Saving Christmas in the Little Irish Village (The Little Irish Village #5)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Eight-year-old Hannah Kelly opened today’s window on her snowman advent calendar and popped the chocolate behind it in her mouth. Usually, the calendar made the long wait from 1 December until Christmas Day more bearable because it was the only time of year she and her sisters were allowed chocolate before breakfast! This morning, Hannah barely tasted it because she had far more important things on her mind this year than what she’d scribbled down on her Christmas wish list.

Hannah’s world had shifted since the day she won first prize for her recyclable art project at school. The prize, a book titled Save the Planet , had opened her eyes to the fact that due to humans’ lack of care, Earth was slowly dying. A fire had been lit within her, a determination to do whatever she could to make a difference.

Hannah placed the cardboard calendar back on the sideboard in the kitchen alongside her older sisters Imogen’s and Shannon’s equally festive gingerbread cottage and reindeer ones. Then she sat at the table to scoff the warming bowl of porridge her nan had set down. There was somewhere else Hannah needed to be, and her eyes flitted to her school bag, which was stuffed not with her books but with the tools to put her plan in motion – a skipping rope, her lunch, a drink bottle and the sign she’d painted at school during break time. It had been touch and go as to whether it would dry in time before her classmates piled back in, and a few of the letters had smudged in her haste to hide it in her backpack, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d use her voice, too.

Her family was oblivious to what Hannah was plotting as the familiar morning routine played out with twins Grace and Ava, the youngest of the five Kelly girls, being tag team fed by Mam. Dad was stealing a few minutes to skim the morning paper while Imogen and Shannon chatted over their oats about whether their letters would have reached Father Christmas’s headquarters in the North Pole yet. Hannah, however, was quiet as she shovelled her breakfast down, eager to be on her way and begin putting her plan in motion.

‘Slow down, Hannah. No one’s going to take it off you,’ Nan tutted, sitting down with a cup of tea.

But Hannah was already scraping the bowl.

She excused herself and got up from the table. The next time her family saw her, she was rugged up for the walk to school. Slinging her bag on her back, she was out the door before they could question her eagerness to get to class so early.

Hannah barely registered the snow that had settled on the ground overnight as she hurried up the laneway running between her home at the Shamrock pub and the row of village shops onto Main Street. There wasn’t a soul in sight, which was just as well because the last thing she needed was a busybody like Mrs Tattersall wanting to know why she wasn’t on her way to school.

In her haste to get to where she was going, she nearly skidded over in a slushy puddle but managed to stay upright, and then she was there. The village square. It was empty save for the troughs filled with flowers in spring and summer, but within a matter of days, Hannah knew an enormous Christmas tree would fill it, and it was the cutting down of that same tree she was going to protest. She might not be able to save the world, but she could try to save a tree.

She unhooked her backpack, pulled out the skipping rope, wrapped it around the signpost at the square’s edge and tied it around her waist because she wasn’t going anywhere. Then Hannah fetched her hand-painted sign, and holding it up high, she shouted at the top of her lungs, ‘Save Ireland’s trees!’

One by one, heads popped out of the colourful doors lining either side of Main Street to see what all the noise was about.

Hannah Kelly shouted even louder.