A/N: It is currently a stupidly warm day for being Autumn and so of course you get the Christmas installment, why not? Thank you again to everyone reading.
_happy golden days of yore_
Secretly, he has always loved Christmas.
He loves the trees in the corner of the room, decorated different each year. Loves the stories of Father Christmas and how eager every child is to be good as December arrives.
When the young Ladies were small, he had often dressed as the jolly man for the family party. He would sit with them on his lap and give them a present each that came from Father Christmas, but was paid for with money from his pocket.
Elsie arrived as Head Housemaid just before Christmas. She confides in her most recent letter that she had thought him too serious at first. That it had not been until she watched him through the small gap in the library door - and here he can kindly keep his words about her curiosity to himself, thank you - with Lady Sybil on his lap, Ladies Edith and Mary standing at each of his shoulders and a great smile on his face as he hunted in his sack for their gifts, that she had realised how much more to him than The Butler there is.
He remembers that she had smiled at him that night at dinner.
The first of many smiles passed up and down the staff table between them.
She has sent him socks. He is not surprised that they fit him well - she has been darning for him for years - but that she has made them herself.
She says it is a new hobby and that she will improve. It's not false modesty; the seam at the toe is a little crooked on one and the heel on the other.
When he writes his thank you, he does not tell her that they have come at a good time now that he has his orders to move closer to the trenches - cannot and would not even if it were safe to.
He asks instead for a favour. If she has time, can she please make something to give the young Ladies. She can take money for wool and wrapping from the little he left in the tin beneath his bed.
He picks a flower from one of the rapidly freezing fields and presses it between the pages of his letter to her. If he were home he would buy her a scarf he thinks, something to keep her as warm as she is trying to keep him.
He gets her reply a week after Christmas has passed. That Father Christmas has once again favoured the young Ladies with a single gift each, delivered to the foot of their beds on Christmas Eve. She writes that she does not expect that they will ever wear the gloves, but that he would have enjoyed the laughter that filled the House Christmas morning.
He clutches the letter to his chest and stares at the great muddy rips in the fields around him.
He is so very glad that women are not made to fight.