In hell, it is always Christmas.
It is breakfast-time now in hell and we sit around a roaring fire drinking hot chocolate and munching on candy canes dispensed from vending machines.
This is the morning ritual of the damned.
In hell it is always Christmas, but of course it never snows. True to the expression, hell never freezes over.
But dotting the landscape of this mostly barren underworld, on the hills and in the trenches, are hundreds of fake plastic Christmas trees. Tiny bulbs cover these trees and glow cheerily in the darkness. Sometimes little red imps with white beards come in the night and we wake to find presents under the trees.
Sitting around the roaring fire now, I can see that a couple of us have found gifts this morning. Irwin is holding a new bar of soap. Stacy unwraps something more useful: a machete.
Giant, blobby millipedes roam the trenches of hell, grinning as they hunt for their prey. For us, the damned.
They can’t hurt or kill us, of course, because we’re already dead. But they can eat us. Being digested in the belly of one of these beasts for eternity is not a fate that any of us wishes for.
So we beat these creatures back with anything we can find; sticks, bats, machetes. We make our homes on hills and light fires to keep the millipedes at bay.
This morning, as on most mornings, there is a newcomer to hell. Like all newcomers, he is scared and confused.
Our hell is not really what people expect from the afterlife.
To calm the newcomer we offer him candy canes and coax him to tell us about himself. About his old life on Earth.
Then all of us gather comfortably around the fire to listen. We rest our heads on each other’s shoulders, staring into the crackling fire, occasionally glancing away to keep tabs on the millipede creatures off in the distance.
Our newcomer starts into his story, still shaken but starting to calm down.
“My whole life,” he says “I always hated Christmas…”