 Every year, Silvana dreads coming home for Christmas. Her family is simply unbearable: a lame and mute father, a dazed mother, two sisters, one gothic, the other dusty, yet insolent, and a brother, who lives in a cupboard! When her mad-hatter family even manages to scare away her new boyfriend, she swears it is the last time she spends Christmas like this. The following Christmas, she comes back full force with a no-nonsense family plan: she wants her parents in an old people s home, her brother in an asylum and her youngest sister at a boarding school. Her plan doesn t quite work out and it is not until she discovers Robertson s ice world that she thaws.