DenNor Collection

Nyo!DenNor - A Spoonful of Sugar

A/N: First of all - yes, this was 100% inspired by Mary Poppins. Secondly, all of my stories are uploaded on my Tumblr (missmarlenekohler) and FF.Net (mbovett) accounts before being shared and stored on here. If you use those sites a lot, you may find fics in here that you've read before. They're all still mine, I'm not stealing anybody's work!

Word Count: 3336

Summary: Marlene Kohler prides herself on being able to find the perfect Christmas gift for everybody she knows - apart from a certain Norwegian girl.

Marlene Kohler loved the snow. She loved the way it fell, fragile and fast, piling up against her window like the thick fur of a winter hare. She liked to sit under a pile of heavy blankets on her sofa - like she was then - listening to muffled squeals of children playing in the street outside and to go out in it herself, letting the cold kiss her rosy cheeks and powder her hair like sugar. The snow brought her Christmas a few steps closer to perfection.

Christmas had already been and gone, perhaps a day ago, perhaps more. Marlene lost all sense of time in that last week of the year. The days turned softly like the pages of an old book; merry yellow and scented with home. No attention was paid to the time. All she did was sleep late into the morning, eat huge roasted meals and drink mulled wine (and other alcohols) with good friends and family, and sleep some more. Each moment was filled with drowsy content and there was no need for timekeeping. It was a snug end to a year of hard work and a month of ceaseless festive preparation, including the long task of finding the perfect gifts for everyone she knew.

She stretched like a cat on the sofa, wiggling her toes in the heat of the log fire at the far wall as they poked out from the end of her blanket. The woolly socks and fleecy bed throw she was wrapped in were both gifts from her oldest and dearest friend, Annaliese Oxenstierna.

Anna would be in her downtown apartment now, probably huddled in her own blankets with her fiancée Tina and watching the old Christmas films from the '90s that they'd grown up with. They would be moving away shortly into the New Year, off to one of the most northerly towns in Sweden in time to get married and properly start their life together. The town was fairly close to the border with Finland, Tina's home country, and though Marlene lamented that she wouldn't see them as often, she was glad that they had each other. Almost as a joke, she had bought Anna a thick, wool-lined winter coat to keep her warm in the far north (Anna was the sort of person who never felt the cold, even if she were to strip naked and swim in an ice-covered fjord). Tina had received a set of canvases and acrylics with which to paint their new town, for she was by far the most artistically inclined person Marlene knew. She worked as a freelance designer for big-brand interior design companies, creating new patterns to go on their products.

In her room, Marlene had pegged Polaroids of the three of them to a string of fairy lights on the wall behind her bed. In the New Year, perhaps, time would slow down enough for her to linger in some sense of grief. But not just yet.

The only other people she had bought presents for were her other friends, her brother, and her brother's boyfriend and his family. Her drinking buddies - Julchen Beilschmidt and Adalie La Vergne - had received a bottle of wine each, and her work colleagues all had baskets of chocolates and hand-crafted items from one of the city's popular Christmas markets. To her older brother, Mathias Kohler, she had given a large replica of a Viking-age axe, with which he vowed to challenge anyone who dared flirt with his beloved Lukas to a non-optional trial by combat. Lukas himself had received an outrageously expensive jar of coffee beans grown somewhere in the United States (he was an ardent lover of all kinds of strange, foreign things, for reasons which Marlene could not quite understand) and his half-brother Emil had received a box set of Marvel films and several boxes of liquorice, plus a miniature scarf for his puffin which Marlene had knitted herself. Their sister, Lilja, was another of Marlene's good friends - she'd been given a leather arm-guard to use in her archery lessons.