It was Christmas Eve. Dragor woke up early, and wished he hadn't. The house was cold, the central heating boiler had obviously decided that enough was enough and it was going off the for the holiday in Marakesh it had always wanted. It seemed unusually quiet, and it wasn't just because the rest of his family had disappeared on an impromptu Christmas shopping trip to Grimsby. He couldn't even hear any traffic outside. Intrigued, he clambered out of his cot and went to the window.
He threw back the curtains, and saw snow. Lots of it, stretching out for miles in every direction. There even seemed to be snow on his bonsai tree, which was sat on the inside of the window.
"Where the fuck has Cottingham gone?" demanded Dragor of the tree, "Did you see where they took it?"
"BOOM! A FARTING MORNING!"
"Don't start. Where's Cott gone?"
"Cot must be like a bed. I have seen."
"Not THAT cot, leaves for brains, Cott as in Cottingham, you know, big village, we live there?"
"You have losing your village. Like a careless."
Dragor closed his eyes and slowly counted to ten, surprised that he could manage it this early in the morning.
"Hahaha that's bugger!" the tree added helpfully.
Dragor ignored the tree and looked out at his new surroundings. There seemed to be movement in the thick hedge that surrounded the front garden. A large brown shape emerged.
"I saw a mouse!" Dragor squeaked.
"Where?" asked the tree.
"Right there! A giant mouse with wellies on!"
"I must be declaring! Well!" the tree continued, rustling its leaves enthusiastically.
The mouse, which incidentally was wearing red wellington boots, was soon joined by a similarly sized rabbit and hedgehog (who was wearing green wellies). All three were wearing thick scarves and mittens. Dragor watched in wonder as they built a snowman in the middle of the garden, then started having a snowball fight.
Dragor decided he wanted to join in, and hurriedly pulled on some clothes, for some reason forgetting his underpants and almost catching himself in his flies. By the time he was wrapped up in winter clothes and ready to go outside only his eyes and hair were visible.
"He he," muttered the tree, "Dragor must be wrapped up and cute."
"Cold weather isn't good for bonsai trees is it?" Dragor asked.
"I must behaving," the tree replied, "You don't threatening to me."
"OK, but just watch it, right?"
"I will watching. Like a James Bond 007 Licence to Watch."
Dragor gave up and went outside.

The animals had gone, and close up Dragor could see that their job on building the snowman had been a bit shoddy, even for creatures lacking opposing thumbs. He neatened it up a bit, then realised there were a few things missing. After a quick glance around he wasn't surprised to find two convenient lumps of coal, and an unidentifiable round fruit, which he used to make eyes and a nose on the snowman's face, before drawing a smiling mouth with his finger.
He was surprised at how real the snowman looked, almost as if it would start moving any minute. He decided it scared him, and ran inside, almost tripping over one of the many crates of questionable foodstuffs stacked beside the door. He looked back at the snowman as he slammed the door behind him, and was sure the smile on it's face had got wider. He bolted the door and ran upstairs to his room.
"Dragor must running, like a scared. That's bugger." the tree announced, as Dragor flopped into a chair, panting.
"Doesn't that snowman look alive to you?" Dragor asked it.
"Snowman cannot be alive. Does not walking in village."
"Eh?" Dragor walked over to the window and was shocked to see that the view had changed once again and his house was once again where it should be, surrounded by Cottingham. "Where have all the fields gone? What in the name of fuck is happening around here?"
"Dragor must be moving house."
"You need pruning, don't you think?" the little man said menacingly, picking up a small pair of scissors. "Or can you be a little more helpful?"
The poor tree was actually shaking with fright. "Don't pruning me, I must be a nice tree for you."
"THEN CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON?"
The tree was shaking so much now that some of its little leaves had fallen off. "I don't knowing that," it said, its voice full of fear. "I does not need a pruning."
"OK" Dragor replied, trying to sound conciliatory. He put the scissors down "I'm just a bit freaked about what's going on. This sort of thing should happen to Indy, not me."
"You could phoning to ask about Indy. That's help."
"You're brilliant! I'll even consider watering you today!" Dragor squeaked excitedly, then ran to the phone and dialled Indy's number. The answering machine was on: "Hi. I'm sorry, but no one is able to take your call at the moment as we've put the Christmas Tree up in the way of the phone. Please leave a message and expect an answer after January 6th."
"Bollocks!" Dragor exclaimed, slamming the phone down.
He ran outside again, and got numerous strange looks from passers by as he prodded nearby buildings making sure they were real. Finding it impossible to cope with all the strangeness, he went back inside for a lie down.

