“Come on, Turner!” cried Felix, a mince pie in one hand and a glass of sherry in the other. “You've got to get into the Christmas spirit!”

     If looks could kill, the look that Turner gave the shuttle pilot should have made him drop dead right there, on the concrete floor of the main storage shed. The only room large enough for all the humans and chorries together. The humans had done their best to give the place a festive look. Every spare light bulb had been taken from the stores and given a thin coating of different coloured paints before being strung along a single cable and hung along the packing crates that covered the west wall, and makeshift paper chains had been made from printer paper, cut and glued into circular loops to form chains that hung from the fibreboard ceiling. George Benson the General Manager was dressed as Santa Claus with a beard made of cotton wool from the first aid box and a cushion stuffed under his jumper. He was handing presents to the chorrie workers, all of whom were jumping up and down in excitement.

     Even the weather was cooperating. It was snowing outside, the fat flakes, stained red with tholins, visible through the small windows up near the ceiling as they settled on the topmost branches of the jigsaw trees and bowed them down with their weight. It snowed most days on Choratton, he'd heard, but it was still pleasing to see it. It was also pleasing to see the stripy, gibbous globe of Talphon, the huge world around which Choratton orbited. All gas giants were impressive up close, of course, even when viewed through a small, grimy window half obscured with dusty cobwebs, and Felix found his eyes repeatedly drawn back to the swirling cloud systems, each the size of a normal sized planet and lit by almost continuous flashes of lightning.

     Felix seemed to be the only human in festive spirit, though, which confused him a little. True, it was the middle of august according to the Universal Galactic Calendar, but there were plenty of other places that celebrated holidays at unconventional times, so when Felix had landed his supply ship and found out that the small mining colony on Choratton was celebrating Christmas, he joined in with enthusiasm.

     “An oil filter!” cried one of the chorries as it ripped the wrapping of old newspaper from Santa's present. The voice came from the speaker hanging around its neck, as the native inhabitants of the small moon lacked the vocal apparatus for human speech. The high pitched chirping it emitted as it showed its gift to the other insectoid creatures conveyed excitement in any language, though, and Felix felt himself grinning with pleasure at the sheer childlike enthusiasm of the creatures. “I got an oil filter! Look! Look! Look!”

Chorries were like children, he remembered reading somewhere. Intelligent enough to count as fully sapient by the Galactic Council but with little creativity and little problem solving ability. They were highly imitative, though, copying everything they saw in other species, and had evidently adopted Christmas with great enthusiasm. They also seemed happy to receive even the most mundane machine parts as gifts, objects that they couldn't possibly have any practical use for.

     “I got a plasma compressor!” said another, and the creatures all gathered around to stare enviously. “That's three! Three Christmases in a row!”

     “I hope I get a plasma compressor!” said one of the others, wearing a piece of blue paper towel folded into a crude hat shape between its bobbing antennae. “Or a flux plug like Grellis or a spool of welding tape like Tobbie!” He was so excited that he could barely keep his place in the line of chorries waiting to sit on Santa's knee. Santa himself, Felix was a little surprised to see, was rather less excited. In fact, there was almost a world weary tone to his voice as he beckoned the next alien forward and asked it whether it had been naughty or nice.

     The other humans were also less than enthusiastic, it seemed to Felix. They were saying the right things and doing everything you expect people to do on Christmas day, but it was as though they were just going through the motions and were counting the minutes until the whole awful thing was over. Hubert the quality control officer was playing a game of charades with a group of the native creatures, and whenever the chorries got one of the ridiculously easy questions right he would try to get up to leave, only to be dragged back, with a sigh of resignation. Nearby, the entire team of accountants were singing hymns, their voices clashing horribly with the mechanical tones uttered by the aliens’ speakers. It was as though the humans were in some kind of Hell, with the chorries as demons trying to see that they suffered as much as possible and using the theme of Christmas as some kind of horrible irony.

     “Okay, I give up,” said Felix. “What's going on here?”

     “It's all his fault,” said Turner bitterly, pointing to a man sitting miserably in the corner, next to a fork lift truck. The man, one of the youngest of the humans present, sat hunched forward, staring at his feet, a makeshift party hat, made of a page from a parts catalogue, sitting askew on his head. Every so often one or another of the humans would shoot him a look of pure venom, and someone threw a piece of Christmas pudding that bounced off his shoulder and made him cringe even lower into himself.

     “He keeps begging for a transfer out of here. We all do. None of us get it. Management know they'll never find anyone willing to replace us. We're especially determined to make sure that he doesn’t leave, though. He started all this. He at least has to share it with the rest of us.”

     “Share what with the rest of you?”

     “It's the T.A.P. regs, you see,” continued Turner. “The Treatment of Aboriginal Peoples. We have to keep the chorries happy. This is their world, and they have the right to order us to leave any time they like. We need the minerals this world has, though. Mankind needs them, so management says keep the chorries happy. Whatever it takes, keep them happy.”

     “Well, they seem happy,” said Felix, looking around at the large room full of excited, bouncing aliens. “So what’s the problem?”

     “Him!” said Turner, pointing another accusing finger at the miserable man sitting in the corner. “He's the problem! This is all his fault!”

     “Why? What did he do?”

     “What did he do? What did he do?” His voice was becoming shrill with anger. “He told them about Christmas, that's what he did. The moment they heard about it they wanted Christmas. They wanted presents and hymns and charades and lights and decorations. They wanted the King's Speech and the Doctor Who bloody Christmas special. They wanted everything, every year, and so we have to give it to them or they’ll tell us to go and we'll lose all the minerals we're mining from this godawful place. All because of him!” He ran a trembling hand through his hair. “You don't understand, you only just got here. You just flew in on the shuttle and you'll be leaving tomorrow. You don’t understand...”

     Felix stared in puzzlement. “But it’s only once a year,” he said. “Surely you can make the effort once a year. It's true I don't understand why you're doing this in august...”

     Turner laughed. A bitter, hopeless laugh. “Just once a year, yes. Just once every orbit. This is a moon, you idiot! We don't orbit the sun, we orbit a gas giant. We orbit it once every three days!”

   There was an almost hysterical tone to his voice now, and the eyes with which he stared at the shuttle pilot were windows into hell. “Once every three days! Now do you understand? Once every three bloody days!”