Friday December 11th, 2015

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about: the Christmas train.

It's been a long day, I'm tired, and it's late. So, basically, I'm just going with what we did tonight with Kat's family as our prompt.

Max enjoyed it a lot, as did Natalie. I thought it was okay. The visit from Mr and Mrs Claus was neat, and the banjo player doing Christmas carols on board was a definite highlight. I suspect we'll be doing it again, though perhaps not next year with two extra babies to consider.

Mine:

We're heading for winter, we're a rolling down the tracks. The train is full of laughing Jennifers and joyous, shouting Jacks. Next stop is Christmas and there's no turning back!

Not even when the engineer has a heart attack...

2 comments:

Greg said...

No matter how many times I read that I can't stop misreading it as "Kat's family [is] the prompt" :)
While I think you're cheating and writing your four-line poem today I am amused by your last line. It makes me wonder what needed to happen on that Christmas train for you to have enjoyed it as much as the children....

The Christmas train
The Christmas train allowed passengers to get on in coach one and walk through to coach twelve, where they disembarked, experiencing the twelve days of Christmas as they went. The first carriages were always popular; the partridge, the calling birds and especially the five golden rings. But the swans were terrifying and aggressive, and the milkmaids kept begging to set free from slavery. The lords-a-leaping was achieved by electric shocks, and the drummers drumming was enough that people staggered from the train, blood leaking from their ears, swearing never to celebrate Christmas again.

Marc said...

Greg - I think more Christmas lights on the houses along the route would have helped. And maybe a stiff drink or two...

I don't know. It just didn't seem like all that much for the cost of the tickets. But perhaps I just wasn't in quite the right mood for it this year.

Hmm, at first I thought this was rather a brilliant way to operate a Christmas train. But then you brought up some very valid concerns with the concept and now... well, I think I'm in agreement with the (likely) concussed patrons stumbling off carriage twelve...