The Battle for Christmas Read online

  It’s Christmas Eve, and Father Christmas should be coming – but the evil Christmas Fairy has other plans.

  Can Ellie and Max save Christmas for the world?

  Let battle begin!

  Jeremy Strong once worked in a bakery, putting the jam into three thousand doughnuts every night. Now he puts the jam in stories instead, which he finds much more exciting. At the age of three, he fell out of a first-floor bedroom window and landed on his head. His mother says that this damaged him for the rest of his life and refuses to take any responsibility. He loves writing stories because he says it is ‘the only time you alone have complete control and can make anything happen’. His ambition is to make you laugh (or at least snuffle). Jeremy Strong lives near Bath with his wife, Gillie, four cats and a flying cow.

  Are you feeling silly enough to read more?

  THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG

  RETURN OF THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG

  WANTED! THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG

  LOST! THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG

  MY DAD’S GOT AN ALLIGATOR!

  MY GRANNY’S GREAT ESCAPE

  MY MUM’S GOING TO EXPLODE!

  MY BROTHER’S FAMOUS BOTTOM

  MY BROTHER’S FAMOUS BOTTOM GETS PINCHED!

  MY BROTHER’S FAMOUS BOTTOM GOES CAMPING

  INVASION OF THE CHRISTMAS PUDDINGS

  LAUGH YOUR SOCKS OFF With

  Jeremy

  STRONG

  The Battle for

  Christmas

  Illustrated by Rowan Clifford

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2008

  1

  Text copyright © Jeremy Strong, 2008

  Illustrations copyright © Rowan Clifford, 2008 All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  978-0-14-191019-2

  This is for Mr Beynon,

  my long-suffering first bank manager.

  I hope that wherever you are I may have put

  a smile on your face at last.

  Contents

  1. So Joseph Put Mary on a Dinosaur…

  2. Max and Ellie Go Christmas Shopping

  3. Who’s a Mince Spy?

  4. Angel Wings, Angel Stings and a Very Hairy Christmas Fairy

  5. Exploding Mangers and Dead Secret Plans

  6. Mince Spies

  7. Superhero Max

  8. An Electrifying Task

  9. The Cupboard Under the Stairs

  10. The Secret Pocket

  11. Let Battle Begin!

  12. The Battle Rages

  13. Marzipanned!

  14. More Marzipan. Is This the End?

  1 So Joseph put Mary on a Dinosaur…

  This is Ellie, aged ten. She’s pulling a face because Dad told her to smile. Ellie thinks she doesn’t look like she feels, which is cool, sophisticated, beautiful and clever. Instead she reckons she has far too many freckles, is too short, has big feet and looks childish.

  Ellie was born the day before Christmas, and her parents nearly decided that they would call her ‘Christmas’. Ellie is very glad they didn’t call her that because she says that if they had she might have had to kill them.

  ‘Ellie!’ gasped Mum, horrified.

  ‘It’s a joke, Mum,’ Ellie explained patiently.

  You might think that having your birthday so close to Christmas would make everything twice as much fun. It doesn’t, and Ellie thinks it’s the pits, big time.

  She gets birthday cards that have and happy Christmas too! added in scribbly felt tip. Even worse, most people give her one present, saying that it’s for Christmas AND birthday. How mean is that? Ask Ellie.

  This is Max. He is six and mad about dinosaurs. It’s as if dinosaurs have climbed into his brain and taken it over. Ellie once told Mum that if you cut the top off Max’s head – ‘like a boiled egg’ was how Ellie described it – and looked inside you’d see hundreds of tiny dinosaurs running round and round. They’d be chasing one another, leaping and clawing, fighting and biting like mad things. Hundreds of them.

  Mum said it was an utterly blood-curdling idea and Ellie shouldn’t be so horrible. Ellie groaned.

  ‘It’s a joke, Mum. I said IF you cut off the top of his head. I didn’t say DO IT. I said IF, and that means no blood.’

  Ellie reckons her parents have no idea at all. ‘I do love Max,’ she told Dad. ‘But I like to show it by trying to kill him. He’s such a noodle.’

  Having a birthday on Christmas Eve was inconvenient, but Ellie was still managing to have a good time. Mum and Dad were in the kitchen, surrounded by dirty pots and pans, not to mention piles of food, as they geared up for the Christmas Day feast. Ellie reckons her dad is the best cook in the world and Mum is second. Max says Mum is best and Dad is second. This gives both children a good excuse to try and kill each other again which, as you know, they enjoy.

  ‘I can do karate,’ said Max, waving his arms about threateningly. Ellie shrugged.

  ‘I only do Instant Death,’ she warned, leaving Max wishing that he was ten and Ellie was six.

  Mum tried to keep things nice and peaceful by telling Max the Christmas story. She had just got to the bit where wicked King Herod appears on the scene.

  ‘He sent his soldiers to find the baby,’ said Mum. ‘Mary and Joseph had to run away, so Mary climbed on to a –’

  ‘Dinosaur!’ Max burst out, sending Dad into fits of chuckles.

