The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas (11 page)

‘We’re sorry for your loss,’ said Michael sympathetically.

‘So what are we going to do today?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘All the shops are shut. Anyway, I’ve been banned from the sweet shop and the Chocolatorium for a week while they repair the damages from my pre-Christmas shopping frenzy.’

‘To be strictly accurate,’ said Derrick, ‘it was more of an eating frenzy.’

‘Well, it seemed such a shame to take the chocolate home, wrap it up and give it to someone else,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Much better to eat it while it’s fresh and flavoursome.’

‘Last week you told me chocolate tasted better when you let it mature down the back of the sofa for a month,’ said Michael.

‘I know,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘and I believed it at the time. But I think that was because I had just found a chocolate bar down the back of the sofa, so my opinion was influenced by the deliciousness of that chocolate.’

‘Well, there won’t be any chocolate or boxing today,’ said Michael glumly.

‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Because it’s Boxing Day,’ said Samantha.

‘So?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘In the Green family,’ explained Derrick, ‘Boxing Day is the day when all the extended family gets together.’

‘To do what?’ asked Nanny Piggins, assuming there would, at the very least, be some sort of cake-based ritual.

‘Nothing, we just get together,’ said Samantha.

‘And the police allow this?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Because, and no offence here, children. As you know, I think you three are all lovely . . .’

‘Thank you,’ said the children.

‘But I am assuming your extended family takes after your father in their lack of charisma and basic hygiene,’ guessed Nanny Piggins.

‘You’re right,’ agreed Derrick.

‘So surely allowing so many painfully boring and tedious people together in one place could be dangerous,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Their anti-personality could act like antimatter and cause a black hole, sucking the entire planet into its vortex and destroying the galaxy.’

‘Have you been watching astronomy documentaries?’ asked Derrick.

‘No,
Star Trek
,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘It can be tremendously educational.’

‘The relatives come over every year and the galaxy has never imploded before,’ said Samantha.

‘That’s just what you think to the best of your knowledge,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But what if the galaxy had imploded and you just didn’t notice because you were in the eye of the implosion so everything seemed the same.’

‘My head is hurting,’ said Michael. ‘This is too much to think about before breakfast.’

‘You mean you haven’t eaten?’ exclaimed a shocked Nanny Piggins. ‘Didn’t you find the chocolate friands I made you? There are 12 dozen waiting for you in the kitchen.’

The children found that after the thought-provoking philosophical discussion they actually did have an appetite for a few friands.

‘So when do your dreadful relatives arrive?’ asked Nanny Piggins as she chomped on the seventy-sixth friand.

‘They are invited to arrive at 10 am,’ said Samantha, ‘so most of them arrive between 8 and 9 o’clock. Then they can judge the ones who are on time for being late.’

‘And what refreshments will your father provide?’ asked Nanny Piggins, getting to the nub of what was, in her mind, the most important consideration.

‘He doesn’t provide refreshments,’ said Michael.

‘What?!’ exploded Nanny Piggins. ‘I know I shouldn’t be shocked by the depths of your father’s depravity after all that I have seen him do. But to invite over guests and not supply refreshments is positively inhumane. How can you be expected to endure the company of cousins, great aunts and, even worse, great uncles, if you are unable to shove a slice of cake in your mouth?’

‘That’s the whole reason Father offers to host. That way he gets out of providing refreshments,’ explained Derrick. ‘He provides the venue and tells all the guests to bring a plate.’

‘A plate?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Why? Is it a Greek-themed party? Are they going to smash the plates, preferably over your father’s head, because if that is the case I may change my mind and throw my support behind the occasion.’

‘No, when you ask people to bring a plate it means you want them to bring a plate of food,’ explained Samantha. ‘Then everyone shares.’

‘Just one plate each?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘That will be inhaled in a millisecond! Then what will they do? Goodness knows, being Greens they’ll have nothing to say to each other.’

‘To be fair,’ said Derrick, ‘Father does provide entertainment.’

‘Really? Well, that’s more like it!’ said Nanny Piggins, perking up. ‘Who has he hired? A balloon animal artist? A juggler? A magician? Someone who breathes fire?’

‘No,’ said Derrick, ‘he provides the entertainment himself. When the conversation hits a lull he gets up and does a one-hour presentation on the latest breakthroughs in tax auditing.’

‘No,’ gasped Nanny Piggins, thoroughly appalled.

‘With an overhead projector to demonstrate graphs and charts,’ added Samantha.

‘That’s dreadful,’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘Someone should tell Santa. He would come and take Mr Green’s presents back.’

‘Santa only gave him one pair of socks this year,’ said Michael.

‘Which was more than he deserved,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Santa probably only gave them to him because he can smell the stinky socks he usually wears all the way to the North Pole.’

(Dear Reader, to be strictly accurate, Mr Green’s feet did not smell that bad. At least, no worse than any man whose wife has mysteriously gone missing and therefore has no-one to tell him off for not doing the laundry as often as he should. But you have to remember that, as a pig, Nanny Piggins has an extraordinary sense of smell, a thousand times stronger than a human’s. So she could be a little overly harsh and judgemental when it came to odour.)

‘Well, I’m not standing for this,’ said Nanny Piggins, contradicting her statement by getting to her feet. ‘If your father is going to allow his dreadful relatives into this house then I shall have to take action.’

