Carmen Meets the Family: Christmas, Guests, and One Cousin Who Screams

The relatives are coming, and the snakes are not going anywhere.

Aino's mother arrives, finds four faults with the flat in six minutes, then crouches at the glass and calls Carmen a good girl, and means it. Two nephews arrive at a run and go straight past the cat as though he were furniture. And Onni arrives, a grown man who has been afraid of snakes since an hour of television in 1998, and who spends his first evening with his back against a wall.

Veikko has laminated the rules. Nobody taps the glass. Nobody opens a lid. He has also measured the distance from the Christmas tree to both tanks, which nobody thinks is strange until Christmas Eve, when two boys play chase in a small living room and the tree comes down towards the glass.

The man who is most afraid catches it with both arms.

Ten chapters of comic strips and six full Sunday pages about a Finnish Christmas in sixty square metres, with six people, two snakes, one elderly cat under the bed, and a family photograph in which nobody is ready and the man is looking at the thermometer.

70 full-colour pages. DRM-free PDF and EPUB included. Read on any device.