Ho ho Who ... The Christmas Ornament, by Sarah Hadley

It's Boxing Day. Happy Boxing Day! Jon's up in the frozen North - well, Cheshire - and I'm at home with the Campbells, reconnecting with Oscar the cat and entering a strange sort of zen state with regard to time. Here's a festive treat for you: a special Christmassy adventure for the eccentric Doctor Who, written by my friend Sarah Hadley.

She's embroiled the current Doctor - probably one of the best we've ever had - in a sort of modern take on Meet Me in St Louis, with monsters. (She wouldn't describe it like that but it's my blog, so ha!). And the monsters are old enemies of the Doctor's, from its dark and foggy past... You should be able to download The Christmas Ornament here: http://is.gd/80YAIB

For the Great British Public, Doctor Who is now a Christmas staple, with the mysterious traveller in space and time doing something heartwarming in the snow every Christmas Day night for about six years now. Even if it doesn't always ring my bell, it makes perfect sense: panto and ghost stories being right there in the show's DNA.

And Sarah and I have known one another nearly twenty years, and have met precisely once. We were brought together by a pen pal association for fans of the Oz books: yes, two lonely children with a taste for ludicrous fantasy brought together by the postal service. I used to long for those giant orange envelopes from Sarah, covered in drawings of Jack Pumpkinhead or Jon Pertwee as a Yorkshire terrier, and we'd pull out all the stops at Christmas, writing long letters full of scrupulous document of our lives and fantasy sequences in which we met for coffee or solved mysteries...

So I've always been reading Sarah, and especially at Christmas. And slowly I've seen her stories evolve too. It's funny how different we are, when it comes down to it: she likes those dark tones, the big sf ideas, the relentless rain of Blade Runneresque worlds (though you could also ask her about The Couch Fairy...) So The Christmas Ornament, with its eponymous baubles, is something of a departure for her - but she promises me there is something stranger and darker on the way in 2012. So I'll be watching out for that...