The Christmas Star

In the small, snowy village of Willowbrook, where the rooftops wore thick white blankets and the lampposts glowed like warm candles, there lived a little girl named Rosie. Rosie had curly red hair, a gap in her front teeth, and the biggest imagination in all of Yorkshire. She wore mismatched socks every single day, always had a smudge of something on her nose, and kept a little notebook in her coat pocket where she wrote down interesting things she noticed. Her mum said she was the most curious child she had ever met. Rosie took that as the finest compliment in the world.

Every year, Rosie loved Christmas more than anything in the whole world. She loved the smell of cinnamon and oranges that drifted through the house from the moment December arrived. She loved the way her mum hung fairy lights around every single window so that the whole cottage twinkled from the outside like a little lantern. She loved the sound of carols playing softly on the radio while her dad made hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, humming along to every song even when he did not know the words. She loved the way her cat, Biscuit, always tried to climb the Christmas tree and always got stuck halfway up. She loved the frost on the windowpanes in the morning, and the creak of the floorboards on Christmas Eve when she crept downstairs to see if Father Christmas had been.

But this Christmas, something was wrong.

The big Christmas star that always sat at the very top of the village Christmas tree had gone missing. It was not just any star. It had been in Willowbrook for over fifty years. It was made of gold-painted wood, with five long points and a small light inside that made it glow like a tiny sun. Old Mr Pemberton, who put up the tree every year without fail, had gone to fetch the star from the village hall storage cupboard on the first of December, as he always did, and found the cupboard completely empty.

Nobody knew where it had gone. Mr Pemberton scratched his bald head and searched through every box in his shed. Mrs Adlington from the bakery turned her entire storeroom upside down. Even the postman, who knew every corner of Willowbrook and had been delivering letters there for thirty years, had not seen it anywhere. A notice was put up on the board outside the village shop. Several people knocked on doors and asked their neighbours. The schoolteacher, Miss Hartley, even asked the children in Rosie\'s class if anyone had seen a large golden star. Nobody had.

Without the star, the tree looked terribly sad. It stood in the middle of the village square, tall and green and draped in all its usual finery. It had beautiful red and gold baubles that caught the light. It had strings of silver tinsel wound carefully from top to bottom. It had little wooden reindeer and tiny felt robins hanging from its branches. At its base sat a circle of wrapped presents that the village collected each year for the local children\'s charity. The tree had everything it needed.

Everything except the star.

And without the star on top, it just did not feel like Christmas.

Rosie stood in the village square on a cold Tuesday afternoon, staring up at the bare tip of the tree, watching it sway slightly in the winter breeze. She pulled her scarf tighter and made a decision.

\"I\'m going to find the star,\" she said to her best friend, a boy named Sam who wore a blue woolly hat pulled down over his ears and a coat that was slightly too big for him because he kept growing out of them.

Sam blinked behind his round glasses. \"But it could be anywhere.\"

\"Then we had better start looking,\" said Rosie simply, and she took out her little notebook and wrote FIND THE STAR at the top of a fresh page.

They made a plan. They would search every building in Willowbrook, starting at the north end of the village and working their way south. Rosie wrote down each location neatly. Sam, who was very good at drawing maps, sketched a rough plan of the village on the back page. They shook hands to make it official, which Sam said was unnecessary but did anyway because Rosie insisted.

They began at the village hall, checking behind the heavy velvet curtains and under the stage where old props from the Christmas pantomime were stored. They found a cardboard donkey, three shepherds\' crooks, and a tambourine, but no star. They looked inside the little stone church at the top of the hill, where Reverend Hollis was arranging white flowers on the altar. He shook his head kindly, offered them each a biscuit from a tin he kept in the vestry, and said he hoped very much they would find it.

They checked the school, looking in the art cupboard and the sports shed. They searched the library, where Mrs Obi the librarian helped them check the back room without even asking why, because she was that sort of librarian. They peered through the window of the sweet shop, just in case, and were briefly distracted by the display of striped candy canes before remembering they were on an important mission.

They knocked on the door of the scout hut, the doctor\'s surgery, and the little tearoom run by twin sisters called Dot and Bea, who made Rosie and Sam sit down and have a piece of fruit cake each before they were allowed to continue searching.

By half past four, the sky had turned the deep blue of a winter evening and the snow was beginning to fall again in soft, lazy flakes. Rosie looked at her notebook. She had crossed off twelve locations. Sam had gone very quiet, which was his way of being worried without wanting to say so.

\"We\'ve looked almost everywhere,\" he said finally.

\"Almost,\" said Rosie. She was not ready to give up. She never was.

She turned slowly in the middle of the lane, looking all around her, thinking hard. The snowflakes drifted down. The lampposts flickered on one by one. The village was settling into its quiet evening routine, curtains being drawn, chimneys puffing out little clouds of wood smoke, the smell of suppers being cooked drifting through the cold air.

