Christmas War

All I want for Christmas is you.

  Mariah Carey's song came through the speakers of the car.  The heater on medium as the outside world faces the cold winter breeze.  Looking through the window, houses are alight with Christmas lights; red, green and white.  Snow covers the sidewalk, thanks to the diggers and children of all ages throwing snowballs or making snowmen.

  How I've missed the feeling of being a child during Christmas.  The world was our stage and our imagination was our world.  When we held no responsibility. How we could endlessly enjoy the snow; how we unintentionally hurt people with snowballs only to be chased around laughing our heads off.

  Christmas was around the corner and the snow had shown that.  About a week before Christmas the whole town had been covered during the night by snow and it was complete chaos when the children woke up.
 
  I didn't even eat anything, I was out that door in an instant.
 
  My hands froze as my fingers had touched the ground but I didn't care.  Snowballs were my goal.  My hands gathered the snow before slowly sculpting the circular shape. 

  "Alissa," a voice yelled out.  My best friend Lily Grey had finally come out of her house dressed completely from head to toe in long clothing.  I hadn't even thought about changing when I ran out the house.  When you're seven you didn't really care what you wore out, flannelette pjs were good enough.

  "Lil, come on we've gotta get ready for the battle.  I won't let the boys beat us this year."

  "You say that every year," she complained landing on the ground and making snowballs herself.

   "Yeah," I huffed as I put the snowball to the side and looked at her.  "I have a secret weapon this year," I smiled, picking up the snowballs we'd made and took them to our 'base'.
 
  It's a tradition in the town of Harrington that there's a war between the males and females with snowballs on Christmas Eve.  It's always better to start making our weapons now so we have more ammo for the war and we weren't the only ones thinking that.
 
  As we trudged through the snow to my shed, our base, the boys on the other side of the street were making both snowballs and barracks.  That was their territory, this side of the street was ours.  So, no sneaking over to sabotage till the war and all the girls who lived on that side had to come over here to get ready, but what's a good war without a little sabotage.
 
  Our base was a rickety shed.  The metal had rusted in some places, vines had grown up the walls, but years of weather and of it being unused, what would you expect.  That was the whole disguise though.  The inside was a whole other story.

  "You remember the code?" Lily asked.

  "How could I forgot it?" I retorted.

  "Well, you might have got memory loss."

  "People wish I had memory loss."
 
  We laughed, not particularly because it was funny, but because it were true.  I remembered heaps of things from conversations to class education.  Everyone hated it because I always seemed to see them doing something stupid. 
 
  This one time I saw George Thomson talking to crows.  Okay that seems kind of normal, we all do that.  I do when I have a problem, I talk to my dog, but he was cawing like a crow.  It lasted for a while and I couldn't help but laugh.  He'd turned to me with a blush forming on his cheeks and the crow disappeared.  He'd hated it and looked like he wanted to hit something but I promised that I would never tell anybody. 
 
  To be honest, who cares!

  "So?"

  "Yeah, I'm on it."
 
  There was a rock in the garden near our feet and if you think it's the key under the rock thing, you're right, kinda.  I picked the up the rock and turned it upside down.  To people who didn't know there was a key in it they'd just think it was a rock.  Yep, the key was actually in the rock.  A hole had been drilled in the bottom, thanks to my dad, and dad had found this kind of putty that felt hard as rock but it was easy to get out and retrieve the key.
 
  My fingers dug into the putty and pulled out the small key.  I quickly put the key in the keyhole, turned, then grabbed the wired clothes hanger from Lily. 
 
  The thing with our lock was that it had to be unlocked with a key then using a wired clothes hanger we lift the latch.  Complicated, yes, the boys would never be able to figure it out with their small brains.
  
  The door latch came off easy.