Christmas in a Snowstorm

by Lois Richer

  ‘“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’” Joy recited.

  “You’ve got it! My dear Joy, do come in. I’ve just put on the kettle. Are these my tiny tarts?” The lady closed the door before lifting the box lid to gaze at the colorful array of tarts inside. “How perfect they are. You must have spent hours on these. Shall we taste two with our tea? I don’t think my ladies’ quilting group will notice them missing.”

  “A Christmas quilt, isn’t it? I heard you’re raffling it to raise funds.” Joy shrugged off her coat, slipped out of her boots and sat down at the kitchen table. The house was just as pretty inside as out. “You have a beautiful home, Miss Partridge.”

  “Thank you, dear, but I keep telling you. Please call me Grace.” She poured tea for them both, set two tarts on flowered china plates and laid a gauzy napkin by each cup. “There we are. Now, how are you managing, Joy? I met Sam at the hardware store and he mentioned your mishap in passing. What actually occurred?”

  “A tree fell on the house. I’m very grateful Sam came along when he did.” Joy had the sense her friend wasn’t listening. “Is something wrong, Miss—ah, Grace?”

  “Well, yes, actually there is. I’ve just had the worst news.” Grace sipped her tea then sighed. “You’re new in town so you wouldn’t know this. Every year Sunshine holds a potluck in our community hall on Christmas Eve. Everyone is welcome. It’s a gathering time to wish others in our little community a Merry Christmas before the church service.”

  “It sounds wonderful.” Joy knew from Grace’s expression there was more to the story.

  “It’s an old tradition here, much loved,” she added sadly. “It’s also one that will apparently end this year because the heating system in the hall has an issue and there aren’t enough funds to replace it.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad,” Joy sympathized quietly. “What can be done?”

  “It’s truly horrible.” Grace sighed and shook her head. “Ordinarily we’d hold some kind of town fundraiser, but this community isn’t wealthy and the past year has been a very tough one for many of our ranchers and farmers.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard families are feeling the strain,” Joy murmured.

  “With everyone trying to make a happy Christmas for their own loved ones, the mayor feels it wouldn’t be fair to increase taxes to pay for hall repairs, and we don’t have a reserve fund to cover the expenses.” Miss Partridge played with her tart. “I doubt we could raise enough before Christmas Eve with bingos or the like anyway. But Joy, that hall is the heartbeat of this community. Everything happens there. It joins us together. Now they’ll probably have to close it up. That’s so sad.”

  “Yes, it is.” Joy didn’t know what to do. She tried to change the subject, but that didn’t help lift the mood, so she tried a new tactic. ‘“Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’”

  But for the first time since Joy had met this woman, quoting a Scripture verse didn’t bring a smile to the lady’s lips. Miss Partridge seemed truly discouraged. Joy was at a loss as to how to help.

  After twenty minutes she rose.

  “I’d better get going. The kids will be home and wanting supper.”

  “Of course, dear.” Grace stood, waiting while Joy donned her hat and boots. “Thank you for the tarts. They’re perfect and so delicious,” she said, though hers remained untasted on the plate beside her teacup. “Have you heard any more about renting the bakery?”

  “No. Whoever owns Possibilities is keeping quiet.” Now Joy felt discouraged.

  “Well, the Lord is on it, dear. He’ll work it out for you,” Miss Partridge insisted. “Remember those verses I gave you? ‘All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.’ They are promises that He will care for you, Joy.”

  “I’ve been repeating that one every day. Faith seems so easy with you as my teacher,” she said truthfully.

  “Believing in God is easy.” Miss Partridge handed over the cash for her baking. “It’s learning to trust Him always, with every detail, that challenges us. That takes time to learn. I’m still learning it myself and I’ve been His child for many, many years.” At last, a bit of the gloom seemed to lift from her face. “Thank you for delivering these, dear. Do let me know if I can help you in any way.”

