‘Um, so…’ My mum is a natural public speaker who thrives under the adoration of expectant gazes. I am not. ‘As you know, Santa’s been evicted from his usual spot in the supermarket, so we need to find a new home for his grotto this year…’ I nod to the man on the right side of stage, in full Santa regalia despite the fact there isn’t a child in sight.
There’s yelling coming from backstage and it’s absolutely plain that everyone wants to listen to that and not to me. My face has gone so red that it’ll camouflage completely with my hair, which I’ve just dyed a bright Christmas red in honour of the festive season.
Eventually, my mum emerges, smoothing her skirt down with a satisfaction only usually felt after despatching a particularly large spider found lurking in the bath, and Mervyn scuttles out after her, rubbing his arm like it really did descend into violence.
‘While we appreciate resident feedback, Folkhornton council is committed to doing what’s best for the town, and this new apartment complex will bring in a level of investment unseen for decades. The decision is final – the contracts are signed.’ He looks around uneasily.
My heart sinks. ‘What about the winter wonderland this year? If the build isn’t starting until January, there’s still time to get everything set up this Christmas – one last time. You could at least give Mistletoe Gardens the send-off it deserves.’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Browne, it isn’t worth the time, manpower, and cost of sending out a team of workmen. Tourists won’t come – just like they didn’t last year, or the year before, or the year bef—’
‘We could do it!’ Mr Arkins calls.
‘Yeah, we’re not giving up on it! We could decorate it ourselves,’ someone else says.
Mum looks to the gathered residents. ‘We need to show them that Mistletoe Gardens means something to this town. Folkhornton wouldn’t be Folkhornton without our magical mistletoe and our December nights spent underneath it. Essie’s right – it deserves a decent send-off at least.’
Everyone’s looking at me expectantly, and I’m not quite sure how I got in the middle of this. The mistletoe is our family’s legacy. There are two framed photographs on the wall in the bakery – one of the gingerbread house display my great-great-grandmother made for Queen Victoria’s arrival, and one of Queen Victoria herself eating my great-great-grandmother’s gingerbread in Mistletoe Gardens on the day she came to Folkhornton to officially open it in 1848.
Murmurs of potential tourist-attracting events rustle through the crowd, and they’re all good suggestions, but none of it is enough. We don’t need a series of events to get people talking – we need to do something spectacular. Something bigger than the council’s new apartment complex. Something that’s going to make people sit up and take notice of Mistletoe Gardens. Something that’s going to go viral on social media, that’s going to put our story of magical mistletoe onto a world stage.
Mistletoe Gardens started with gingerbread… Maybe it should end with gingerbread too. A karmic full circle thing. A send-off to mark its departure in the same way it began.
‘How about gingerbread?’ I suggest so quietly that only a few people in the front row hear. ‘A display like my great-great-grandmother made to celebrate the opening. We could recreate that. Use the old Victorian recipe she once used…’
‘It’s a little small, Ess. I can’t see tourists travelling for miles to visit a few modestly decorated gingerbread houses…’
‘Small!’ An idea flashes into my head in full living colour. ‘That’s it! Not small! The opposite of a small gingerbread house display! A giant gingerbread house! A life-size one!’
The murmurs that crackle through the room this time suggest I’m a few fries short of a Happy Meal, but the idea gathers speed so fast that I forget I’m in front of a microphone and barrel onwards. ‘Think about it – we’ve got a Santa without a grotto and we need to do something big for Mistletoe Gardens, even if it’s only a final goodbye. No one’s going to talk about a few events, but people are going to talk about a real-life full-size gingerbread house. People are going to visit Santa if his grotto is inside a gingerbread house. It’ll be a nod to what my great-great-grandmother did for the opening day – gingerbread, but modernised. And hopefully it will attract the kind of crowds that Mistletoe Gardens attracted back in the day because we could do with even a fraction of the people shown in those old photographs!’
‘Is a life-size gingerbread house even possible?’ Mum side-eyes me.
Maybe I should be worried that my mum who – when she’s not busy terrorising council leaders and trying to set me up on dates – is head baker at Dancing Cinnamon bakery doesn’t think it’s possible.
It must be possible… right? ‘We make gingerbread houses all the time. Why can’t we work on a slightly bigger scale? A really, really big scale?’