When Dragor woke up, it was dark outside. He hadn't intended going to sleep, so it felt rather odd to have missed the whole day. The house still seemed to be empty. He wondered what it was about Grimsby that the rest of his family found so compelling, and when they were going to get back with all his presents. There was a knock on the front door. Well, more of a damp thud. He picked up the bonsai tree, feeling the need for some reassurance, then walked to the door and opened it.
He received two shocks at once. For a start, his house was once again surrounded by snowy fields, and secondly, the Snowman he had seen being built earlier was standing right outside the door, as if it was it that had knocked.
"AGH!" Dragor yelped.
The snowman stood there, smiling.
Dragor shut his eyes, then opened them again. The snowman was still there. It's grin widened slightly.
"Are you the ghost of Christmas past?" Dragor asked it, trembling.
The snowman shook its head.
"Present?"
Again, the snowman shook its head.
"Future?"
Once more, the snowman told him no.
"Snowman cannot be a ghost," the tree announced, "cause his snowman."
The snowman nodded in a friendly kind of way, then reached forward to shake Dragor's hand.
Dragor started to shake its hand tentatively, then pulled his hand away suddenly. "Fuck! Your hands are cold!"
The bonsai tree shook it's leaves, laughing wildly. Pretty soon the snowman was too.
"OK, OK, so your hands are meant to be cold," Dragor said sheepishly. "I suppose you should come in."
The snowman followed him into the house, going straight to the living room and switching the tele on. The Christmas edition of 'Pets win Prizes' had a man dressed up as Santa Claus with a group of Reindeer doing what could loosely be termed as 'tricks'. Dragor cringed, but the snowman seemed intent on watching the whole programme. "Turn it off, Turn it off!" he squeaked, running around the room covering his ears. The snowman ignored him. The television was an ultramodern, and had no channel change buttons on the actual set, only on the remote control. Of course, Dragor was unable to find the remote, and had a horrible suspicion that the snowman was sitting on it. This called for desperate measures. Dragor ran into the hallway and whacked the thermostat up to 30C. A smug grin on his face, he returned to the living room to wait for it to take effect.

The bonsai tree was laughing uncontrollably. "Reindeer takes a shite on TV that's live. Hahaha that's bugger."
The pipes throughout the house started rumbling as the central heating went into over-drive. The snowman looked up worriedly.
"Change that channel!" Dragor demanded, "or it's meltdown time for you."
The snowman shuffled uncomfortably, then retrieved the remote control and turned the tele over. The other channels were broadcasting similarly awful programmes.
"Turn it off!" Dragor yelled.
"TV must be crap. That's Christmas," the tree announced.
Dragor looked at the snowman sat in the armchair, and suddenly wished he hadn't told it to turn the tele off. After all, now he had to entertain it.
"Go upstairs," he told it, "I think I've got SNOWMAN.WAD somewhere."
The snowman plodded slowly up the stairs as Dragor adjusted the central heating slightly. He was about to follow the snowman up when he decided he needed a stiff drink. He made himself a weak pineapple and grapefruit squash, downed it, then went upstairs to his room to boot the computer up.

