Welcome back to Night Falls, the bedtime show of classic and original stories designed to guide you into a calm and peaceful sleep.

I'm Jeffrey, and tonight, I'd like to tell you about the run-up to Christmas we've been enjoying here in the falls. Whilst the snow has

been coming to blanket the ground and the pines have been permanently crystallized with glittering

frost, my days seem to have begun echoing those in the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Seems the magic of

this place may have something to do with it. A dusting of snow had peppered the mountaintops for weeks already.

But it wasn't until twelve days before Christmas that the first heavy snow began to lay in the clearing.

There are no natural phenomena that bring me quite as much peace as the thick blanketing

of snow on frozen ground.

I've never known quiet like the quiet of the mountains in the thick of that winter.

The snow soaked up sound for miles and miles around until there was no chaos and no noise

to clutter the clearing around me.

The first snow always felt like it offered a new beginning.

A chance to breathe, to rest, to recoup.

Though fresh snowfall was always welcomed by my friends and I, the cold that often

accompanied it would, for that Christmas at least, be made to wait at the door. On the first

truly cold December day, my friends and I gathered around the campfire and

joined hands, breathing in the warmth of the flames and lifting our hands skywards to send

that heat up into the heavens.

When we had finished reciting the incantation that Lyra had taught us the night before and insisted

we committed to memory, the result was something of a crystal dome stretching over nightfalls. My friends and I

could pass through its walls whenever we needed to, but it would keep the cold and the snow

out of the clearing for the duration of the winter.

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