“No,” Sherlock says, “no, no, and no.”

“Hang on-” John begins.

“No, Oliver has rejected all of these.”

“Oliver has rejected all of the Christmas decorations?”

“They’re all tedious, aren’t they, Ollie?”

Oliver nodded.

John didn’t bother to ask why a three-year-old had such opinions on Christmas decorations. “But you love the tree,” he ( Read more... )

John had an idea, in the formal, stuffy milieu of the Holmes family estate. Sometimes you didn’t want a seven-course meal. Sometimes you just wanted…a mugcake.

“But what is it?” Sherlock asked dubiously.

“A mugcake. What’s it sound like?”

“Don’t be insulting, you can’t possibly be making a cake in a mug.”

“Why not?”

“Because my mother ( Read more... )

“I think it’s preposterous,” Oliver said. Preposterous was four-year-old Ollie’s favorite word.

“What is this time?” John asked, because everything was preposterous these days.

“The idea that a fat man could deliver all the presents in the world in a single night being pulled by reindeer. Coming down everyone’s chimney. It’s preposterous. Why ( Read more... )

John worried so much that Oliver would have nightmares, that his ordeal would lurk in his subconscious. But John never saw any evidence of that. When Oliver slept, he seemed peaceful.

Then one day, when Oliver was seven, John walked in on an experiment, furious written notes.

“What’s this?” John asked.

“I am going to get to the bottom of ( Read more... )

Requested by K2togYO

There comes a day when John suggests that Oliver should move out of a cot and into a proper bed.

“He’ll move out of a cot when he’s ready,” Sherlock sniffs.

“But I think we should encourage it,” John explains.

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why do we need to encourage it?”

“It’s part of growing up.”

Sherlock scoffs.

“He can’t ( Read more... )

Requested by 
( Read more... )

What to Get the Person Who Has Everything! proclaimed the headline.

“Useless,” muttered Sherlock. Nobody had everything. What people had were enough things that it was difficult to make an impression. That was Sherlock’s problem: When you gave someone all Twelve Days of Christmas, what could you get them after that?

The article suggested ( Read more... )

“You could be a better dancer than that,” Sherlock remarked, when John returned from the dance with his cousin.

“It’s just a wedding,” John told him. “It’s not the Royal Ballet.”

“Nevertheless, you could be better. You’re so focused on the steps that you miss the point.”

“And what’s the point?”

“The feelings.”

“Sherlock Holmes is going ( Read more... )

Requested by anonymous.

“When you eliminate the impossible,” Sherlock said, “whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

“So Santa left us a bunch of birds in cages.”

Sherlock scowled. “No, no, that’s impossible, we are eliminating that.”

“What other possibility is there?”

“Mycroft.”

John snorted. “Mycroft is ( Read more... )

“It is really just a bother,” Mycroft said.

Lestrade gave him an amused look.

“It snarls up all the traffic. I know Sherlock thinks I like to snarl up traffic, but I really don’t.”

“Do you stop in traffic? Don’t you just glide through it in your sleek black cars? Float above it?”

“The cars aren’t magic, you know.”

Lestrade grinned. “No, ( Read more... )