The Christmas newsletter

The Christmas newsletter is a seasonal writing prompt from our recent Dean Writers Circle workshop.

This year had to be different.

Mavis had settled in her most comfy chair, slippered feet on the ottoman, soles to the hissing gas fire. Wind pummelled the glass behind her, rattling the frames, and Mavis is sure, now, while she’s sitting in her flower-filled house, that it was the gusty, pushy wind that planted the idea in her head. Such a disruptive wind, a wind which shouted: Take notice! I’m here!

She had glanced at the sideboard snug against the opposite wall, her gaze fixed on the particular drawer where last year’s Christmas cards and their accompanying boastful letters were stuffed in, willy-nilly. Mavis didn’t need to open the drawer and read the letters to remember their self-satisfied contents. Holidays in the Maldives, children and grandchildren graduating from here and there with plentiful honours and awash with lucrative job offers; or new grandchildren, so bright, so bonny, so destined to be leaders of the free world; shiny new cars, shiny new kitchens – oh, my dear, the drama of the renovations and SO costly …

Well, this year Mavis had determined she wouldn’t be outdone. She thought, later again, that perhaps she should have let Bill in on her wicked plan. He’d laugh, encourage her. He never read the Christmas letters, saying he had no interest in the minutia of the lives of people he barely knew. Certainly he never read the one Mavis sent.

She had finished her cuppa, set the mug down and pulled the dresser drawer open to fetch pen and paper.

Chewing the end of the pen, she had sat at the kitchen table and pondered just how life-changing and dramatic this letter should be. Death or divorce?

Mavis had smirked. And gone for the big one. Safari holiday, lions … her own narrow escape …

Let them trump that.

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Find Cheryl’s flash fiction and short stories, including audio versions of some, here.