Calufrax

Story: The Ghost of Christmas Always
Author: minerva_fan
Rating: Teen
Word count: 5087
Author's summary: Maria and Sarah Jane manage to spend Christmases together, despite the distance between them. Implied Maria/SJS crushing.
Characters/Pairings: SJS, Maria, Luke, Clyde
Warnings: Character death (but not a bad sort of character death)

Recced because: A completely unseasonal rec, but I don't care. This is a wonderful fic, jumping forward through a selection of Christmases over thirty years to show the SJA gang's futures through Maria's point of view. The characterisation is deftly handled, making it feel completely canonical to me, to be honest (while YMMV about the existence of Maria's crush, I'm completely convinced of it, so).

What I particularly love about it, though, is the way that with a few carefully chosen descriptions, minerva_fan captures the essential feel of not only SJA ("Luke has never seen fit to improve on Sarah Jane's somewhat anachronistic method of hiding the key. It's as if the mere act of living like nobody would find a key under a plant will somehow make it true."), but some wildly different parts of canon that Sarah's been involved in as well, and makes it all seem part of a seamless whole. Which, of course, it is, from some very old school stuff about themagic of the TARDIS to the new school excesses of there being aliens every Christmas. Lovely stuff.