Snow Penguin
A Christmas tree inside the house was inevitable, for his daughter's sake, but Stannis drew the line at cluttering his lawn and front yard with Christmas-related figurines and ornaments. Santa Claus, elves, Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer and their ilks, they were all banned as decorations. Banned!
His front yard was white, completely white and pristine, enveloped by snow. His neighbors' yards, on the other hand, were eyesores, providing more than ample cause for teeth-grinding and jaw-clenching. The Seaworth's yard was the worst, with seven wooden elves in descending sizes arranged in a row (a crooked row, at that), one for each of the Seaworth sons. The eldest of those sons was already a married man in his mid-twenties, but still Davos persisted in putting out an elf for him, as if Dale Seaworth was still a little boy who believed in elves and Santa and all that nonsense.
His daughter did not seem to take as much delight as Stannis in the pristineness of their front yard. "We could build a snow penguin," Shireen suggested. "It's not Christmas-related, so you won't hate it, but it will still make our house look more festive from the outside."
"A snow penguin? Don't you mean a snowman?"
Shireen stared at her father with reproach in her eyes. "If I meant a snowman, I would have said a snowman, Dad. You taught me to be precise with my words."
"How exactly do you build a snow penguin?"
"It's not all that different from building a snowman. Come on, I'll show you," Shireen said, pulling her father's hand, trying to lead him from their front door to the yard.
Stannis resisted. "Why do we need any decoration in the yard in the first place? The house looks festive enough inside. That is all that matters."
Incredibly, his daughter was suddenly near tears. "We've never built anything together. Mr. Seaworth made those elves in his front yard with his sons. Devan told me so. They are not all the same. Each one is different, made special for each of his boys."
So they were not store-bought ornaments - yet another example of the over-commercialization of Christmas - as Stannis had assumed. Davos Seaworth, a man of many talents. Stannis turned to his daughter and said, with some regret, "I can't carve you a wooden penguin. Woodworking is not one of my skills."
Shireen sighed. "I don't want a wooden penguin. I want us to make a snow penguin, together."
This time, Stannis allowed himself to be led to the yard. "Well, you're the teacher. How should we start?"
"First," Shireen said, "you have to check if the snow is in the right condition."
"What would be the wrong condition?"
"If the snow is too icy, or too slushy, then that is the wrong condition. You must check if the snow is firm enough to be rolled into a ball, and firm enough to stay in that shape."
Stannis nodded. Shireen waited. Nothing happened. They stared at each other in silence, father and daughter.
"What are you waiting for, Dad?" Shireen finally broke the silence.
"I have to do the checking?"
"Yes!"
"You said you want us to build the snow penguin together," Stannis reminded his daughter.
"But we're not building it yet. This is just the checking phase, to see if the snow is in the right condition," Shireen pointed out. "If the condition is not right, we can't build the snow penguin at all."
"Now who's being pedantic?" grumbled Stannis.
"I learned it from my father," Shireen replied, with a grin.
"Hah!" exclaimed Stannis. He gathered snow and rolled it into a ball. "It looks firm enough," he said. "But it needs one final test."
"What test?" Shireen asked. The snowball hit her arm before the question was fully out of her mouth. Laughing, Shireen declared, "It needs to be tested one more time," and threw an ever bigger snowball at her father.
They did manage to finish building the snow penguin, finally. Stannis even relented and agreed to have the penguin wearing a red-and-green scarf emblazoned with the words "Merry Christmas" around its throat. But he drew the line at antlers. "Absolutely not!" he laid down the law. "It's a snow penguin, not Santa's reindeer."