Sherlock Holmes was putting the finishing touches to his Christmas tree when his friend Dr. Watson came round.

  “Need a hand?” asked Watson.

  “Baubles,” Holmes snapped.

  “I was only trying to help,” Watson sulked.

  “They’re behind you,” Holmes replied, “in the box marked BAUBLES.”

  “Ah, see what you mean,” said Watson, reaching for a spherical object.  “Had a request from my chum Chalmonderly,” he continued, placing the spherical object in Holmes’ hand.  “Been friends since we were at school”.

  “Elementary, my dear Watson?” Holmes asked.

  “No, secondary,” Watson replied. 

  Holmes asked where Watson’s chum Chalmonderly lived.

  “Stow-on-the-Wold,” Watson replied.

  “And the request?” Holmes asked.

  “He’s asked me to play the Dame in the local panto.”

  “Can no-one be found locally?”

  “Apparently not,” Watson replied.  “Seems there is nothing like a Dame, nothing in the Wold.”

  “There is nothing you can name,” Holmes asked, “that is anything like a Dame?”

  “Nothing walks like a Dame, nothing talks like a Dame,” Watson replied.  “In short….”

   “Yes, I get your drift,” Holmes cut-in.  “Therefore, you must go.  If you leave now you’ll catch the four-fifty from Paddington, change at St. Mary Mead and you’ll be in Stow in time for dinner”.

  Watson did as Holmes suggested.  He kept himself to himself on the  journey.  He was wary of talking to strangers on a train and had once been compelled to complain in no uncertain terms about snakes on a train.

  It was white-over when he reached his destination.  The locals had a word for it – they called it Snow-on-the-Wold.  He found a cab and rapped on the door.

  “I say, my man, I want to go up the road and in to Stow,” he rapped. 

  The cabdriver proved a surly Scottish fellow.  He had great bushy eyebrows and sidewhiskers and a great long nose.  All the way in to Stow he chuntered about the snow and muttered, “We’re all doomed.”  But when they reached Chalmonderley’s, off came the eyebrows, the sidewhiskers and the great long nose and to Watson’s astonishment he revealed himself as,

  “Holmes!  But why the disguise?”

  “I believe,” Holmes replied, “that there’s more to this pantomime than meets the eye.”

  The following evening as they dined at Chalmonderley’s before the show, Holmes asked their host, “At any point in the proceedings does the entire cast appear on stage at the same time?”

  “Yes,” Chalmonderly replied, “at the end: they’re gathered round the dinner table at a famous London restaurant when someone wearing a gorilla costume brings in a Christmas pudding.”

  “A gorilla costume?” Holmes asked.

  Chalmonderley nodded.

  “Bearing a Christmas pudding?” Holmes continued.

  Chalmonderley nodded again, then added, “A rather large one.  Far too big for the Women’s Institute to bake.  They had to call in outside caterers. The scene’s called Pudding on the Ritz. Why do you ask?” 

  “I have an uneasy feeling,” Holmes replied.

  “Probably the sprouts,” said Watson.

  “Possibly,” Holmes agreed.

  Watson offered to give him something for it, but Holmes declined, advising him to slip into his dress instead and prepare to wow the audience.

  “What about you?” Watson asked.

  “I doubt they’ll have anything in my size,” Holmes replied.  “Besides, I have some deducing to do.”

  But despite spending much of the show deducing on the back row, Holmes was unable to explain-away his uneasiness until the final scene.  The cast were gathered round the dining table when the gorilla entered carrying a gigantic Christmas pudding with a sprig of holly on top.  It placed the pudding on the table and produced a box of matches.  Then it struck a match and was about to apply it to the sprig of holly when the truth suddenly hit Holmes:  the Christmas pudding was filled with gunpowder, the sprig of holly was the fuse, and the person wearing the gorilla costume was none other than Professor Moriarty!

  Realising that the evil genius planned to give Stow more than a little seasonal indigestion, Holmes shouted the only words he knew that would stop the show: “Health and safety!”

  At that moment Inspector LeStrade walked onstage.  A hole had appeared outside the theatre and he’d been looking into it.  He confiscated the matches and the Christmas pudding-cum-bomb as evidence and made his third arrest of someone wearing a gorilla costume in as many days.

  “There’s a lot of it about this year, Mr. Holmes” he said as he put the handcuffs on Moriarty. 

  After the show Watson asked Holmes what made him suspect that the person wearing the gorilla costume was, in fact, Professor Moriarty.

  “Well,” said Holmes, “it was partly the distinctive whiff of Peruvian cigars that hung about the theatre, and partly the traces of red clay normally only found along the upper reaches of the Limpopo that I spotted on a passing carriage, but mainly it was the recipe book that I found at the stage door.”  And here he held up a copy of Professor Moriarty’s Guide to making the Perfect Christmas Pudding and World Domination.