  ‘And you can stop laughing,’ Mum warned him. ‘No, a donkey. They left the country and went into Egypt. Meanwhile, the Three Wise –’

  ‘Dinosaurs?’ Ellie suggested brightly, before Max could, so he launched an attack.

  Mum threw them an irritated glance. ‘I don’t think you two are very interested in this story,’ she muttered.

  ‘That’s because we’ve heard it a trillion times and Max isn’t bothered because it hasn’t got any tyrannosaurs in it.’

  Ellie was pretty much right about this. Both she and Max secretly thought the Christmas story would be a lot more interesting if it had dinosaurs in it, or whales. She was the one who liked whales, especially the ones that sing – humpback whales. The stable should have had dinosaurs and whales in it. Ellie said that King Herod’s soldier
s would never have gone snooping around if they thought they might be attacked by humpback whales and some dinosaurs.

  Fortunately there was a ring at the door at that point. It turned out to be the postman with a parcel for Ellie, wrapped in brown paper and string. The stamps looked rather exotic and used an alphabet that nobody in the family recognized. The crackly paper gave off a faint smell of rainforest and sandalwood. Or maybe it was the pong of damp gorilla fur and woodsmoke. It was magical and mysterious and made Ellie’s heart beat faster.

  Inside the parcel Ellie found a jacket and a pair of trousers. They were made of cotton and covered with a pattern of little pictures – pirates, princesses, unicorns, dinosaurs, buildings, palm tree islands and more all jostled for space.

  ‘I think they’re pyjamas,’ Dad murmured. ‘Who sent them, anyway?’

  Ellie rescued a badly scribbled note from the crumpled packaging.

  WARNING! These are COSMIC PYJAMAS. I found them at the back of a tiny shop, down a tiny alley, off a tiny square, on a tiny street, in a tiny Turkish town.

  Legend says you must never wear the top and bottom at the same time. I didn’t have time to find out why not.

  I don’t know why they’re Cosmic either. I just liked the pictures.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY! HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

  Fond love from Great-Aunt Jemima.

  ‘Oh well,’ sighed Mum. ‘That explains everything. Great-Aunt Jemima’s as daft as a brush.’

  Dad disagreed. ‘She just likes exploring and adventure. I think she’s a rather splendid old lady.’

  Ellie wasn’t listening. She stood holding the strange nightwear, turning them over in her hands and staring at them. What on earth were Cosmic Pyjamas?

  2 Max and Ellie Go Christmas Shopping

  If someone gives you a pair of pyjamas and makes a point of telling you not to wear the top at the same time as the bottoms, what is the first thing you want to do? Exactly. You want to wear both bits. Besides, Ellie reckoned she’d look pretty daft wearing just the bottom half, and she’d look even more daft if she only wore the top. Anyhow, she wanted to see what they looked like and she could only do that by trying on both parts at the same time.

  BAD MISTAKE! (But she didn’t realize that, yet.)

  Ellie looked in her mirror. She didn’t think she would win any fashion prizes but she did have to admit that the pyjamas made her feel strange. She put this down to all the crazy stuff Great-Aunt Jemima had written in her note. Her head was feeling all jumbled, as if everything inside was being stirred up and shaken.

  Ellie sat on the edge of her bed and fiddled with her recorder, squeak squeak. She hadn’t been learning the recorder for long, and it showed. Even her recorder teacher, Mrs Tompkinson, sent her outside to practise. Mrs Tompkinson once told Ellie that when Ellie played the recorder it sounded as if she was treading on several cats and the odd piglet or two. Strange to say, Ellie didn’t find that very encouraging.

  As she idly squeaked and squawked she glanced at the little pictures on her sleeve. There was a dinosaur, galloping along, and beside it a winged horse. She found the planet Saturn – the one with rings round it. Next to that was a small shop with a sign above the window that said: CHRISTMAS SHOP. Ellie was just looking at that when the tiny door of the shop opened.

  THE DOOR OF THE SHOP ON THE PYJAMAS OPENED!

  Ellie blinked like mad, looked again and it shut, opened and then shut once more. She slowly got to her feet, holding her left arm as far away from her body as possible, as if it was covered in some terrible infection. She moved slowly out to the landing and across to Max’s room.

  ‘Max?’ she whispered, her voice sounding odd and croaky. ‘The door just opened.’

  ‘Shut it behind you on your way out,’ Max said pointedly.

  ‘Max, you don’t understand. The door opened. The door of the shop.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Max! The door! Of the shop! It opened!’

  Max at last looked up from the dinosaur book he was studying.

  ‘Did you know that the really big dinosaurs had two brains? One to move their tails and one –’

  ‘Max, look at the shop!’ howled Ellie.

  ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Max said evenly, getting off his bed. ‘Why are you holding out your arm like that?’

  ‘Just look at the shop on the sleeve,’ pleaded Ellie. ‘Tell me I’m not dreaming. Tell me I’m not mad. The door of the shop opens and shuts.’

