Mary smiled, as she signed the Christmas card addressed to her last client. Her clients were all old ladies who trusted her for financial advice. Without exception, they loved her annual card. She always chose a stable scene, full of animals. The animals never failed to include Mary’s trademark symbol: a fleecy lamb. It was almost the only hint she ever gave her clients about how she really viewed them … as she fleeced them. It was a joke worth a smile.

Mary styled herself a financial manicure specialist. She was certainly a specialist: she selected her clients with great care. Invariably, they were rich old ladies who were the widows of self-employed businessmen. All of them had been left alone when their unhealthy, stressed spouses had expired. And each had thus become the owner or director of a small company about which they knew little.

Managing such firms – and clients - was Mary’s field. She visited her ladies often, sharing portions of her time generously with each. In whatever direction that Mary’s business plan led them, her old ladies were sure to go. They had no idea, of course, that most of their companies were already half shells, the former contents of which had, for years, financed Mary’s secretly lavish lifestyle.

Yet still her little lambs followed and trusted her. Every year, they thanked her. And they all waited with delight to receive her beautiful Christmas card, adorned with those sweet, well-manicured animals in that spotless stable. Such a realistic stable! Yet in Mary’s stable there was no baby crying out. Jesus was someone that Mary had no plan to be associated with, let alone to hear.

Mary smiled as she added to the card the same final note that she added to each card, each year. It was, perhaps, a slightly incautious turn of phrase: but one she could never resist.

‘I do look forward, as always in this season so white as snow, to many more portions of your lovely company next year.’

The card did not, of course, identify those Mary had had, already.

[George B. Hill (2012)]