Kid’s Short: Snow Adventure

The wonderful Susanna Leonard Hill has announced her 4th Annual Holiday Contest and again I’m approaching it as a writing exercise. This time I have a massive 350 words in which to write ‘a children’s story in which wild weather impacts the holidays’ (i.e. Christmas etc.). I’m deliberately avoiding a weather-centric story as I remember that my favourite children’s stories were almost always based around characters in a ‘situation’ which usually got out of hand. I have therefore reached for some of my own characters (in their first public story) and added a touch of snow… (somewhat rare around these parts of middle England at Christmas).

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Kitten-Woolly’s Snow Adventure

Babbit pressed his cotton nose against the window, his eyes wide.

“Snow!” he whispered. The toys had never seen snow before; they had only ever known grey skies and rain at Christmas.

Alice was already outside with her daddy, making a snowman.

Pinky Bear climbed up onto the window-sill next to the cloth rabbit and looked outside. “Gosh! It’s so bright and white! Kitten-Woolly would love this,” she said.

Babbit twitched his ear. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said Pinky, She’s probably lost. Again.”

Babbit peered through the glass with a frown. “I think I’ve found her. She’s in the hood of Alice’s coat!”

Sure enough, when Pinky looked closely, she could see a tiny, knitted cat bouncing inside the little girl’s hood.

Every time Alice bent down to collect snow, Kitten-Woolly slid forward into the scarf wrapped around Alice’s neck. When Alice stood up, the tiny toy plopped back into the hood.

Pinky was horrified. “What if she falls out?”

Alice was now galloping around the snowman, with the excited woolly cat jiggling up and down in the pouch behind Alice’s shoulders.

“As long as Alice doesn’t need her hood, she’ll be fine,” said Babbit.

But then it started to rain.

Alice reached back to the sides of her hood, and in one quick motion dipped forward and flicked the hood over her head. Kitten-Woolly shot across the garden, fired from the coat catapult.

Babbit’s leg stuffing gave way in shock and he fell off the window-sill.

Alice looked up and saw her cuddly kitten stuck to the snowman’s face next to the carrot.

“Kitten-Woolly! How did you get there?” she cried. She plucked the cat off the snowman with her mittened hands. “You should be inside, naughty thing.”

Alice dusted the snow off her friend and carried her back into the house, placing the kitten carefully next to Pinky before leaving to take off her boots and coat.

“Are you alright?” asked Pinky.

“Yesh” said Kitten-Woolly.

“I’m not,” came the muffled voice of Babbit from the floor. “I think, on the whole, I prefer summer.”

[348 words]