‘Are we going out?’ asked Michael.

‘No, I shall invite my own family over,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘All of them?’ asked Derrick.

‘Yes,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘all thirteen of my identical fourteenuplet sisters. They are so extraordinary and brilliant it will counteract the drabness of the Greens, balancing out the potential social disaster and hopefully creating a normal pleasant gathering.’

‘I thought you didn’t know how to contact your sisters?’ said Samantha.

‘I don’t,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but Wendy will know.’

‘Which sister is she?’ asked Michael.

‘Is she the devious computer genius with a vendetta against the chess community?’ asked Derrick.

‘That’s Deidre,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Or the amoral kleptomaniac with a passion for apricot danishes?’ asked Samantha.

‘No, that’s Anthea,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Or the messy-haired biographer who tried to take over the world by stealing your mother’s cake recipes?’ asked Michael.

‘No, no, no, that’s Nadia,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Wendy is the evil super-spy who tried to throw me out of an aeroplane.’

‘Oh, her,’ said the children.

‘She uses her contacts in the espionage business to keep tabs on us all,’ explained Nanny Piggins.

‘Why?’ asked Samantha.

‘In case she falls too deeply into fudge debt and has to blackmail one of us to raise the money to pay off her fudge supplier,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘I didn’t know she had a fudge problem,’ said Derrick.

‘I didn’t say she had a problem,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I said she periodically ate so much fudge she racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. It is very judgemental of you to assume that is a “problem”.’

‘Sorry,’ said Derrick.

‘And I happen to know for a fact that she has been tapping our telephone,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Because you can hear clicking sounds on the line?’ asked Michael. (He had watched lots of police television programs so he knew all about such things.)

‘Partly,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but mostly because of the distinctive sound of an evil pig eating fudge.’

Nanny Piggins lifted the handset of the telephone. ‘Wendy, I know you are there listening . . . Stopping chewing does not conceal the fact that you are there . . . I can smell the fudge down the phone line.’

‘Can she do that?’ asked Samantha, worried about the time she had eaten an apple right before ringing her nanny. (Nanny Piggins did not approve of fruit, especially in its raw form. She was suspicious of anything that was good for your bowels.)

Michael shrugged. ‘Nanny Piggins can do anything.’

Nanny Piggins continued to speak on the phone. ‘Wendy, I want you to gather all our sisters and have them here are the Green house by 10.15 today . . . What do you mean “Why should I?” Isn’t a polite request from your sister enough?’

‘When was she polite?’ asked Derrick.

‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ promised Nanny Piggins. ‘If you get them all here on time I shall buy you one box of fudge. The largest one available from Mr Flomberg’s Fudgetorium.’

The children heard the phone click on the other end as Wendy hung up.

‘Now we just sit and wait,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘And eat more friands?’ asked Michael.

‘Of course we eat friands,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Plus we’d better whip up some real refreshments. My sisters are not going to put up with your father’s shabby standards when it comes to hospitality. If there isn’t a large quantity of A-grade cake plus apricot danishes for Anthea, the subsequent riot may very well cause structural damage to your home.’

At 8.02 am the Greens began to arrive. They were every bit as detestable as Nanny Piggins had imagined. First to arrive was Cousin Agnetha, an utterly unpleasant woman. She always looked like she had been sucking on a lemon, because she had always been sucking on a lemon. She needed to, to keep scurvy at bay. She was so miserly she only ever ate home brand porridge, which meant she was prone to vitamin C deficiency (scurvy). To counteract this she did not buy vitamin C tablets from the chemist. No, that would be too lavish. Instead, she went out every night at midnight, climbed her back fence and stole a lemon from her next door neighbour’s tree and then spent the next day sucking on it.

Next came Uncle Waldo. He smelt even worse than Mr Green because he had discovered some time in the mid-eighties that you can save a fortune on socks if you don’t wear them. And since he did not mind the smell of his own feet (it is a peculiarity of evolution that people with a normally perfectly good sense of smell, for some reason do not mind the whiff of their own body odour), during the three decades since he had stopped wearing socks he had saved nearly two hundred dollars. (He had not spent much money on socks beforehand.)

And then came Great Aunt Hilda. A shrewd, shrivelled old lady who enjoyed saying mean things to see how people would react. She was the one who concocted the whole ‘Santa Photo Scheme’ (see
Chapter 1
, or use your memory) purely because she knew how much it made Mr Green squirm to remember that he had three children.

By 9.45 the house was full of two dozen people who only had three things in common – their surname was Green, they were unpleasant and they smelt like they had left their washing out on the line for a week in rainy weather (which incidentally, if you have ever left your clothes on the line for a week and wondered what that smell is, it’s fungus and bacteria growing between the fibres of your clothes).

‘Do you think if we called the Police Sergeant we could have them all arrested?’ asked Nanny Piggins as they watched the amassed Greens all sitting silently in the living room through the peepholes in the kitchen wall. (Nanny Piggins had drilled four holes in the wall specifically for this purpose so they could all peek at whoever was in the living room at once, because the inconvenient thing about peepholes is usually that you have to take turns peeking.)

‘The Police Sergeant is on holiday in Bermuda,’ said Derrick.

‘Do you think he would cut his holiday short?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘This is an emergency. The floor may very well collapse under the weight of their boringness.’