A Snowy Winter in the Book Dragon Realm
- hailey-mccall
- Dec 9, 2024
- 3 min read
Winter has truly begun. Snow settles on trees and grass and dragon lairs, and ice makes fragile frost flowers on the windowpanes. Icicles hang from every rooftop, glittering like crystals in the winter sun. The air is crisp and the breeze is sharp all throughout the realm.
Book dragons love winter. They love all the seasons, really, but they appreciate the things about winter that are sometimes hard to appreciate: snowy drifts that come right up to their wings, dragging in wood pile after wood pile to make warm fires in their fireplaces, slipping and sliding across the ice as they go about their day. It’s easy to appreciate when the more it snows, the more reading they get to do.
When the snow covers their lairs to the point where they can’t open their doors, the dragons quite happily stay in to read. They raid their libraries for books they haven’t read, or books they read every year, or books they read once long ago but remember liking. It doesn’t matter really, as long as they have something to read. They wrap up in large, plush quilts and settle into comfy chairs to read the snowy days away. Sometimes the snow lasts for just the afternoon. Sometimes it lasts for days. They don’t mind either way. They settle in by their warm, crackling fires and snack on buttered popcorn and roasted nuts while they wait out the storms.
And while reading is their favorite past time, it’s not all they do on those long, snowy days. While the wind whistles past their windows, dragons decorate long rolls of colored paper to wrap their Hollytide gifts in. They draw patterns of lines and dots, or holly or snowflakes, or even little books of all sorts of colors. Little dragons especially love the drawing part of wrapping, though sometimes their drawings are nearly undecipherable. It doesn’t matter one bit! Dragons know that it’s the heart that matters, and little dragons always put their whole heart into their designs.
Once the paper is decorated and they have dug up their old boxes of ribbon from their hoards of odds and ends, they sneak their gifts for dragon friends and dragon family out of their hiding places and start to wrap. They have piles of gifts for each other: jars of hot cocoa mix for drinking while they read books, homemade marshmallows to put into that cocoa, peppermint bark and toffee and fudge (because everyone needs a reading snack), book covers shaped like little Hollytide sweaters, hand knitted scarves to keep the chill away, and, of course, books.
Some are new books, purchased from the local bookshop or from their travels in the warmer months. Some are older books, favorites of theirs or traded books from other dragons or sometimes rather dusty, ancient tomes. Some books are for recipes—dragons are so fond of good food after all—and some are for magic. Some books tell fantastic, daring adventures and others relate the history of times both distant and more recent. Some books are still writing themselves as they read them. Some have been read a thousand times and never seem to manage staying the same story twice. There are storybooks for little dragons and mysteries for old dragons and a copy of The Greatest Libraries of All Dragon Time for that one very serious dragon. There is a good book for every dragon, and no book is quite the same.
If and when the snow lets up, dragons emerge from their lairs with piles of gifts, all wrapped in their own paper and tied with colorful ribbon. Sometimes they can’t even wait for Hollytide, they just exchange presents right there in the snow! A stray winter breeze will sometimes blow a ribbon or two loose from these impromptu unwrapping parties, but all the better. The little ones make a game of chasing the colorful ribbons through the snow, giggling and squealing all the way; they don’t even mind when they trip into the deep drifts and get their wings snowy!
If the dragons wait to unwrap their presents—and many of them do—they take their gifts and set them in colorful piles of boxes and bags under the Hollytide tree until they can open them. There is so much to do while they wait! Reading, twisting candy canes, building snow dragons, wrapping even more presents—the time really flies!
And soon enough, it’s Hollytide, a day of presents, and giving, and feasting, and, of course, books…!
But that’s a story for another day.
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