  “Thank you. For everything.” Impulsively, Joy leaned forward and hugged the woman, and after only momentary hesitation, she received a hug in return. “Bye now.”

  “Pray about the community center, will you?” Miss Partridge asked quietly. “Sunshine surely does need His help now. Bye, dear.”

  By the time Joy had picked up more baking supplies, it was far later than she’d intended and darkness had fallen. She drove back to the ranch carefully, apprehensive about stray wildlife and possibly damaging Sam’s car. But she forgot all about that the moment she entered the yard site.

  The exterior of the little log house now glowed as brightly as the main house, with Christmas lights resembling crystal icicles hanging from the eaves. The shrubbery on one side of the stairs twinkled with fat, round red bulbs that made her think of holly berries. A massive lighted spruce wreath graced the front door.

  It looked so lovely. Joy stood by the car just taking it in. She stared for such a long time that the kids came running, demanding to know if she liked it.

  “It’s wonderful,” she whispered. “So pretty. Did you help with this?”

  “Yes. Come see what else we did, Mom.” Josh’s face glowed, alight with excitement. “Sam’s helping us.”

  “Welcome home, Joy.” Her heart did the familiar bump and flutter when Sam appeared, that famous smile stretching his lips. He took the grocery bags out of the vehicle, handing one to each child, but reserving the heaviest for himself. “Let’s put these inside the door, guys, then we can show your mom our creations.”

  That’s when Joy spied a massive snowman standing on one side of the front yard and a half-finished snow fort on the other. “Wow! Those are both huge.”

  “Aren’t they great?” Josh looked more excited than she’d seen him in ages. “Sam’s showing us how he and his brothers made a fort just like this when they were kids. An’ we got lots to do yet. Come on, Becca and Cris. Let’s put these bags in the house so we can finish.”

  Her children dashed to the house, bounded up the stairs and set the bags of supplies inside so fast, Joy feared for her eggs. Then with a whoop and a holler, they returned to packing snow onto an igloo-like shape.

  “C’mon, Sam!” Cris called.

  “Be there in a sec.” Sam walked beside Joy to the house, and when she was inside he handed her his grocery bag.

  “Thank you so much for watching them,” she said. “And for doing all this with them. They’ve always wanted to decorate outside.” But I could never afford that.

  “Why don’t you come and join us? It should be a family fort.” His grin set her heart racing again. “You know you want to.”

  “I need to put these away and—” Joy paused, thought a moment. How often did she get a chance to just play with her kids? This was a rare opportunity not to be missed. “Okay, I will. For a few minutes. Then I’ll start supper.”

  “It’s already in the slow cooker. Soup.” He chuckled at her expression. “I told you I can cook. Don’t worry. The kids and I cleaned up our mess.”

  “It’s very kind of you,” she began, but he shook his head.

  “Come on, before it’s too dark to see anything.” Then he was gone, rushing out the door as if he wanted to help her three fatherless kids build a snow fort on a winter’s evening.

  Sam Calhoun was like no other man Joy had ever met. She grabbed her gloves and hurried out to join them.

  Chapter Four


  “The community center, huh?” Later that evening Sam leaned his elbows on the table and cupped his chin in his palms, glad the kids were in bed so they could discuss this.

  “It sounded as if it’s pretty bad,” Joy told him.

  “Our family has spent so many fun Christmas potlucks in that hall over the years. It seems wrong to cancel it.” He smiled at the recollections. “Do you know that supper is the only Christmas event some folks in Sunshine ever attend?”

  “It is?” She frowned. “Why?”

  “We have some very hard-up folks around here,” he explained. “But at the Christmas potluck they can bring a jar of pickles if they want, and nobody notices or cares if that’s all they bring. Everyone knows there will be oodles left over.” He fiddled with a place mat. “It’s not just the food, it’s the friendship and the joy that we all share at our Christmas potluck.”

