About 6 minutes to read aloud.

Every year, when the crackers were dealt round the table, there was one left over. It sat in the middle of the tablecloth between the last of the roast potatoes and the gravy boat, waiting for whoever wanted it. Grandma Pat called it the last cracker, and every year, once everyone else had pulled theirs and put on their paper hats and groaned at their terrible jokes, somebody would reach across and take it.

Last year, that somebody was Ben.

He remembers it exactly: the small tug, the crack, the flash of colour on the cloth. Inside, instead of a plastic ring or a paper hat, was a brass bell no bigger than a thimble, tarnished dark with age, with no motto folded round it at all. Grandma Pat went very quiet and said she hadn't seen that bell since she was a girl, and had no idea how it had come to be inside a cracker bought from the supermarket that same week. Ben picked it up and gave it a shake, just to see, and it rang out clear and cold, like ice cracking on a pond. Outside, though nobody had heard so much as a flake all winter, snow began to fall, thick and sudden, right past the kitchen window.

Nobody said much about it afterwards. What was there to say? But all year, whenever Christmas dinner came up, somebody would mention the bell, and the room would go quiet the way it had that night.

So this year, when the crackers were dealt round again, there was a different feeling at the table. Everyone counted the crackers twice, hoping the numbers might come out even for once. They didn't. There in the middle of the tablecloth, between the potatoes and the gravy, sat the last cracker, plain red and gold, looking exactly like any other cracker in the world.

Nobody reached for it.

Ivy watched it through the turkey and the sprouts. She watched it through the crackers everyone else had already pulled, the paper hats slipping down over ears, the jokes nobody laughed at properly.

"Somebody's got to pull it," said Dad, not moving.

"You pull it, then," said Mum, not moving either.

Grandma Pat looked at it the way she looked at crossword clues she was fairly sure she knew the answer to, then picked up her spoon and went back to her pudding, which everyone agreed was the sensible thing to do. For a while the last cracker was simply left where it was, while the custard went round and the paper hats came off and the kitchen filled with the particular quiet of a family that has eaten too much.

It was Ivy who pulled it, in the end, when nobody else was looking. She waited until Dad had gone to put the kettle on, and Mum was clearing plates, and Ben was arguing with Grandma Pat about whose turn it was to wash up, and then she reached out, took hold of one end, and pulled.

It went off with an ordinary crack, no colder and no louder than any of the others had been.

Inside was a paper hat, purple, slightly too big. There was a small plastic frog that hopped if you pressed its back, and a slip of paper with a joke about a snowman on it that wasn't very funny at all.

Ivy sat there for a moment, holding the frog, feeling oddly light. Then she laughed, properly, the sort of laugh that brings other people over to see what's funny, and by the time Ben and Dad and Mum had crowded back round the table she could barely explain that there was nothing to explain. It was just a cracker, this year, the same as any other.

Grandma Pat read the joke out loud in her best storytelling voice, and it still wasn't very funny, and everybody laughed anyway, at the joke and the frog and the whole strange business of the year before, until the kitchen was warm with it.

Nobody ever worked out where the bell had come from, or why it had rung the way it did, or whether the snow at the window had anything to do with it at all. Grandma Pat kept it wrapped in tissue paper in a drawer of the dresser, and once, when Ivy asked her outright whether it was magic, she said only that some Christmases were like that, and some weren't, and you couldn't tell which kind you'd got until the cracker was open.

That was as much of an answer as anyone ever got, and it turned out to be enough.