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It’s been eight years now since Xopher became the Ghost of Christmas Vengeance, and that’s a hell of a lot of Christmas. You know that song, ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’? That song was Xopher’s life now, minus the sax and the snowman and the great big smile on somebody’s face, because rarely in Xopher’s line of work did he ever encounter anyone with a great big smile. And if he did, it was usually Xopher’s job to make that smile go the hell away. Three hundred and sixty-five Christmas Days a year.

They say Christmas is a time of loving and giving and good will to all men. And sometimes it is. For some people, in some lucky places. But for others, it’s no different than any other day, or even: it’s worse. For those people, it’s a day of cruelty and hatred, anger and bitterness, selfishness, even sadism. And for those people, there is the Ghost of Christmas Vengeance. Because even the universe has a Christmas spirit.

Hannah Templeton is seventy-eight years of age, but that isn’t old these days. No, her hearing isn’t as good as it had once been, but that new hip means she’s more sprightly now than she was five years ago, and she no longer has to rely on family to do her shopping, especially since they built that big new Tesco right at the bottom of her road. She’s in there today, picking up a gift for her granddaughter, Shelly, who’s sixteen, every inch of her.

“I hear that that Take That are back together,” Hannah says to a boy stacking shelves in the music section. He’s a friendly enough lad, cheeky but not rude, and he jokes with Hannah about how personally he wishes the recently reformed former-boyband had stayed apart, but he shows her to the right purchases – a new CD and a DVD out just in time for the Christmas suckers.

“My granddaughter used to be such a fan,” Hannah tells the young man, remembering a time when Shelly’s bedroom wall was a mosaic of poster worship, when she’d talk of nothing but Robbie and Gary and Ronan and Mike. And though it wasn’t from Shelly that Hannah had heard about the group’s comeback (Shelly didn’t talk about such things to her gran as she once had), Hannah was certain these would be presents greatly appreciated… though she’d make sure to keep the receipts, just in case. She wasn’t so old as to have forgotten how fickle she herself had been at that age, and that was in the day before teenagers had even been invented.

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” says the smiling stock boy, giving Hannah a wink that wipes all those years away in an instance, and sends her floating to the tills behind her trolley, then all the way back up the festively lit street to home, warmed against the unseasonably mild winter wind. Back home, Hannah makes a pot of camomile with limeflower, puts on the TV for Richard and Judy, and wraps her granddaughter’s gifts, thinking what a lovely Christmas this is going to be.

And while Hannah packs her stockings, where is the Ghost of Christmas Vengeance? It’s hard to tell. For Xopher, maybe that’s the Christmas Day he watches a desperate man fighting with his girlfriend, then leaving, and driving halfway across a continent, taking their son with him. Their unborn son, that is. Maybe that’s the Christmas Day when, less than half an hour from this man’s intended destination, he falls asleep at the wheel and drives himself, his unborn child, and an unfortunate hitchhiker off the edge of a bridge, on a dam, over a great, dark mass of water.

Or maybe that’s the Christmas Day Xopher watches a lonely old man who lives in a churchyard cottage, an old man who has, over the years, done absolutely nothing to dispel that loneliness, and everything in his power to foster it. Maybe that’s the Christmas Day Xopher invites a few gone but not entirely forgotten acquaintances back to pay a call on the old man, to pay a call and keep him company forever more. Whether he likes it or not.

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