The thought makes me feel like a child again. I can imagine the wonder of staring up at a life-size fully edible house towering above me, peaks of bright-white royal icing and twinkling gumdrops of giant proportions.
But when standing on a stage in front of a crowd and getting overexcited about something, deathly silence is not generally the desired response.
‘Oh, come on. Where’s your imagination? We need something that’s going to get people talking about Mistletoe Gardens – something that people are going to come to see. If there’s nothing we can do to save Mistletoe Gardens, then we can at least send it out with a bang.’
‘That bang might be our ovens exploding, Ess,’ Mum whispers. ‘Do you have any idea how much gingerbread that’s going to take? How much time it will take to put it together – if it’s even possible to get a structure of that size to stand up?’
Well, no, because I haven’t thought about the logistics yet, but I’m a firm believer in ideas coming at exactly the right moment and things working out when you need them to. I’m fizzing inside at the idea of building a gingerbread house to such a large scale. ‘Can you imagine how magical it would be for a child to go to visit Santa in a real gingerbread house? The smell, the look, the taste. It would be like something from a fairytale. A part of a winter wonderland that no one will ever forget.’
‘Wouldn’t it get wet in the rain?’ Edna, the retired librarian, calls. ‘This is South Wales, we’re not known for our dry and sunny winters.’
Oh, snowdrops, I hadn’t thought of that. You can’t leave gingerbread outside, it would melt in the first shower, and she’s right, we’re not short of rain in this valley. There has to be a way around it… ‘The old bandstand! It’s more than big enough to fit a house in, and it’s got a roof, so the gingerbread would be protected.’
‘And what about that sleety, driving rain that comes down sideways with howling wind?’
‘We could put something around the edges… a circus tent or something. I don’t know. It’s a spur of the moment idea, obviously it needs some planning first, but it’s the best plan we’ve got so far…’ As usual, I do not excel at having confidence in myself and my ideas. I was hoping for a slightly better response than the indifferent mutterings that sweep through the audience.
‘Ess, who’s going to do this?’ Mum sidles closer and whispers from the side of her mouth while projecting a bright smile outwards. ‘You?’
‘Of course. I’d love to. What an amazing way to spend December and honour our family and the tradition our grandmother started. She sowed the first mistletoe – it’s brought a lot of joy to Folkhornton over the years. If it’s going to be the last time, people should remember her.’
‘I can help,’ my best friend and co-worker, Saffie, says from her seat in the front row.
‘You can’t both do it! What am I supposed to do for staff at the bakery? There’s only the three of us and you know how often I have to dash out for my resident committee duties.’ Mum’s face contorts in distress. ‘Do you have any idea how long this is going to take? Do you even know how to build a life-size house out of biscuits?’
‘No, I haven’t got a clue, I’m going to need help on that front, a builder or someth—’
‘Right, attention, folks!’ Mum claps her hands in front of the microphone, so loud that it attracts the attention of not just this room, but probably a fair half of the rest of Wales too. ‘Essie’s volunteering to build the gingerbread house, but there’s the small issue that she doesn’t know how. Anyone out there have experience of building houses?’
In slow motion, every eye in the room swivels to a corner at the back. Slouched in a chair at the furthest edge of the room is Joseph Hallissey Junior, owner of Hallissey Construction, a building company well known around this area. Joseph, who always attends these town meetings but never speaks or offers any input whatsoever, has a black baseball cap pulled so far down that I doubt he can see out, a black scarf pulled so far up that it covers most of his face, and he seems to be shrinking in his chair under the weight of so many gazes.
No one speaks. The entire town hall is waiting for him to volunteer his services, but his arms fold and his cap sinks lower.
The silence stretches out, and my mum isn’t one for patience. ‘Mr Hallissey! You are a builder, are you not? In fact, you’re the only builder in Folkhornton. Would you be so kind as to offer some advice?’
No response.
‘Maybe he’s asleep,’ someone murmurs.
My mum does the deafening crack of a clap again, loud enough to wake ancient mummies in the Egyptian pyramids, never mind any napping builders in the vicinity. And he’s definitely not asleep. His arms have pulled his black coat even further around his body and he’s sunken so low in his chair that he might be trying to slide off it and crawl away unseen.