The snowman wasn't in Dragor's room. For a second, Dragor thought that perhaps it had suddenly melted, but he realised he wasn't anywhere near so lucky when he heard rustling sounds from his sisters' room. He ran there quickly to check what was happening.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!" He exclaimed as he entered the room.
The snowman was stood in the middle of the room, wearing several items of Dragor's sisters' clothing. For a moment, Dragor had found the sight quite amusing, but it had not taken him long to realise how his sisters would react to finding half their clothes cold and damp in the middle of their floor.
"Please," Dragor begged, "take those off and come out of here."
The snowman chuckled to itself, shaking its head.
"I could always turn the heating back up."
The snowman laughed again, then opened the windows in the room.
"Now it's freezing!"
The snowman grabbed Dragor's hand and leapt out of the window, the skirt it was wearing billowing as it did so.
"EEK!" squeaked Dragor. It took him several moments to realise that rather than slamming rather hard into the ground below the window they had in fact started flying. He kept expecting a Welsh choirboy to break into song. "Wow!" he gasped, "now this is cool."
They soared up into the clouds, the landscape dropping away quickly as they gained altitude. Dragor was alarmed to see ice particles starting to collect on his arms. He found himself having to scrape them off almost constantly to stop them forming into big lumps which fell off of their own accord onto the roads below.
"Can we slow down a bit? I'm turning into an icicle."
The snowman swooped down as he slowed, taking them low as they headed out over the North Sea.
"Woah! Careful, now you're going to get me wet!" Dragor piped, as he tried to stop himself looking down at the sea, which was black in the darkness. He grinned, realising how fortuitous it was that he'd left the bonsai tree behind. He could imagine the sort of things it would say at this point, and how tempting he would find it to drop it into the depths below.
As they headed further out to sea all Dragor could see was stars and the lights on the non-disposable oil platforms they passed from time to time. The snowman seemed to have taken to flying dangerously low, and twice while flying over oil rigs Dragor narrowly escaped injuries that would have left Dippy very unhappy (and unsatisfied) indeed.
Finally land came into sight again as they flew along the scandinavian coast of the Baltic, swinging round into Finland and narrowly avoiding violating Russian airspace. The two MiGs flying along the border seemed rather disappointed about this. To relieve frustration, they ended up dogfighting each other.

Meanwhile, Dragor and the snowman entered the Arctic circle, hit a pocket of air turbulence, and tumbled towards a mountain below.
"Oh Shit! we're going to crash." Dragor screamed, his voice experiencing the doppler effect in person as they plummeted towards the ground. The snowman turned its head and grinned at him.
"Ohhhh myyyyyyyy Goddddddddddddddddd!" the small man screeched. They came to a halt six inches above the snow, at which point the snowman dropped Dragor, allowing him to fall six feet into the snowdrift.
"Bastard!" Dragor exclaimed, "Now I can't see a thing."
He jumped up and down trying to see out of the top of the hole he had formed, but only succeeded in falling deeper into the snow. The snowman picked up a couple of pieces of burned out MiG wing, and threw them down to Dragor, motioning for him to use them as snow-shoes. Once Dragor had done this, the snowman reached down and pulled the little man out of the hole, then led him off across the mountainside.

They soon found a large group of similarly animate snowmen sat in a circle. Something was being passed around. Dragor stepped closer to try and see over the shoulders of the snowmen, and saw one of them take a long drag on a spliff then pass it on. The lumps of coal on its face seemed to get bigger for a second, and its head wobbled slightly.
Soon the spliff was finished, and a small bottle of white tablets was handed round instead. One of the snowmen pulled a large disc jockey booth from out of a clump of nearby trees and put on some loud music with a thumping baseline and very little else.
"Rave Music?" Dragor asked incredulously of no one in particular, "What the hell are snowmen doing listening to rave music?"
"It looks like they're dancing to it. It's got a good beat, don't you think?" said a pathetic sounding voice behind him.
Dragor turned and saw Father Christmas standing behind him. At least, it looked like Father Christmas at first - he was wearing all the right gear, but he wasn't fat enough, and was wearing distinctly crap glasses.
"Hang on a minute!" Dragor squeaked. "You're not Father Christmas, you're just John Major dressed up."
"Oh... oh dear," said the figure, and shuffled off into the trees, feeling rather ashamed.
"So," Dragor shouted after him, "That's why we never get the presents we ask for!"
All the snowmen were by now 'dancing' to the music that was pulsing out of the numerous speakers hanging in surrounding trees. Dragor found that the rhythmic beat failed completely to lift him to a state of altered conciousness and decided that it was time for a change of tune. He waddled over to the DJ's both (it was impossible for him to do anything other than waddle when his feet were encumbered with bits of fighter plane wing), seeing that the DJ Snowman had left it so that it too could dance, and starting looking through the records. He found a record and grinned.

