Page 21 of A New Family at Puddleduck Farm (Puddleduck Farm #6)

As it turned out, this wasn’t a hard promise to keep.

It was the busiest beginning to December Phoebe could remember.

Sam got carried away with advent calendars.

He bought one for Phoebe with chocolates inside.

And he bought one for Lily, which showed festive pictures of fir trees, reindeers and puppies and said Baby’s First Christmas.

It was beautiful to look at and Lily loved it, but it was also a keepsake because alongside each date it had spaces for parents to write in little things that had happened that would become memories for the future.

‘It’s gorgeous, Sam,’ Phoebe said, running her fingers over the colourful pictures. ‘Thank you so much.’

He’d also got advent calendars for their animals. Snowball’s had catnip toys and Roxie’s had dog treats. ‘No one should be on a diet in December,’ he joked as he put the calendars up in the kitchen, close to the back door. Luckily they had plenty of wall space.

Phoebe was now back at work Mondays, Tuesday and Fridays when either Sam or Maggie or Louella or Jan had Lily, depending on whether Sam was doing a shift at Hendrie’s. Lily seemed to thrive on seeing so many people. She was a happy little baby and not clingy at all.

Puddleduck Vets were rushed off their feet. Everyone on their books, it seemed, wanted to get any niggling problems with their animals sorted out before the Christmas break.

That was before you factored in the prankster calls from people who wanted them to go out to see a reindeer who had a very shiny nose. Or a poorly partridge, stuck in a pear tree. Or two French hens.

Jenna nearly fell for the French hens call. Phoebe overheard her asking the client questions on the phone.

‘You say you’ve got two hens that seem off colour? What kind of hens are they? French ones, mmmm. I’m not sure what those are…’

A few seconds later she paused, disconnected the call and cursed under her breath. ‘Honestly, if I get one more person who thinks it’s funny to phone up and wind me up and then sing me lines out of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” I’m going to thump them.’

‘It’ll be tricky to thump them over the phone,’ Marcus said, who’d just come in to take over from her. ‘Although I do get what you mean. They’re total timewasters.’

Jenna shook her head in exasperation. ‘Most of them are kids who think they’re being terribly funny. They’ve probably been dared by their mates.’

‘Yes, but they’re still wasting our time. We could be talking to people who really need our help and they’re blocking the line. If anyone pulls that stunt on me, they’ll get more than they bargained for.’

This almost backfired on him because later that same day a man who said he was a local farmer phoned up to ask them about five geese they had who’d been laying but had suddenly stopped.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t six geese you had?’ Marcus quizzed them. ‘Six geese a-laying. If you think I’m falling for that old chestnut, you’ve got another think coming. The joke’s getting old, mate. Try another vet.’

He disconnected with a smirk of satisfaction. ‘They’ll have to try harder than that to fool me.’

Probably no one would have been any the wiser, but five minutes later the same man phoned Phoebe because he happened to have her mobile.

‘I think your receptionist has been on the Christmas sherry,’ he said crossly. ‘Either that or he’s lost the plot. I just phoned about a suspected case of bird flu and he told me to find another vet. Did you know about this?’

‘I’m so sorry.’ A mortified Phoebe explained why Marcus had been so curt, and luckily by the end of their conversation the farmer had calmed down a bit and saw the funny side.

Seth went out to see the geese and was relieved to report that it wasn’t bird flu either, but coccidiosis, which was a parasite that was easily treated.

After that, Marcus was mercilessly ribbed by Jenna and Max and Seth humming ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ every time they saw him. But they were also all more careful to interrogate prospective clients before jumping to conclusions.

Tori and Phoebe arranged the Blenheim Palace lights trip for mid-December and it was definitely one of their festive highlights.

They’d booked tickets for four thirty which was one of the earliest slots available. It would be dark enough to see the lights but wouldn’t make too late a bedtime for the little ones.

Harrison drove them up in his 4x4, which was the only vehicle they had big enough for them all to fit into as it had six seats.

There was a very festive atmosphere in the car as Phoebe, Sam and Tori sang Christmas songs for the little ones, and even the somewhat sombre Harrison had a grin on his face a lot of the way.

The atmosphere at Blenheim Palace was incredibly festive too, they discovered as they walked through the huge ornate gates of the venue and into the Christmas market.

It reminded Phoebe of a German street market where dozens of wooden huts, themselves festooned with Christmas lights, were lined up in the courtyard of Blenheim Palace, a few hundred feet away from the imposing house itself.

Street food of all descriptions was on sale, from Asian dishes to kebabs to fish and chips. There was even a noodle bar, and the cool December air was full of the delicious scents of chilli and cinnamon and spice.

Sam and Harrison queued up for food and mulled wine, while Tori and Vanessa looked after the little ones. Lily and Vanessa-Rose were both wide-eyed before they got anywhere near the light trail.

