Tap, tap, tap.

“Is there anyone in here?”. Frannie Moose wriggles in her chair, stretches her arms skywards, cracks her knuckles, takes another sip of hot tea and resumes her conversation with the internets.

For quite some time now, Frannie Moose has been sharing the inner workings of her mind with the world at large – and no one in particular – because she is worried sadness might just render her mute again if she doesn’t speak up, just like it did when she lived on a tiny floating dot in the middle of the great big ocean. She retreated so far back into her own skull that she ended up lost in there for months, thoughts flapping around with nowhere to go, voice hung on the coat rack by the door.

Frannie Moose is a blogger sometimes, and, just like any other blogger, all she really yearns for is some kind connectedness. The only way to do this, she reasoned, is to transpose her real life self into words without redacting anything. So post after post, she defies discomfort, bares her soul for all to see and lets her heart do the typing. Quirky, joyful, sad, gut-wrenching, all human life is there in full gore, glory and bad grammar.

Come early November, the holiday season zooms in on her like a vulture, all claws and beak, picking at her the very last shreds of joy she has managed to salvage and Frannie Moose feels herself running out of happy. All the other days on the calendar recoil, shrink and cower in readiness for the looming meltdown scheduled on the fourth and last Sunday of December, that enforced day of merriment, Olympic-style eating and epic fabulism that makes all of Frannie Moose’s thoughts turn winter gray.

By stealth or by force, time inevitably accelerates and anxiety starts gnawing at her addled brain, filling it with relentless background noise and shards of broken memories. Suddenly, living out of a suitcase called home, being average and a little battered around the edges just won’t do anymore. Instead, the grocery store shelves groaning under the weight of seasonal miscellany, the blinged-out streets and even the muzak in the coffee shop are all urging Frannie Moose to park the snark and hulkily burst out of her meek and mild skin as a re-invented superhero, perhaps an elf of good cheer called Shoogarush or Nutcake, or Santa’s mighty sidekick Ms Starshine Laughterbox, or maybe even a supersonic reindeer known as Swiftzen…

Way back when, before Frannie Moose’s family broke – shattering her head and heart at the same time – Christmas used to smell of pine, spices, chocolate and the small clementines a mysterious figure had left in her shoes the night before. That’s the way it was where she grew up, you’d shine your shoes extra nice on Christmas Eve and place them under the tree. More often than not, they’d be invisible by morning, buried under gifts of all shapes, colors and sizes. That was the one morning in the year that always smelled so deliciously heady that Frannie Moose would try to preserve it by carefully picking up pine needles off the floor and putting them into whatever containers she could find, for yearlong sniffing.

These days however, Frannie Moose is all grown up with wrinkles like graffiti announcing that “worry woz here”, a bruised heart and empty pockets because life did hurt real bad this year. For months, she managed to run away from the hurt only to come to a screeching halt a few weeks ago in front of a big wall, stopped dead in her tracks by something so overbearingly huge it threatened to crush even the ghost of her fighting spirit.

To Frannie Moose, Christmas reeks of decaying hope, rotting faith and rancid grace. More than anything, this is the one holiday synonymous with loneliness in its many declinations – searing solo, decorative or parallel to name a few already filed away in her personal catalogue – and nagging frustration at being unable to replicate the ever so desirable seasonal magic being paraded by everyone else. Deep down, she knows that she is not the only one fighting tinseled demons, but how do you tackle Christmas without also experiencing the burning shame of admitting publicly that you are rattling around without anywhere to go or anyone to celebrate with? Because being alone at Christmas is one of the last remaining societal taboos, an anomaly that points to all kinds of sinister rather than just a side effect of luck being temporarily out of stock.

And yet, Frannie Moose used to worship at the retail altar too, temporarily convinced that joy could be bought, stuffed inside a stocking or placed under a tree, guaranteed to permanently undo the year’s unmentionable horrors in one go and conjure up instant happiness the minute “it” – yet another generic whatever – was unwrapped. It’s a well-known fact that everything is magical at Christmas – this pair of socks can change your life and of course ubiquity is possible but only for one excessively cuddly, ageless chap who wears a red suit lined with white fur, and a matching hat.

But Frannie Moose doesn’t grinch. Instead, cheeks ablaze, she reassures the internets that Christmas still rocks as a concept and that there’s always next year’s edition anyway.

What Frannie Moose doesn’t know is that, thousands of miles away, Someone has been listening intently to the bleatings of her clumsy heart and somehow not only feels inspired to get a Christmas tree for the first time in over twenty years but also puts a little Santa hat on the elderly cat and has the docile moggy pose under the tree for a picture, a glimmer in his eye. Unbeknown to Frannie Moose, Christmas 2011 is in for an imminent rewrite as the internets suddenly chime in one Monday night with a singular email.

Reading it instantly changes the course of Frannie Moose’s thinking, provoking a curious tingling sensation that lifts the corners of her mouth and makes her heart sprout tiny feathery attachments. So intense is the experience that Frannie Moose stares at her screen for the longest time, wordless, wet-faced, glowing.

“I want you to know that wherever you are in the world, there will always be a Christmas happening and waiting for you”, reads Someone’s email, complete with a picture of a festive Santacat sprawled suggestively under the tree.

And just like that, the stony wall that was Christmas turns into a window through which kindness and human warmth beckon, melting away Frannie Moose’s cynicism and gently reflecting a happy face, that of a starry-eyed child filled with wonder and gasping in awe.

Santacat is immediately appointed official Christmas feline overlord wizard and given pride of place on Frannie Moose’s computer so he can dispense warm fuzzies on tap throughout the day. Slowly, the holiday season loses its gray sheen, the calendar panic subsides and a secret magical masterplan of superlative ingeniousness starts taking shape.

But for the masterplan to work it has to be shared, so Frannie Moose digs deep, right through the shame and under the place where self-doubt and fear of rejection live until she finds enough just enough words – 596 of them – to weave together into one breathless single sentence turned paragraph turned text which she sends to Santacat’s keeper.

“I happen to think I would look really good with a big bow around my head…”, she begins, braving tinseled demons and ridiculousness in one fell swoop of the keyboard.

On Christmas Day this year, if you happen to be in an airport or traveling aboard a big flying machine, look out for Frannie Moose: she’ll be heading west across one great big body of water and an enormous landmass to hug Someone, the somewhat anxious person pacing back and forth under the arrivals board. Together, they’re beginning their very own Christmas traditions. Do say hello, share the magic and remember that presence makes the best Christmas gift ever!

@HannahCurious uses the internet as a snuggle blanket and occasionally scribbles at The Ideal Wife Giveaway