Read on for your Online Christmas Story from Ballyyahoo.
CHAPTER ONE – THE HOOLEY
Kevin and Gerry couldn’t wait for Christmas. They were bored as usual. They were stuck indoors because it was cold, wet, and windy in the tiny Irish town of Ballyyahoo.
They weren’t just bored. They were disappointed.
You see, they had recently learned that there was a real live witch in Ballyyahoo. The witch of Ballyyahoo saved Gerry and his Mum from a vicious burglar who had broken into their house.
Later, she made Gerry and Kevin deputies so that they could help her with the fight against crime in Ballyyahoo. The two boys thought their days of boredom would be over.
They thought that now they were deputies, they would fly around Ballyyahoo on broomsticks, turning burglars into toads and toads into giant packets of crisps!
But after they turned a bowl of vegetable soup into a bowl of bubbling chocolate soup, the witch wouldn’t give them any more spells.
She said they’d get sugar-rot of the teeth and stomach and end up so unfit that the criminals would run rings around them.
The witch said it would be better for Gerry and Kevin to learn their witchcraft slowly, surely, and very, very carefully.
When, at last, it was Christmas Eve, Kevin and Gerry got on their bikes and cycled into Ballyyahoo. For once, they had something to be excited about.
Christmas Eve in Ballyyahoo is about the best Christmas Eve you could ever have. Every person in the whole of Ballyyahoo gets together in the middle of the town and enjoys a massive hooley.
All down the main street of Ballyyahoo are big thick logs from the Ballyyahoo forest. People use them to sit on in the summer or rest shopping bags while they fumble for their car keys.
There are always a few small ones, so old people, or just plain tired people, can put their weary feet up and rest them.
On Christmas Eve, the people of Ballyyahoo drag the logs into the road and carefully place boards on top of them to make tables.
The Christmas tables are enormous and look Christmassy with their log legs and holly decorations.
All the decorations are handmade by the kids of Ballyyahoo, and all the materials are collected from the wonderful Witchy Woods of Ballyyahoo.
Everyone enjoys walking in the Witchy Woods. The woods are dense with trees and full of beautiful flowers, cones, twigs, branches, and holly, lots and lots of holly.
The people in Ballyyahoo love fresh green holly with its shiny red berries. Kevin and Gerry help with the preparations, even though they don’t like work.
Nobody in Ballyyahoo minds helping out with the party, and that’s because nobody thinks of it as work, and that’s probably because the party starts when the helping starts.
Miss Parrot and Miss Parrot always bring their giant bag of party hats. Every single hat is different, apart from the fact that every single one has got holly leaves and berries on top.
The two Miss Parrots make the hats themselves and are the best knitters in Ballyyahoo. They knit so fast that they have to buy new knitting needles weekly because they wear them out.
Everyone brings something to the party, and even though the table goes the whole length of the main street, it’s always filled with fantastic food and drinks.
All Ballyyahooians bring a present, and each person puts the gift they brought under the Christmas tree.
When all the food is gone, Paddy Plant drives his digger up and parks it beside the tree. Everyone else helps to put all the presents into the digger’s bucket, so it turns into a giant lucky dip.
After that, they all pull their party hats down over their eyes so they can’t see as they dip their hand in the digger bucket to take their Christmas present.
The party starts at lunchtime and ends at teatime, just in time for everyone to go home, put the little kids to bed, and finish wrapping presents and stuffing turkeys.
This year, the party was the best ever. Seanie from Kelly’s shop is Ballyyahoo’s one and only one-man band. He prides himself on making all his instruments out of whatever he can get his hands on.
This year he played the bin lids, the rusty saw, the poker, the coal shovel, and the very popular rake and wheelbarrow.
Occasionally, if there’s a special request, he will play the chainsaw in a tin-bucket song, but for some strange reason, nobody made any special requests for that particular song this year.
It took a few hours for all the food to be eaten since there was so much of it, and after that, they cleared the table to prepare it for the best part of the hooley: the dancing.
As usual, Maggie-Many-Cats set up her mobile disco from the back of her cat-mobile.
She had brought her favourite record – sounds of the glittery seventies and had set it up to play on her wonky old record player.
She wore oversized wide trousers, a denim jacket trimmed with tartan and a tartan scarf to match.
She had done herself up in her favourite makeup too, and she had glitter around her eyes and silver sequins done in the shape of butterflies on each of her cheeks.
People would never dare say it in front of Maggie-Many-Cats, but last year, some of them, especially the older, deafer people, thought that Maggie-Many-Cat’s record player might have seen better days.
In other words – the music wasn’t loud enough. Everyone waited for her to put the old needle on the scratchy record, but she didn’t.
She returned to her cat mobile and started dragging out a huge, cumbersome, and strange-looking object.
Nobody could tell what the object was, but it looked like there’d been an explosion in a pile of wooden pallets and old tin bins.
People watched as she pulled the half-wood, half-metal object beside the record player and unwound a long wire with a plug.
She plugged it into the back of the record player and smiled.
“Are you ready to rock, Ballyyahoo?” she shouted.”Yes,” they all called back.”
“Are you ready to rock and roll, Ballyyahoo?”
“Yes,” they shouted.
“Git on with it, will you, Magser, before we all die for want of a bit of music,” said old Paddy Plant, who isn’t as patient as he never used to be.
Maggie threw a mince pie at Paddy, but it bounced off his head. Still, he managed to catch it before it hit the floor and ate it before it went cold.
Next, Maggie placed her old needle on the scratchy record as the town got ready to rock. The music that blared out was so loud that it blew Paddy Plant’s party hat clean off.
It turned out the huge object was a massive speaker Maggie-Many-Cats had made out of seven old metal rubbish bins and a few wooden pallets that fell off the back of a lorry that got stuck in a pothole outside her gate.
The music got louder and louder, and soon the music of Ballyyahoo was so loud that it made the telephone poles rattle in County Clare.
The first one up to dance was Paddy Plant. You’d never think he was ninety-six years old. He leapt up on the table and danced the whole length with a Christmas cracker on his head.
Then the two Miss Parrots got up and started dancing with Paddy. Someone threw them some Christmas crackers, and the Miss Parrots put them behind their ears and danced for an hour.
Afterwards, one of the Miss Parrots said the music had set her feet on fire, and she’d had to soak them in a bucket of cold seaweed and seawater to stop them dancing all on their own.
Gerry’s mum, Dymphna, and Kevin’s mum, Aggie, got on the table and danced the legs off themselves.
Then, when everyone started clapping, they got carried away and began Zumba dancing backwards down the table until Dymphna slipped on a turkey and stuffing sandwich, nearly fell off the end of the table and almost knocked the Christmas tree over.
Luckily, a woman of around sixty-five years old, called Biddy, managed to catch her.
Everyone remarked how amazing it was that a woman Biddy’s age was strong and fast enough to catch Dymphna in one hand and save the Christmas tree with the other.
But then, apart from Gerry and Kevin, none knew that Biddy wasn’t an ordinary woman. Biddy was a witch, the Witch of Ballyyahoo.
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