‘This is wonderful,’ Tori said as they pushed their buggies around stalls that were selling all sorts of things, from handmade wooden tree decorations to sparkly jewellery to boxes of Christmas biscuits to gingerbread men.

‘Really Christmassy. I’ve always fancied going to a real German market.

We should go one year when the girls are older. ’

‘It’s amazing.’ Phoebe glanced around them.

There was a sensory feast for the eyes and ears everywhere you looked.

Classical music bounced across the air and the palace itself was lit by dozens of lasers that flickered beams across it, sending a light show of glittering colours across its stately facade.

The lights were even more amazing, they discovered once they’d all eaten their impromptu supper and gone through into the formal gardens.

The areas on either side of the path were ablaze with colour as they travelled through a winter wonderland of music and light show magic.

Music swelled out from hidden speakers so each section was a feast for the senses, and each section was worth lingering over.

One of the first sections of path overlooked a lake and the entire surface of the water was lit with silver and gold lights that rippled and glittered like waves on an ocean in time with an orchestral version of ‘Jingle Bells’.

‘Wow!’ Even Harrison looked impressed as they all paused to watch and take photos, even though Phoebe knew no photo would do justice to this display.

Because everyone had a time slot, the venue wasn’t overcrowded either so they could walk in comfort without any jostling. There were no crowds.

A little further on they passed a giant tree with a skyscraper of a trunk over which a river of moving lights changed through streams of green, purple, blue, silver and gold in an everchanging myriad of colour to the accompaniment of a rousing version of ‘My Favourite Things’.

‘That’s got to be one of the tallest trees I’ve ever seen,’ Tori said, craning her neck.

‘It’s a cedar, I think,’ Harrison told them. ‘I’m sure David Attenborough featured it on one of his programmes. They’ve got the Harry Potter tree here, too, somewhere.’

‘We should come in the day some time,’ Sam said. ‘I bet it’s just as spectacular then.’

Towards the end of the trail, they went through a twelve-foot-long archway of glittering silver lights.

‘It’s like something out of a fairy tale,’ Phoebe said to Tori as they paused at the entrance and took more photos of each other and the girls while Sam and Harrison discussed the practicalities of powering so many lights at once.

‘LEDs or ordinary?’ Harrison pondered.

‘They’d need a whole power station for this lot,’ Sam replied.

‘I’ll go with magic,’ Tori said in Phoebe’s ear as the two little girls stared around them, wide-eyed. ‘This is a magical place.’

The highlight as far as the little ones were concerned was a hologram of a scarlet-cloaked Father Christmas, sitting in his silver and gold sleigh, drawn by eight dancing reindeers, racing across the dark sky and then a backdrop of fir trees.

Vanessa-Rose was totally transfixed as Tori held her up to look and Lily shouted and waved her fists.

Phoebe and Tori only managed to persuade the little ones to leave the Father Christmas loop at all with the promise that they could meet the real Father Christmas, who was just up ahead of them, if they did.

Vanessa-Rose cried when the big man standing outside his grotto said, ‘Ho, ho, ho, happy Christmas,’ but Lily was more than happy to go for a cuddle and have her picture taken with him.

‘She’s amazing,’ Phoebe said, slipping her hand into Sam’s. ‘She’s not scared at all, is she?’

‘She’s used to meeting lots of people at Puddleduck Farm, though, isn’t she? She’s going to grow into a proper social butterfly.’

They finished the trail with mugs of fragrant hot chocolate and the chance to toast a marshmallow on a long stick over a barbecue of flaming hot coals.

‘They might be the most expensive marshmallows I’ve ever bought,’ Sam murmured as he came back with a handful of them on sticks.

‘Yes, I said that last year.’ Harrison frowned. ‘We were going to bring a bag, weren’t we, Tori?’

‘Yes. I forgot. And we could have afforded a sack at these prices,’ she said, laughing. ‘But thanks, Sam.’

‘Thank you for suggesting we come,’ he told Tori. ‘It’s been amazing.’

‘A proper bit of Christmas magic,’ Tori said happily. ‘Before we get back into all the mayhem and madness of the final December countdown.’

‘The calm before the storm,’ Harrison said, ‘unless you’re one of those organised people who does all your Christmas shopping in the January sales.’

‘Which we’re definitely not.’ Phoebe wiped the stickiness of marshmallow from Lily’s face. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you, sweetheart?’

‘Worth every penny, then,’ Sam said, crouching down beside her in the buggy.

‘She’s loved every minute of it,’ Phoebe said. ‘So have I.’

As they walked back through the vast dark car park to find Harrison’s 4x4, it was like coming back to the real world again, but they all agreed that it had been a fantastic evening.

A proper start to Christmas. An oasis of calm before the festive madness and mayhem hotted up into the frantic countdown towards the big day.