Mab’s Christmas Nightmare

Mab screamed on the inside. She’d been silently screaming for the last three days, emitting curses that no-one else heard. Ever since that accursed Witches Christmas Ball.

She knew attending was a huge mistake, but Hortense had insisted. So she’d furtled around in her wardrobe for her best party dress, shaking out the cobwebs.

The fateful evening had arrived. Mab spent the evening grousing in the corner, watching her co-witches giggling like village idiots. She’d been so bored.

Towards the end of the evening came the highlight of the ball. The drawing of the ‘Secret Santa’ gifts. The crowd moved as one to the cauldron, full of gifts, greedy hands plunged deep to find the best one. Hortense pushed Mab forward. She reluctantly thrust in her hand, grabbing the first thing her fingers found – a card, in a revolting shade of pink, covered in glittery, spangly sparkles. On it was written ‘A Traditional Family Christmas Experience in a Non-Magical Household’.

“Nyx’s knickers!” she’d exclaimed in disgust.

She was about to drop the foul thing back into the cauldron when, with a ‘poof’, the world went black.

She was quite discombobulated when she’d come back to herself; her body rigid as a poker and far smaller than her usual size, perched atop a Christmas tree with a particularly prickly branch poking up her artfully arranged skirt.

Someone, somewhere, must be howling with laughter at their cosmically cruel prank. Her idea of partaking in a traditional family Christmas certainly did not include turning into a porcelain fairy, stuck up a tree with a draught around her fairy pants. Her Secret Santa gift donation had been much more appropriate, a pot of her fragrant pink camellias.

Mab had tried thinking incantations to get her out of this mess, but nothing worked. She hoped the appalling gift came with an expiration date.

“And I really hope their Christmas is rotten,” she thought, longing for her own home where she could forget Christmas, tucked up in front of a roaring fire with a potent glass of Witches Brew.

Maybe next Christmas… she hoped…