Door 5

"Mummy, do you think Father Christmas will bring me such a teddy bear this year?"

"Maybe Lucas, if you are a good boy until Christmas."

"I promise!"

Samuel watched the little boy with his mother standing in front of a shop window. He felt his hand being squeezed and looked down into his sister's brown eyes. Samuel forced himself to smile at Emily before he looked up at Angelina to see if she had noticed him watching the mother and boy, too.

But Angelina was looking into a shop window herself right now.

"How about something like this?"

"Don't even think about it! You're not going to make my house look like some Gryffindor Candy Shop!"

Angelina sighed and rolled her eyes.

"I have news for you, Montague: red is a typical Christmas colour! It has nothing to do with the houses at Hogwarts but with tradition that I want some red decoration."

"As far as I know, green is just as well a colour for Christmas decoration, so you can as well choose green stuff."

"But to decorate everything in green is stupid! You take at least two colours to decorate…"

"Well, then take silver to go with the green!"

Angelina throw her arms up defeated and shook her head.

"Silver and green don't look like Christmas, they look like Slytherin! And there's NO snake in the Christmas story!"

"This."

Montague and Angelina stopped and looked down at Emily who was pointing at some of the decoration in the next window. Angelina walked to stand behind the little girl and looked for herself at the decoration.

"Looks like a good compromise to me." She said and looked questing at Montague.

"You will keep the red stuff at a minimum!" were his only words.

And they also turned out to be his final words for the day as well. The rest of the day he stayed silent, only rolling his eyes or sighing at the amount of decoration Angelina bought. He refused to carry anything of it though; instead he wondered what his home would look like when she was done with it. He dreaded the possible outcomes already.

Though Montague would never admit it – not even to himself – the house didn't look bad at all when Angelina and the children were finished with it. Montague had refused to let them do anything on the upstairs rooms or on the outside of the house but the ground floor looked a lot more inviting now.

Of course, Montague couldn't keep from complaining about how the red colour hurt his eyes during dinner that evening. While Angelina's only response was that there was still more green everywhere than the few red decorative items she had used.

As annoying Montague was during dinner as silent was Samuel. And this surprised Angelina. While Emily barely spoke a word and Angelina hadn't had a real chance to get anything more out of her yet, Samuel had seemed to warm up today while they had decorated the house. But now he sat there and ate wordlessly, barely looking up from his plate at all.

When she walked past the children's room on her way back from the bathroom to her bedroom that night she heard that they were still up and talking with each other.

"But if he is really this famous Quidditch player you think he is that would prove that Miss Robert is wrong. He doesn't seem to be a lunatic to me. You could be a quidditch player yourself one day. He is rich, so you can make a living out of it."

Emily's voice could be heard from inside the room. Angelina couldn't hear Samuel's reply so she walked silently on to her room.