mini_fest | fic: This Christmas

Title: This Christmas
Author:

strav
Disclaimer: I don't own anyone appearing in this story. Their creator is much more talented.
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Minerva; Severus; Hagrid; Albus D
Warnings: None
Prompts: Overall: 34. Snowed in on Christmas Eve. Part one: 26. Hey, There Really *Is* A Fairy On Top Of The Christmas Tree! Part two: 50. A New Year, a New Love Part three: 30. Snooping for presents Part four: 17. Secret Santa
A/N: The prompts are just that - some of them promted an idea rather than got written as the story. Thanks to A for the beta. Thanks to

brissygirl for running the fest and getting me writing for the first time in years.

This Christmas

Hagrid remembers making snow angels that look more like snow ogres, and children half his size pointing and laughing at indented snow, flattened as though something had fallen from the sky.

He remembers lifting his father up so he could reach the eaves, to hang tinsel and bells and moving, sparkling baubles by hand, his father letting Hagrid be included even in this, despite being too young to use magic.

His first Christmas memory is of singing: a chorus of what was probably seven or eight but to Hagrid seemed like thousands of wizards and witches, lighting the sky with floating candles and song.

This Christmas Hagrid is inside with just Fang for company, snow still falling against his roof, his door, his windows, obscuring even his view of the castle. This Christmas, Hagrid's wish is that his hut won't collapse under the snow's weight, or get washed away in the flood when it melts.

*******

Minerva thinks her yuletide resembles the life cycle of a phoenix. Her favourite time of year is New Year - a rebirth, a second chance, a memory of a new love long ago. To get to New Year one has to pass Christmas. To Minerva, Christmas is like a slow drawn-out death, a time she'd like to cut out, surgically remove from her heart or her brain or at very least the calendar.

She spends Christmas Eve dreading Christmas Day, and Christmas Day burying her past, knowing that in seven days time she'll have fond memories to look back on once again.

Minerva likes the phoenix analogy, not only because every year the death precedes the birth, but just as with the phoenix, it was only out of the ashes of her painful Christmas loss that her New Year's new love was free to enter her heart.

This Christmas Minerva is watching two fifth-years making the most of some overhanging mistletoe and hoping they never have memories like hers.

*******

Every year at Christmas Albus makes bets with himself. How many students will be up before daybreak, which house will first rouse its Head from his or her sleep, how many children will lie awake all night waiting for their presents to appear, how many more will snoop in their friends' piles before their friends are awake. Sometimes he gets the house-elves to lurk in dormitory corners, and report back on how he scored.

He likes to sit at the staff table over breakfast and guess which students got the most presents, which ones got the worst presents, which ones got presents they'd never have even dreamed of.

Sometimes Albus even likes to guess what colour his socks will be before he tears off the wrapping paper. They always turn out to be books instead, but sometimes he still gets the colours right.

This Christmas Albus is making a silent bet with himself as to how high up the castle walls the snow will pile before it stops, how long it will fall before it does, and how many days before the students' Christmas spirit wears off and a riot breaks out in their rebellion at being stuck inside.

He suspects, knowing children, that he should pick a low number for the last one.

*******

Severus claims to hate Christmas. Not that anyone's ever asked him - people just generally assume Severus hates Christmas for the mere fact that Christmas exists, and Severus seems to hate most things.

He lurks disapprovingly over the students from other houses playing with noisy or cumbersome or otherwise disruptive gifts; he stays for just as long as necessary to make his appearance at dinner; he nods a curt "thank you" to the staff as they bid him Merry Christmas, if they forget for a moment to whom they're speaking.

Then, his Christmas duties done, Severus retires to his dungeon, listening to the sounds of joyful children receding up the stairs, feeling the chill as the snow-covered ground seeps its cold into the castle walls.

It's down here, on his own, that he brings out the small, wrapped, Secret Santa gift collected from his chair in the staff room. Every year he chooses with care for whichever professor he's Santa for. It's not to try to make them happy, or in case they know it's from him. He likes to make the effort to make his gift special, because at Christmas giving is the other half of receiving, and he thinks the sides should balance out.

Severus claims to hate Christmas, but down in his dungeon, for a moment, he forgets that it's even snowing. Because now he's going to open his gift - the only one he'll get all year. And for this moment, that's enough.