Then Rosie noticed something.

High up on the roof of the old stone cottage at the end of Maple Lane, something was glinting in the last of the evening light. It caught the glow of a nearby lamppost and threw a small golden shimmer back across the snow. It was five-pointed and perfectly still, sitting wedged between two tall chimney pots as though it had always been there.

\"Sam,\" she whispered. \"Look.\"

Sam looked up and his mouth fell open. \"How on earth did it get up there?\"

They walked quickly down Maple Lane and knocked on the front door of the cottage. It belonged to old Mrs Finch, who was eighty-three years old, had a large tabby cat called Pudding who always sat in the front window, and made the best shortbread in the village, possibly in all of Yorkshire.

Mrs Finch opened the door wearing a Christmas apron and holding a wooden spoon. She had flour on her cheek and warm eyes behind her glasses. \"Hello, dears,\" she said, as though she had been expecting them. \"Come in out of the cold.\"

They stepped into her warm, cosy kitchen, which smelled gloriously of butter and vanilla and something with cinnamon. Rosie explained about the missing star and pointed up towards the roof. Mrs Finch set down her wooden spoon and looked puzzled for a moment, her brow furrowing. Then her eyes went wide.

\"Oh my goodness,\" she said softly. \"I think I know exactly what has happened. Come with me.\"

She led them up the narrow creaking staircase, past the row of framed photographs on the wall, past the little shelf of china owls, all the way up to the attic room at the very top of the house. It was a low-ceilinged room full of old furniture and cardboard boxes and a rocking horse in the corner that had seen better days.

And there, on an old wooden chair beside the small round window, sat a very large crow.

It was glossy and black from beak to tail, with bright clever eyes like two little beads of ink. It sat very upright, very still, and looked at them with an expression of complete innocence. Tucked carefully under one of its wings, slightly bent at one point from the journey, was the Christmas star.

\"This is Midnight,\" said Mrs Finch, in a fond and slightly exasperated voice. \"He comes every winter to shelter in the attic. He has done for years. He is a wonderful bird but I am afraid he has always had a very great love of shiny things. Last winter it was my good silver thimble. The winter before that it was a brass button off Mr Finch\'s old coat.\"

Rosie stared at Midnight. Midnight stared back at Rosie.

She took one slow step forward. Then another. She crouched down to the crow\'s level and held out her hand, not grabbing, just offering. The crow tilted its head to one side, then the other. Its bright eyes studied her carefully. For a long moment, the attic room was completely silent except for the soft sound of snow falling outside.

Then, very slowly and with great dignity, the crow shuffled sideways on the chair and allowed the star to topple gently from beneath his wing. It landed softly in Rosie\'s waiting hands.

\"Thank you, Midnight,\" she whispered.

The crow made a low, quiet sound deep in his throat, almost exactly like someone saying sorry, and ruffled his glossy feathers.

Sam let out the breath he had been holding for approximately two minutes.

They carried the star carefully back down the stairs, thanked Mrs Finch who pressed a bag of shortbread into each of their hands before they left, and walked back through the falling snow to the village square. Word had somehow already got round, the way it always does in small villages, and a small crowd had gathered.

Mr Pemberton climbed his tall wooden ladder with great ceremony, took the star from Rosie with both hands, and fixed it firmly back to the very top of the tree. He climbed back down, plugged in the extension lead, and stepped back.

The star blazed golden and warm against the dark winter sky.

The crowd let out a long, happy cheer that rose up into the snowy air and scattered the sparrows from the rooftops. Somebody began to sing Once in Royal David\'s City. Someone else appeared from nowhere with a tray of steaming cups of hot chocolate. A little boy in a bright red coat began dancing in the snow.

Rosie stood beside Sam, both of them looking up at the glowing star, their faces warm with the light of it.

\"We found it,\" said Sam, grinning so wide his glasses steamed up slightly.

\"We did,\" said Rosie.

She took a long sip of hot chocolate, felt the warmth spread from her throat all the way down to her toes, and tucked her notebook back into her coat pocket. She would write it all up later. Every detail. The crow with the clever eyes. The quiet attic. The moment the star had fallen into her hands like a gift.

The carol grew louder as more voices joined in. The snowflakes drifted down through the golden light. The village of Willowbrook gathered together in its square, warm and cheerful and whole again.

That night, when Rosie climbed into bed and pulled her thick quilt up to her chin, Biscuit the cat curled into a ball at her feet and began to purr. Outside her window, the snow kept falling in the quiet dark. Somewhere across the rooftops, a crow called out once, a single clear note into the stillness.

Rosie smiled, closed her eyes, and drifted off to sleep.

And Willowbrook slept too, snug beneath its blanket of white, the Christmas star glowing steadily above the square, lighting the way for Christmas morning.

*The End.*