  Max stood next to her and they both stared at the little picture. The door remained firmly shut. A smile crept on to Max’s face.

  ‘You’re a –’ he began, but he didn’t finish. His mouth stayed open. The door of the shop remained shut but instead all the coloured Christmas lights in the shop window came on and began flickering. Max grabbed Ellie’s arm in amazement, his eyes goggling and then – BLAMMM! KERRANNGGG!! PHWOOOOOSSHHH!!!

  They both disappeared into whirling blackness. All they could do was cling to each other, yelling and screaming, as they were hurled along in the dark. It was like being on a helter-skelter that was going down a mega-gigantic water flume, with all the lights out. And then suddenly – FFWWAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

  Colours spun around them. They were tumbling giddily over and over in space and then they landed on something hard and skidded along the ground until they came up against a wall that stopped them in their tracks. BANG!

  ‘Ouch!’

  For a second they lay there, dazed and winded.

  Then, just as they began to struggle to sit up, an avalanche of brightly coloured giant balls rained down on them. They bounced off their heads, shoulders, arms and legs before rolling away in all directions. At last they stopped and the two children opened their eyes.

  It was dark. They took in quick, deep gulps of air, and flicked their eyes round their new surroundings.

  ‘Are we dead?’ Max asked.

  ‘Yes, Max,’ Ellie answered, rubbing her bottom. ‘That’s why we can talk to each other.’

  Max grinned. ‘Cool! I’m dead!’ His sister decided it was best if she ignored him. Sometimes he could be very annoying.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Max. As you can see, it’s dark, so it’s rather difficult to tell.’

  There was a faint crackle and some tiny coloured lights flickered on for a microsecond before going off, coming back on and going off once more. They stayed off.

  ‘They looked like Christmas-tree lights,’ Ellie murmured.

  ‘They never work,’ Max snorted. ‘Dad had to get new ones this year. He said our old ones were –’

  Fortunately Max didn’t finish. A pair of lights had just appeared and they were gradually inching towards the children, accompanied by a faint whirring noise. Max shifted closer to his sister.

  ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

  ‘Just keep still and quiet. Mummy will look after you.’

  Max elbowed her in the ribs. ‘I don’t need looking after. I can do karate,’ he boasted, rather half-heartedly.

  A mechanical clumping sound echoed in the still air and the lights swivelled towards them. Ellie was scared and gripped her recorder tightly. It was all she had to defend herself and Max with – a plastic recorder. What a deadly weapon! On the other hand maybe she could scare whatever-it-was away with some squashed piglet noises. Ellie shaded her eyes from the glare and stumbled to her feet. She reckoned they might have to run for safety. Whatever it was had almost reached them.

  The whirring stopped and the lights focused directly on the children. They got the distinct impression that they were both being closely examined.

  ‘Oh. Carol singers.’

  That was what the thing said, in a deep, slightly grumpy voice. The lights began to turn away from them and head back and as they did the faulty Christmas lights flickered briefly. There, caught in the multicoloured glimmer, they could see what it was that had been looking at them.

  A DINOSAUR.

  Or,
to be more exact, it was a diplodocus, as Max the Dinosaur Expert was quick to point out. But he was also puzzled.

  ‘The diplodocus,’ he whispered, ‘did not have eyes that shone in the dark. And they are supposed to be much bigger than we are. This one is titchy.’

  Ellie had a different answer. ‘Suppose the dinosaur is the right size and somehow we have been made much, much bigger than we were.’

  ‘Like giants?’ asked Max. ‘Cool! I’m in the Land of Dinosaurs and I’m a giant.’

  Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘There are a couple of other little things I’d like to point out about that dinosaur,’ she said. ‘It spoke. It seemed to think we are carol singers. Also, it had tinsel wrapped round its neck. Now it seems to me we have a problem there. Why would a dinosaur wear tinsel round its neck, why would it talk and why would it think we were carol singers?’

  Max considered all this for a few moments. The answer was simple. ‘Because it’s Christmas,’ he said.

  ‘Max, it can’t be a real dinosaur.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was no doubt that Ellie’s little brother was disappointed. ‘Uncool,’ he added. ‘I guess it must be some kind of toy.’

  Ellie was shaking with the enormity of what had happened to them. If Max was right and the dinosaur was a toy, then they had to face a different problem all together. Nobody, but nobody made toys as big as dinosaurs. Ellie delivered her shattering conclusion.

  ‘In that case, we’re not giants,’ she gulped. ‘In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Max, we’ve been shrunk.’

  3 Who’s a Mince Spy?

  While Max and Ellie were discussing the finer points of dinosaur recognition, a crowd of shadowy figures silently gathered around the children and began to press forward. The two children were being surrounded. Peering into the dark, broken only by the brief fizzing of the patchy lights, Ellie tried to make out what they were. Penguins. A triceratops and a tyrannosaur. A pair of giraffes, three teddy bears, a group of carol singers, half a dozen Marys, the same number of Josephs and four donkeys. (The other two had been kidnapped, as Max and Ellie would later discover.)