Forgive us for we have Christmased

Clara Wembley has been praying. She knows she needs to. She has committed a sin against Christmas. She knows she was only seeking justice, but she also knows it was a sin.

It was last Christmas eve that Shingles, the dog, stole her blankie, AND GOT AWAY WITH IT, because all the adults were too busy with Christmas bustling and bumbling even to notice, let alone do anything about it. Clara has spent the year trying to get justice. Finally she did.

Randall Nathan borrowed Shingles so he could go to the Buddy Mutts Café, where they won’t let you in unless you have a dog with you. As a payment, he gave Shingles a nice big bone that Claire Nathan had tied a big red Christmas ribbon around.

Shingles now has a collar to keep him from wandering off. The collar requires him to stay behind the invisible electric fence in his own yard. Clara snuck up on him and grabbed his bone and ran over to the neighbor’s yard and left the bone just beyond the electric fence. She built up a little snow fort on the house side of her yard, so that anyone looking out her house’s windows cannot see the bone. Shingles has been racing up and down beside the invisible fence, trying to get at his present, but unable to because of the shock effect.

“There are two strange things happening today,” said Kate Bates, Clara’s nana, to her husband, Prof. Ben “Seymour” Bottoms, as they “sat” at the Wembley’s so Clara’s parents could go to her father’s Christmas party at the “Persimmon Pulsations Microbrewery.” “Shingles is running rabid, or at least rapid, in the back yard, and Clara is praying. Do you think they might be related?”

“I’ll see,” said Ben.

He went to Clara’s room door and listened.

“And forgive us our Christmases,” he heard, “as we forgive those who Christmas against us.”

He returned to the kitchen and looked out the window at Shingles.

“I don’t think we want to know,” he said.


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