A while ago, in a blog post , I was bemoaning the fact that I hadn't written a Christmas-themed story this year because the world was rather too much with me. Then it occurred to me, the other day, that this was incorrect. I had written a Christmas story! The only difference was that it had been written a little while before the festive season, as a special story for my collection of seasonal stories ' A Christmas Cracker '. I thought it was about time that I shared it with you, so let's take a break from Archibald and Josiah's madcap dash across Spain (in ' Bring Out Your Dead' ) and instead visit them at the undertakers' at Christmas...