Surprisingly enough, the snowmen didn't enjoy Des O'Connor's rendition of 'A Mouse lived in a Windmill'. Things started to get unpleasant. The snowmen turned on Dragor and started pelting him with snowballs. For creatures with the physique and look of portly good-natured gentlemen they were highly aggressive, and had deadly accurate aim. By the time his face was covered in three inches of snow Dragor thought it was time to duck. As his head was now supporting a fair weight of snow, he didn't seem to have much choice in the matter anyway. Most of the snow fell from his face as he hit the floor of the booth, and he found himself staring at stack upon stack of Rave CDs. The snowmen were advancing on the booth and he knew he had only a few precious moments in which to save his skin. He opened a few cases and removed the CDs, so he had a fair handful of silver discs in his left hand. He stood up, took the top disc in his right hand, and threw it at the nearest snowman as if it was a frisbee.
His gamble paid off. The CD hit the snowman in the neck (Dragor had no idea that he too was good at aiming), beheading it neatly. The severed head fell to the ground and shattered like any ordinary snowball. Two more quick flicks of the wrist stopped the next two snowmen dead in their tracks too. The other advancing snowmen stopped momentarily.
"Now listen," Dragor piped into the microphone in the booth, "I just want to go home. After that you can play whatever shite takes your fancy, but not while I'm still here. Now, will one of you take me back, or do I have to throw some more of these discs?"
As one snowman stepped forward, another further back in the crowd threw a snowball up high into the air in a terribly precise lob, so that it hit Dragor full on the top of the head. Dragor flicked his arm out sideways, throwing a CD off to the right. Everyone watched the disc slingshot around two trees on opposite sides of the gathering, skip across two boulders, then strike the offending snowman full in the neck, taking its head clean off.
"Flash sod." aid a CD rack inside the booth.
"Thanks." Dragor grinned before talking into the mike again. "Now. Is anyone going to take me home?"
Hesitantly, the snowman that had brought him across the sea earlier stepped forward, a mixture of fear and anger in its eyes. It walked up to him, knocking the remaining CDs to the floor then grabbing Dragor and leaping high into the sky.
"And no pissing about this time," Dragor told the snowman, "I just want to go straight back."
"Wait for me!" called a voice from the ground below them. Dragor looked down to see a pitiful figure in a red outfit standing waving.
"Sod 'im!" Dragor snapped. "Get me home."
Suddenly, everything became blurred.

Dragor wasn't aware of anything after that until they landed. It was then that the large collection of ice particles that had encased him almost as soon as they had hit Mach 5 decided to shatter and free him. The snowman took one look at him, making sure he was intact, then turned away and started to leap into the air. Dragor decided that the threat of reprisals was too great and pulled from his coat pocket a compact disc he had hidden there earlier. With unerring accuracy he spilt the snowman down the middle, leaving two rather large piles of almost fresh looking snow in the place where the snowman had originally stood. Shivering, Dragor went into the house.
As he entered his room the clock downstairs started chiming midnight. "XMAS!" trumpeted the bonsai tree, "AN EATING PUDD!".
"Don't start, please, it's been an awful ni- oh sod it. Merry Xmas bonsai."
"Xmas must be a merry to you. Dragor."