  “Grace said it’s been a really tough year for Sunshine,” Joy said thoughtfully. “I heard someone at the grocery store mention there was even some question at the last council meeting about bothering to put up the Christmas angels on the streetlights. Apparently the wiring’s old and not functioning properly. With the economy here suffering, the atmosphere in town feels almost depressed.”

  “Depressed? Before Christmas? That’s pretty grim, isn’t it?” A wave of sadness swooped over Sam. Was that how his first Christmas at home in years would be? Grim?

  “It’s sure not a fun place at the moment, and I doubt that heating system problem is helping.” Joy’s gorgeous eyes held shadows. “Grace seemed really down about it. She said the mayor feels it would be wrong to ask for donations to repair the heating, if it even can be repaired, when lots of folks are already struggling just to provide Christmas for their family.” Joy’s sigh for people she barely knew touched him. “I’d donate baking if someone organized a fundraising event, but—”

  “Fundraising! That’s it.” Sam sat up straight as ideas began to bloom inside his head.

  “A bake sale?” she said dubiously, her nose wrinkling. “I don’t think that will—”

  “Not a fundraiser.” Sam wondered if it could actually work. “We need an entire event of fundraisers. Maybe several,” he said thoughtfully.

  “But I just told you, nobody can—”

  “Not to get money from the townsfolk. Something else, something bigger...” Scenes from his past, on a lonely Christmas Eve, in a small northern European town, swam into focus.

  “Sam?” He blinked back to awareness to find Joy staring at him, a worried frown on her face. “You kind of blanked out just now, and you did the same thing this morning. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he assured her absently as pictures flashed through his mind. “The town needs to hold a festival. The Twelve Days of Christmas Festival.”

  “Um, okay. Good idea,” she said cautiously.

  “I hear a but.” He glared at her. “Well?”

  “But,” she said emphatically, her eyes snapping emerald sparks at him, “the twelve days of Christmas actually start on Christmas Day and run to January 6, which would be too late for the hall,” she reminded him. “The days before Christmas are called Advent.”

  “That’s perfect!” Sam felt as if new life filled his lungs. This was something he could help with that wouldn’t bring up his past. And it would give him something to do while he waited for news that his career sacrifice had been worth it.

  You weren’t going to get involved, remember? Getting too involved is what cost you your career and forced you to come back to the ranch.

  Sam put a lid on that voice. “We’ll call it the Advent Festival.”

  “Ah.” Joy studied him for several minutes, green eyes cloudy. “What exactly happens at this Advent Festival?” She sounded wary.

  “Not exactly sure. Hear me out.” He inhaled and began his story. “Three years ago, I was in this little town in Poland. A lot of poor people lived there, and they didn’t have much money to celebrate Christmas in their broken-down church. Their priest wanted to help them, so he organized a festival to draw in folks from other communities. That festival was so successful they raised enough money to refurbish their church, so they held a Christmas Day service in it for themselves and anyone else who wanted to come. They handed out bags of groceries so everyone could celebrate the birth of Christ.”

  “How wonderful! I wish I’d seen that.” Joy stared at him. He knew ideas were filling her head just as he felt them gathering inside him. “So you’re thinking vendor stalls?” she asked.

  “Well, yes, because people always want to shop for unique Christmas gifts. We’d encourage that, of course. Also, we’d need stops along the way where folks could get a drink or a snack, yet still be part of whatever the activity is.”

  “But you’re thinking more than that?” She studied him curiously.

  “Way more,” Sam confirmed.

  “Such as?”

  “Events. Lots of events,” he emphasized while noting the way the firelight turned Joy’s hair a pale claret hue. Focus, Calhoun.

  “Explain.” She grabbed a pad and a pen and waited.

  “Contests. Maybe snowman building one day, games on a little open-air rink in the town square another. An evening talent show. Hot-chocolate-making contests for the kids. Live theater.” The concepts came so fast and hard he struggled to rattle them off slowly enough so she could write them down.

  “All amazing, though not exactly unusual. Next.” She cheered encouragingly, her pen flying.

  “We don’t need them all to be unusual, but we do need them to be fun and maybe just a little different from the norm.”

