“Such a pretty, delicious-looking turkey!” Gram smiled warmly, peering into the oven where Samantha had now begun to cook in earnest. “Sidney herself would be proud!” As they got the right number of mugs out of the cupboard and began to spoon chocolate powder from the catering-sized jar that Laura had bought into them, Laura thought about the girls that she had had watched and helped to prepare into turkey crown, as well as those that had already been packed into their hampers when they got there and the others who inevitable arrived later. She wondered who had got the sweet girl whose thigh was safely stored away in their freezer at home, waiting for their wedding anniversary, and the little cutie who was going to be returned to her mum for her own family’s Christmas dinner.

Most of them would probably be in the oven too right now, she thought. The whole point of a turkey crown, as she understood it, aside from the presumably lower price and slightly more manageable quantity of meat, was that they would fit in a decent sized home oven so she assumed most would be cooked in the homes of whoever bought them. There would have been people who ate earlier of course, who would already be stripping the remaining meat of their turkey’s bones to put in the fridge, and those who would not be eating until later this evening and so might only now be beginning to prep their birds. There were some cultures, she remembered, who celebrated with their big meal on Christmas Eve, there might be folks in town from that background who would have feasted yesterday and be on the girl-turkey sandwiches today!

“Any of your other friends enjoying girl-turkey today, Mum?” Laura asked conversationally as they took it in turns filling mugs from the water-boiler on the wall and making sure that the mixture was well-stirred then adding a dash of milk to each to make the taste creamier and help cool them down a little.

“Carol’s and her lot are having their youngest.” she grinned. “I think she’s thirteen? And Joe and Louise ordered one of those hampers they’ve been advertising. You know? The ones where you get a turkey crown, a ham, and everything you need to cook them along with a couple of bottles of wine?” Realising that she hadn’t yet told her Gram about what she had got up to at the butcher’s shop, Laura happily filled her in while they finished making the drinks, including the fact that both the guttings and Emily’s harvest had been filmed in their entirety.

“Wow, that’s quite the adventure!” Gram chuckled. “Sounds like, once you’re all a bit more settled with the new kiddos and everything, Ed and I should come over for a movie night!”

In the hall, once everyone had dried off and consumed their warming beverages, the excited guests formed a circle with chairs so that everyone could join in without needing to sit on the floor, the adults helping those who were too small to easily carry their own chairs. Josh and Laura opted to have one chair between them so that they could take it in turns to operate the music and both join in the game.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how many layers there are,” Josh explained apologetically, “so I don’t know if everyone will get to open one but, knowing Sam, there will be more than enough! As I understand in, in keeping with the Christmas theme, there are naught, or silly, prizes, and nice ones. If you get one of the naughty ones, it will come with a little dare or forfeit but if it’s something you can’t or really don’t want to do, you can nominate someone else to do it in your place.” He looked around the circle, not at all surprised to see Amelia, Amanda, Caroline and Ella still in their birthday suits but rather intrigued to see that, although his sister had insisted that little Rosie get dressed to avoid getting cold, despite the warmth of the hall, Nadine had opted to stay naked like the other girls. Was this to fit in and show that she was cool, he wondered, or was she starting to come around to the idea that the others, even Amanda to an extent, seemed to have so readily embraced?

Taking first turn on the music, Josh pressed the button and turned his back as the rather large and bulky parcel began to be passed around the circle. After just less than a minute, he stopped the music and turned to see who was holding the parcel. It was Rachel. With everyone leaning forward to see what she had got, she carefully unwrapped the first layer and found a photograph of Samantha, one that her parents recognised as having been part of a montage she had made on her bedroom wall, stuck up with blu-tac. It was a selfie of her on the beach in a bikini and sunglasses, taken that same year, pouting playfully at the camera and making the peace sign. After showing what she had won, Rachel put the photo on the floor under her chair and the music started up again.

The next person to be holding the parcel when the music stopped was Gramps. Chuckling, he unwrapped the next layer and found a single white school sock that Samantha must have kept from her last day or two at school since it had certainly not been washed!

“Uh-oh!” Gramps chuckled gamely. “Guess I’m on the naughty list! So there’s some sort of forfeit in here too?” He peeled off the rest of that layer which, since newspaper was not the readily available resource it once had been, was made from the cheap packing paper Samantha had asked Josh to bring home from work. A brightly-coloured square of paper from the scribble pad on Samantha’s desk fluttered down. Gramps picked it up and read the challenge. “Sing one verse of a song that is not a Christmas carol! Hmm…” To everyone’s amusement, he stood up and launched into the opening verse of “The Pirate King”, adding the chorus for good measure before taking a bow to the rapturous applause of the other guests before sitting down again and getting ready to carry on the game.

Next to unwrap was Ella who got another photograph, this time of Samantha in her winter woollies, posing next to a snowman she had just built, which Laura remembered having been taken in late January. Contrary to what they had been expecting, the next layer, opened by Grandma, had a nice surprise too, a pen in the shape of a dinosaur bone that Samantha had brought back from a school trip to a museum a year or so earlier.

“Is this meant to be a good or bad prize?” Merlin laughed, opening the next layer to find a pair of Samantha’s panties which, like the sock, had definitely not been through the wash! He held them up and in doing so, dislodge the piece of paper that had been folded up in them.

“Looks like Sam meant it to be a booby-prize!” Josh laughed. Shrugging, Merlin put the panties on his head like a party hat and read his forfeit.

“Kiss the best-looking boy in the room!” he chuckled. “Well, that’s easy!” Standing up as Gramps had done, he planted a big, noisy kiss on the back of his own hand then sat down to the indulgent chuckles and applause of the others.

“Want to switch?” Laura asked, relieving Josh at the music station. Next time the music stopped, it was Martin holding the parcel but, to his visible relief, this layer only held another photograph. Caroline was next, winning the paperback magical adventure story that Samantha had got for her birthday and had only just finished reading, then Josh himself who got another dirty sock, but a black one this time, and was challenged to perform a handstand, nominating Willow to do so in his place, which she happily and confidently did, even performing the splits upside down to show off which, dressed as she was, was quite a sight! Chuckling, Josh awarded her another gift from the prize table – the magazine-style book which contained all of Sidney’s campaign material, a prize he was rather surprised to see had not been claimed already!


To be continued...