This week your prompts will come from Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature, an academic catalogue of motifs that appear in folktales and fairy stories. Thompson set out to "scientifically" break down folktales into their component parts, and the charm of his index comes from the combination of terse, academic prose with surreal subject matter. Click the link, have a poke around and you'll see what I mean. (The motif index is the pages labelled A to Z; the Tale Type Index is a different thing.)

When you sign up, choose one of the categories in the index and I will assign you a motif from that category as your prompt. (Specifically, I will assign you one of the phrases in bold red text.)

Your story does not have to be written in a fairy-tale style, but it can be.

Also, to add a little Christmas cheer to the proceedings, it must snow at some point in your story.