  “Yes.” She paused then, her huge grin dimming. “It’s risky, though. What if the weather turns awful? There’s no indoor place in town where we could host things. What if we don’t raise enough to pay for the hall repairs before Christmas Eve? And even if we do, what if we don’t have enough time to get it fixed before the potluck?”

  She made good points. Sam thought hard for several moments.

  “The only way to do this successfully is for council to get a loan to pay for the repairs,” he insisted. “Then we could use the community center for some of the events for our Advent Festival. We could even schedule more than one thing at the same time and we could repeat events on different days so that no one would have to miss any event they wanted to be part of.”

  “Keep going,” she encouraged, as if she knew his head whirled with possibilities.

  “Well, that hall is right in the center of town. It could be the focal point, Christmas central. It would also keep our guests in Sunshine’s commercial hub so businesses would get maximum exposure, and hopefully that would increase their sales. If we do it right, maybe this year Sunshine won’t have any going-out-of-business sales after the New Year.” Possibilities grew in Sam’s brain.

  “What about the loan?” Joy asked.

  “We could pay it back with the proceeds of the festival,” he said.

  “We’ll need a lot of proceeds, Sam. Miss Partridge said it was a big bill.” Joy related what Grace had told her about the estimate for repairs. “Are you sure the town would agree to such a large loan? Could Sunshine bring in that much before Christmas? Can they pay it off without having it hang over the town for years to come? That’s what everyone will be asking.”

  He liked Joy’s businesslike approach. She, unlike him, didn’t get totally swept away by grandiose ideas. She’d be a great asset to the town’s businesses.

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Joy. No one can,” Sam said quietly. “But if we don’t do something, if Sunshine doesn’t have its community center, I can almost guarantee that our town will die away, just like the other small towns around here have done. That community center is the core of Sunshine.”

  “Okay. Let’s think about it tonight,” Joy suggested. “If it still seems v
iable in the morning, maybe you should meet with town officials and suggest a town meeting. A big plan like this is going to need everyone on board to be successful.”

  “Good idea. Besides, you need to get some sleep.” Sam rose and pulled on his coat. As he did, he heard a crackle and was reminded of something. “Oh, I forgot. Drew gave me this letter for you. Apparently someone hand-delivered it this afternoon.” He tugged the plain white envelope out of his pocket and gave it to her.

  “Who knows I’m here?” He watched Joy study the envelope on which only her name was neatly printed. No return address. She shrugged, slit it open with one fingernail and then read the words. Her expression changed to shock then astonishment. She frowned and reread the letter, as if she couldn’t quite process what it said.

  “Is it bad news?” Sam held his breath. She’s already dealing with so much, Lord.

  “On the contrary.” Joy lifted her curly head, her eyes suddenly awash with tears. “It’s the very best news. That company, Possibilities, has agreed to rent me the bakery building for the amount I suggested in my offer to them. I’m to take a look inside on Thursday afternoon, when the repairs will be complete. If I decide I still want it, I can move in on Friday.” She gaped at him. “Sam, today’s Tuesday. That’s only three days away. Three days!”

  “I heard they’d been doing renovations there. Great.” He’d glimpsed his lawyer’s name on the letterhead, but he wasn’t going to mention that. He had to text his dad first. Ben was the only one who could have set this in motion and his timing couldn’t have been better. “How will you get in?”

  “It says to contact Marty at the hardware store.” Joy gazed at the letter as if overwhelmed. “Move in Friday? I have two big party orders for Saturday. Preparing them with so much space would be amazing.” She glanced up, her face blazing with happiness, eyes shining with unshed tears. “Miss Partridge was right. God does have His eye on me. What a tremendous answer to prayer.”

  “I’m so happy for you, Joy.” Sam wanted to hug her, to comfort her, to let her know he supported her. But all of those actions meant risking romantic involvement and he couldn’t, wouldn’t ever let that happen again. Once burned, twice shy.