I love to build a bit of family history into my characters by giving them a seasonal traditional that brings back fond memories. It could be jam-making, or a special recipe for a feast, or an activity that only happens occasionally. Do you do that? Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine! As always, just post your excerpt into the comments.

Claudia began the run up to Christmas on the first of December, when she put up the Jesse Tree, a painted tree branch, fastened to a stand, that Grandma had made the year after Abbie was born. Grandma had made the felt ornaments, too, one for each day until Christmas. Each ornament had a story from the Bible, for the Jesse Tree was an old traditional way of tracking the salvation story from the creation of the universe to the birth of Jesus.

“But I don’t believe what you believe,” Claudia had explained, her father’s rigid form of Christianity having put her off religion of all kinds. But Grandma said the stories were part of her cultural heritage, and she — and Abbie too, as she grew older — could enjoy them without putting any more weight on them than on tales of King Arthur and his Round Table or Maui fishing up the North Island of New Zealand.

When Grandma died and Claudia moved to the city, she’d packed the branch and the ornaments away, but they’d come out again to decorate Abbie’s hospital room after the accident. Claudia had whiled away the days and nights spent waiting for Abbie to recover consciousness, by looking up the story to go with the ornament of the day, telling it in simpler words to the child lying still and white in the clean bed, writing it down, and illustrating the page. The pages, now bound, still recalled to her mind the long hours in the hospital, and the joy when, a few days before Christmas, a nurse had interrupted the story of Gabriel’s visit to Mary to take Abbie’s pulse, and Abbie had wrenched her hand away and demanded that the story continue.

The Jesse Tree had been part of their Christmas last year, too, as part of keeping things normal for Abbie while Claudia worried about what her former lover might do, now that the police had been convinced he was not responsible for what happened to Abbie. He was not stupid enough to attack either of them while he was under investigation, but now he was free to carry out his threats.

But as the year drew to an end, Abbie finished the intensive courses of physio, occupational, speech and psychotherapy prescribed by the hospital. Claudia was free to go anywhere she wished. So the day after Christmas, she loaded everything they owned into the back of her old station wagon, and they drove south, meandering through the country, stopping when they felt like it, until they reached Fairburn.

It had been a refuge when she’d flown into New Zealand, pregnant with Abbie, fleeing an angry boyfriend and a controlling father. It became a refuge again. They were welcomed back into the community, and not just by those who remembered them from the three years they lived here with Grandma.

Carly had found them this little studio, on the back of the property belonging to her parents, who were warmly welcoming. It was very private, hidden behind hedges and overlooked only by the main house — currently unoccupied, since Carly’s parents were on an extended overseas holiday.

Claudia wished they were home. Since the note three days ago, she had been very conscious of how isolated the building was. There had been nothing more, though. It must have been someone’s idea of a joke.

She shook off her sense of impending disaster, repeating one of the sayings taught to her by the counsellor she’d seen while Abbie was recovering. “I am in charge of how I feel and today I choose happiness.”

“Abbie,” she called. “I have the tree up. Are you ready for your story?”

Tonight, the story was just about the tree and its name. Abbie listened intently to the explanation.  A tree would grow from the root of Jesse. “Jessie,” Abbie commented.  “Jessie is at my riding.  Differen’ Jessie. Not Jesus’s granddad.” She began laying out the decorations from the shoebox that held them. “Which one comes next, Mummy?”

Claudia was picking through looking for the star that would go at the top of the tree to symbolise creation when a flicker of red caught her eye, and she leapt up to rush to the window.

“Edward!” The rabbit hutch stood in the corner of the paved patio, in its own little caged enclosure.

Abbie pressed her nose up against the glass. “It’s burning,” she observed. Flames licked all the way along the bottom and shot from the interior.