Hogfather

last.
    “Just you leave it to us,” said Corporal Nobbs, magnanimous in victory. “You just nip down to your office and treat yourself to a nice cup of tea and we’ll sort this out in no time. You’ll be ever so grateful.”
    Crumley gave him a look of a man in the grip of serious doubt, but staggered away nonetheless. Corporal Nobbs rubbed his hands together.
    “You don’t have Hogswatch back where you come from, do you, Washpot?” he said, as they climbed the stairs to the first floor. “Look at this carpet, you’d think a pig’d pissed on it…”
    “We call it the Fast of St. Ossory,” said Visit, who was from Omnia. “But it is not an occasion for superstition and crass commercialism. We simply get together in family groups for a prayer meeting and a fast.”
    “What, turkey and chicken and that?”
    “A fast , Corporal Nobbs. We don’t eat anything .”
    “Oh, right. Well, each to his own, I s’pose. And at least you don’t have to get up early in the morning and find that the nothing you’ve got is too big to fit in the oven. No presents neither?”
    They stood aside hurriedly as two children scuttled down the stairs carrying a large toy boat between them.
    “It is sometimes appropriate to exchange new religious pamphlets, and of course there are usually copies of the Book of Ossory for the children,” said Constable Visit. “Sometimes with illustrations ,” he added, in the guarded way of a man hinting at licentious pleasures.
    A small girl went past carrying a teddy bear larger than herself. It was pink.
    “They always gives me bath salts,” complained Nobby. “And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can’t think why, ’cos it’s not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You’d think they’d take the hint, wouldn’t you?”
    “Abominable, I call it,” said Constable Visit.
    The first floor was a mob.
    “Huh, look at them. Mr. Hogfather never brought me anything when I was a kid,” said Corporal Nobbs, eyeing the children gloomily. “I used to hang up my stocking every Hogswatch, regular. All that ever happened was my dad was sick in it once.” He removed his helmet.
    Nobby was not by any measure a hero, but there was the sudden gleam in his eye of someone who’d seen altogether too many empty stockings plus one rather full and dripping one. A scab had been knocked off some wound in the corrugated little organ of his soul.
    “I’m going in,” he said.

    In between the University’s Great Hall and its main door is a rather smaller circular hall or vestibule known as Archchancellor Bowell’s Remembrance, although no one now knows why, or why an extant bequest pays for one small currant bun and one copper penny to be placed on a high stone shelf on one wall every second Wednesday. * Ridcully stood in the middle of the floor, looking upward.
    “Tell me, Senior Wrangler, we never invited any women to the Hogswatchnight Feast, did we?”
    “Of course not, Archchancellor,” said the Senior Wrangler. He looked up in the dust-covered rafters, wondering what had caught Ridcully’s eye. “Good heavens, no. They’d spoil everything. I’ve always said so.”
    “And all the maids have got the evening off until midnight?”
    “A very generous custom, I’ve always said,” said the Senior Wrangler, feeling his neck crick.
    “So why, every year, do we hang a damn great bunch of mistletoe up there?”
    The Senior Wrangler turned in a circle, still staring upward.
    “Well, er…it’s…well, it’s…it’s symbolic, Archchancellor.”
    “Ah?”
    The Senior Wrangler felt that something more was expected. He groped around in the dusty attics of his education.
    “Of…the leaves, d’y’see…they’re symbolic of…of green, d’y’see, whereas the berries, in fact, yes, the berries symbolize…symbolize white. Yes. White and green. Very…symbolic.”
    He waited. He was not, unfortunately, disappointed.
    “What of?”
    The Senior Wrangler coughed.
    “I’m not sure there has to be an of ,” he said.
    “Ah? So,” said the Archchancellor, thoughtfully, “it could be said that the white and green symbolize a small parasitic plant?”
    “Yes, indeed,” said the Senior Wrangler.
    “So mistletoe, in fact, symbolizes mistletoe?”
    “Exactly, Archchancellor,” said the Senior Wrangler, who was now just hanging on.
    “Funny thing, that,” said Ridcully, in the same thoughtful tone of voice. “That statement is either so deep