(Quick heads up, Charlie is an anthropomorphic reindeer)

Charlie sat in the armchair in his room, contemplating everything that had happened in the past month. He cupped his cocoa, trying his best to ignore the wall calendar he had taped down weeks ago as it struggles and shifted, trying to turn it's pages past December 2024. The merry scene depicted on it had long since faded to a blank image, seemingly trying to compensate for the lack of changes it has made since December ended.

He looked down into his Christmas themed mug and thought about everything that had happened the past month. He had originally taped down his calendar because he wanted to celebrate new years with his friends, and once he had done that, he wanted to stay around for the entire year, who knows, maybe the calendar would even stop fighting once Christmas rolled around, but the year was very different to what he had expected...

His friends seemed a bit confused to see him around, expecting him to be gone after December. At first this was expected, this was the first time he'd tried to stop his calendar from packing him up on January 1st, but that feeling never really went away... His friends were always busy, and when they did interact, they seemed weirdly impatient about his sticking around...

What's more, as someone who only lived their lives around the Christmas season, it was a bit of a culture shock to see all the products he knew well go off-sale the weeks after Christmas. Every time he'd go out to the store, he'd be newly disappointed that another of his favourite products had been stripped from the shelves. Did they have calendars too?

Overall, the experience had just left Charlie stressed. He shuffled his hooves impatiently, thinking of what to do, looking over at his calendar. It was squirming behind a few straps of various types of tape. He could see the point where he ran out of wrapping tape and had to go out and buy duct tape... He looked around the rim of the calendar, surrounded by shreds of tape from close calls that had already happened, the wallpaper surrounding the calendar practically shredded to pieces.

The stress of it all was getting to Charlie, and it was causing him to feel particularly un-merry. He placed his cocoa down on his coffee table and stood up, walking over to the wall calendar and standing as close as he could to it. Immideately, it recognised what was happening, falling silent as Charlie contemplating freeing it, being unable to see his friends, yes, but to wake up on the first day of December, completely unstressed and with his bank account refilled. He gently ran his fingers along the sides of the calendar, pinning down and weakening the tape strands as his hoof-tipped-fingers ran across them. He paused for a moment, deciding to throughly think through his decision before continuing, before running his hand across the other side as well.

The calendar, jux apposed to its behaviour previously, gently flicked itself forward to February. Charlie was kind of caught off guard, he was so used to using a calendar that he had not even noticed so much time pass... The image for February was a crow on a branch in front of a cloudy sky, which for some reason fascinated him. But now wasn't the time to fascinate.

The wallpaper around the calendar reformed, before a grey staining washed over it, fanning out from the calendars position, each silhouette of an present printed onto the wallpaper fading away as the dry gray wallpaper formed over the. Charlie felt weirdly nostalgic about this... He found it quite scary the first time it happened, but had got used to it, as it was always the first step in the calendar preparing to pack him away...

The dry, dusty wallpaper reached his fireplace, extinguishing the fire instantly. The wood already at the fireplace crumbled into ash, and then further into dust, ready to be spread around the room to give it an authentic abandoned feel. Charlie had never really seen it himself, though, he'd only ever seen it because Toby showed him a photo of what the room looks like when January rolls around...

The tree in the corner, decorated beautifully, began to shudder and shake, the trees arms curling in on each other as the ornaments crumpled up, reducing themselves to nothing at all. This was quite the harrowing sight the first few times, but Charlie was happy in the knowledge the always came back every December... The tree itself reduced down to a tightly wrapped stump, a column of bubble wrap sliding up to hold it in place, proceeded by a cardboard box forming around it, a faith Charlie knew all too well would be befalling him soon...

The two candles on the mantlepiece went out with the fireplace, but continued to melt. They melted and melted until they had coated the little metal stands they sag on in wax, and then the stands themselves melted away too. The liquid wax started to dry up, shrinking away until they were completely gone from sight. The decor piece he had left on the back of the mantle, a weird fo-pine branch began to darken. The plastic pine cones glued onto it shrivelled up until they had imploded on themselves and the body of the decoration had blackened and shrivelled up, leaving nothing but a few strands of plastic pone leaves left behind...

He watched as the cup of cocoa drained of its contents, it's design fading to solid white and it shattering, shrivelling away into nothingness. He could imagine this also happening to the cups still in the kitchen, too, as they would also be removed from existence every year. They made him think about Toby, his roommate. Being that he didn't exist for 11 of 12 months out of the year, he couldn't afford to keep his own home anymore, instead moving into Tobys spare room... The more he had been pushing the time, though, the more he could feel himself getting on Toby's nerves... He would get annoyed with him about spending too much... How he would be pretty unaware of the messes he'd leave behind... How he would end up eating a lot more than he ends up buying... Still, he felt bad for not telling him he was hibernating...

A white cloth formed on the coffee table, slowly growing and shifting until it was completely covering the table, protecting it from the dust so if could be pristine next year... Charlie went to sit down, but the sheet had already began to form over the armchair behind him, the influence of the calendar pushing him back upright. He felt bad for leaving Toby for another year... He regretted his decision...

He tried the door, attempting to get more taps in order to prolong his existence, but the door was firmly locked. Panicked, he copped over to the calendar and desperately pawed at its pages, trying to pull them back to give himself just a few more hours, as he had done many years before...

... But it was too late. Charlie looked down at his hands as his body began to go numb. His fur melded together, looking fake and plasticy, his body feeling off as he began to lose control of his body. A small box formed under him, a tomb he was all too familiar with, as his body began to melt, buckling under the weight of his regrets...

His hooves were the first to go, as they were quickly absorbed into his rapidly deflating body. His antlers began to sag as his mind began to wane, his eyelids becoming droopy in preparation for a long, deep sleep... His legs buckled entirely, his torso splatting down into the box as it began to melt, fanning out to fill out the entirety of the box. He raised an arm to try and inspect his antlers, but it simply fell off his body, as it had become too unstable, splattering onto the side of the box and slowly flowing against gravity in order to re-enter it. He tried his other arm, but by then, it had already fused to his torso, half submerged in the box already... He watched with his uncovered eye as the carpeted floor tore itself up, slowly dissappearing behind the flaps of the box as he...

...

..

.





Several hours later, Toby arrived home. He was out grocery shopping and had found an expired gingerbread house on sale at one of the stores. He walked into Charlie's room to tell him about it, only to be met with a familiar sight. It was the first time in a while that he had been disappointed to see the room abandoned like this... While it was a learning experience for both of them, he quite liked the company of Charlie, even if sometimes he ruffled his feathers... He dropped the expired candy out of shock, slowly walking into the dusty, empty room. He stared down in bitter disgust at the cardboard box in the middle of the room, cheekily labelled "Do not open until Christmas" in a forgery of Charlie's handwriting... He returned to the kitchen and sat down, and thought through everything... He sad to see him go, but now knew there was a way to stop the calendar, even only for a short time...

He was determined to make sure to help Charlie and to make sure he gets to experience the full year... But for now, all he could do is wait until December...