Chapter 19: Christmas Prep

~~ December - Weeks 51 to 52 ~~

Sean had gotten inventive.

First, he made a heap of moulds from clay in all sorts of Christmassy shapes. He had set up a small furnace and melted Oznglass in it, which he then coloured and poured into the shapes. He repeated this several times, so he had the shapes in about eight different colours.

He then drilled into each shape and inserted small crystal shards. He picked the best crystals for this. He commandeered the cleaning staff at the retreat to help him. He had four willing Pix slaves, eh, helpers, drilling the holes so he could then fill them.

Then they put in the different coloured strings for the hoops and sealed them in place. With experimentation, he had learnt that if he fully charged them to kill the bugs and then fully discharged them, and boxed them before he copied them, the crystals copied better.

They were still only about ninety percent as powerful as the originals, but for this type of use, they should be powerful enough. He charged them up and arranged them, so he could take a picture of each group first by colour and then by shape.

He got one of the Burgis kids whom he knew loved technology to add the sales information to the pictures and printed him off a set while he discharged them and packed them into a partitioned thick cardboard box.

They very carefully stuck on the labels for ‘by colour’, and he copied the boxes into the replicator. They repeated this but sorted them by shape into the boxes with those pictures and scanned them in again.

Then he replicated a complete set of each colour. Unboxed them and let them charge up. He was happy with the results. He hung the originals on the tree he had already acquired and stepped back. The Pix all agreed they were gorgeous. He now had the most awesome Christmas deco’s to sell. And sell they did.

When Lee turned up and saw the tree, she was amazed. “Why the Christmas tree Sean? I didn’t think we were going to celebrate Christmas; it should have been a day ago. We’ve been gone for 51 weeks.”

Sean hugged her from behind and looked at his magnificent tree. He laughed and kissed her ear. “You’ve got your time zones mixed up. We are still short Earth time by just over 16 Earth days or about 15 of ours. So, we have been gone just over 48 Earth weeks, not 51.”

“We haven’t been gone a full Earth year yet, we are still short by about twenty-three Earth days or about 22 of our days. So, it’s still about ten days to Christmas for us.”

Lee looked at her minder, and swapped to the Earth calendar and confirmed the current Earth date. She must be about the only person in Delta that hadn’t checked the dates. She typed in some quick calculations.

Then said, “Damn, when Eze said this planet had 25 hours to a day and took 360 days to complete a full rotation, he was talking Utopian days not bloody Earth days. How the fucking hell did I screw that up?”

She looked around at Sean then said, “Did you realise the Utopian year is actually about ten Earth days longer than an Earth year if you calculate in hours, which we seem to share rather than days which we don’t?”

“We actually take 9000 hours to complete a rotation around Delta, but Earth only takes 8761.6 hours. Earth’s Christmas is not going to be the same date each year here.”

“That’s going to confuse the fuck out of people. It’s confusing enough that here we are going to be celebrating it in what for us in June.”

“Yes, my love, we might have to have a town meeting. We never did discuss public holidays and what will be deemed public holidays. We may need to check with the locals and see what days of the year are special to them as well. Even on Earth, different cultures don’t celebrate Christmas.”

Lee grinned at him, “Have you noticed the locals have already started dropping the ‘us’ of the end of the months like June and July? Thank god they hung around long enough to adopt the Julius calendar before they disappeared from Earth.”

“I have my love. They are also using our names for the days of the week. After all, day 1, day 2, day 3, is a bit boring,” said Sean.

Lee giggled and snuggled into his arms and looked at the Christmas tree. “You have done a bloody nice job, my love, it’s a beautiful tree. Thank you,” she turned in his arms and kissed him. Sean found he had to lean further forward as her tummy was taking up a lot of space these days.

“Hey Lee, I know I’m asking a lot, but do you think you can slow down a bit, I know by your calculations you’re close to eight months pregnant,” he said.

Lee smiled that special smile at him, “I have been trying my love, but it’s not easy. I’ve already told everyone, no more carting heavy loads. I’m a big enough load by myself these days.”

Sean smiled, “but a very beautiful one.”

“Flatterer, I wonder what you want?” she said, rubbing against him. She slid her hand down and wasn’t surprised by what she found. Sean groaned when she squeezed him harder. He had taken to wearing the looser Genteli pants when in the retreat but still liked to wear his T-shirts.

Lee had noticed that many of the other men had also adopted his dress for leisurewear. One of the ladies had made several designs using a soft non-crush, cotton fibre mix, which was in the replicator and had them replicated in turn.

Sean’s, however, were faerie silk. There were some advantages to having an adopted faerie daughter, who also happened to be the Queen.

He still liked to wear his jumpsuit or jeans when working. Many others, even the locals, had adopted them as workwear as well. Lee had replicated some of her favourite Genteli dresses, but they could only be accessed here at the retreat.

For some reason, the replicator didn’t detect the spider’s enzyme in the older dresses. Lee realised it must be a different type of silk. The dresses had probably been made on Earth, so the replicator had accepted the dresses. They had a lot of things in their replicator that was not in anyone else’s.

Lee had unravelled the spells, which made the Crystal balls work. She still didn’t know why they worked, just that they did. She had put the spells on her minder. She had found that she could be on either planet, and it would now work as an instant connection.

So, she spelled the minders of the other wizards as well. Interesting none of the other wizards could do the spells. Lee guessed it had something to do with the fact only she could repair the wizard’s artefacts.

She had found this was now a two-edged sword. It was good that she could contact or could be contacted by anyone else, at all different times of the day wherever she was. The problem was that she was contacted often.

It might be 12:00 hours where they were, but it could just as quickly be 24:00 hours where she was. She had reprogrammed her minder so only the other wizards, Haf, Nick, Gary or Philip could contact her if she had privacy mode activated.

Lee decided she didn’t want interruptions and selected privacy mode. She then convinced her lovely husband to do some very enjoyable, private things with her. She was perfectly happy with his performance.

She loved it when he sucked and nibbled on her cunnie, he could really get her humping. Since missionary was pretty much out of the repertoire these days, Sean still found plenty of ways to bury his cock deep inside of her and bring her to fulfilment.

The next day Lee had Gwen post a web page and a community notice for a town meeting in five days. They needed to discuss public holidays.

The web page was designed to allow people to put forward for discussion which days they wanted. To say why and when they wanted to celebrate them considering to the time and date differences between the Delta planets and Earth.

People could also vote if they agreed with a day, which had been posted. When Lee looked at the website three days later, there were sixty-odd different days posted. “Good grief,” she said to Sean. “We can’t possibly have that many public holidays.”

“This is a bigger issue than I thought. I don’t generally pay much attention to why we have them, I think six to eight is fair. Especially as the community coffers had to pay for them, but which ones?”

Sean agreed, and they organised a quick council meeting and included Gary, Bentley and Nicko from Clarksville. Everyone had a different idea. It was a heated discussion. Bentley said he had done some research and believed that the locals didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter as we did, but they did celebrate a ‘Gods Day’.

They have multiple beliefs systems he told them. The locals had agreed this day was the one day they could all live with. Apparently, they had decided on this day about a thousand years ago when the communities first started interacting. It was the first day of July, which was when the sun was directly over the Equator.

It also happens that this year it also coincided with their Boxing Day Celebration. So, the committee agreed that they would have two days off for Christmas and Gods Day the next day, in line with the Earth dates for Christmas and the locals for Gods Day. They would just have to put up with them moving each year in relation to the Earth calendar.