She knows he doesn't celebrate Christmas. She plans to change that. Everyone warns her against it, repeatedly, but she prides herself on her stubbornness. She is determined that he will partake in the spirit of the season no matter what, so she finds herself in the freezing dungeons, shivering and knocking on his door.

He takes his own sweet time to answer, and she lets him know why she is here. As she expected, he nearly closes the door on her cheerful face, but she places her foot to stop it, stubbing her toe in the process. Perhaps as a way of apologising for causing her injury, he lets her inside his sparsely furnished quarters that hold no trace of Christmastime. She has to fix that, she decides. So, she makes herself comfortable on his ebony chair and gestures for him to sit across her. He looks as though he is opposed to it, initially, but eventually slumps down on a chair of his own, somewhat resignedly.

She casts a spell to make hot cocoa, thanking Molly mentally for teaching it to her, all while joyfully trying to get him to open up. He resists, of course, and he can be as stubborn as her. Nonetheless, she doesn't give up. Instead, she starts telling him about her childhood memories of the the festival.

She begins with the first Christmas she remembers. She was four, and her parents had gifted her a colourful wooden horse. She remembered spending the entire day atop it. She smiles fondly at the memory, and notices that he is no longer frowning either.

She moves on to when she was ten, the year before she came to Hogwarts. She had already got her letter, and on Christmas she opened her presents to find a wand and her copy of Hogwarts:A History. She still treasures the book, she tells him. From the smile on his face, she knows he understands that feeling.

Then there is fourth year, the Yule Ball, and all the drama that comes with it. Viktor, Ron, and how she just wanted to cry in her mother's arms after everything that happened, but both the Grangers had been busy with their surgery. It wasn't a terrible Christmas, just a lonely one. He frowns at her, and she realises that he understands this too.

She doesn't want to dwell on the year they spent in the forest, knowing how painful it was for both of them, so she quickly shifts to the present, describing how the Great Hall is decorated and how everyone is trying to set up Aurora with Filius. He flinches at the mental image of the couple, and she laughs. Soon enough, he has joined her, and she notices how different he looks when he is happy. His own memories of childhood were not pleasant, she knows, and she assumes that he might not have had gifts or friends to celebrate it. But he does now, and she is simply trying to make him aware of the fact.

She finds he converses more freely after that, and together they reminisce over their favorite books or their worst students over magically replenished cups of cocoa. And she realises that she wouldn't have preffered it any other way.

Notes: For the TGS 12 Days of Christmas Challenge Day 2