This Christmas

by Jane Green

  Poking around for a minute or so, I began to understand that “Goodwill” was a euphemism for “Holly’s belongings.” No wonder my room had seemed so clean when I had dropped my bag there this afternoon! My PowerPuff Girl bedspread from high school was in here, and a lot of my old books, and a nearly bald stuffed orange monkey named Mr. Fabulous that I had had since I was five. The monkey came out of the box. When I pulled him out, I let out a muffled scream. Underneath where Mr. Fabulous had been lay Ted’s old ventriloquist dummy, smiling at me with those eerie eyes of his. I slammed the lid shut on the box. God, that thing was creepy.

  I scanned the boxes for one marked Lights or Xmas or Snow Village, but I didn’t find anything.

  Then, from nowhere, I remembered Isaac saying, “What a waste of a good dummy.”

  My gaze strayed back to the Goodwill box.

  Then I remembered that I was mad at Isaac.

  But I relented. This was too good to pass up. It was perfect for him! I hauled the dummy out, trying to inspect it without looking too closely at that psychotic little face. His suit was a little moth eaten, but otherwise he seemed okay. I took him down to my bathroom and tried to clean him up. I brushed his suit, scrubbed an indeterminate stain off his pant leg, and took a sponge to his rubber head. Then I carried him downstairs to show Ted; the dummy was his, after all. He might not want to part with it any more than I wanted to see Mr. Fabulous go into a Goodwill bin.

  In the living room, another doll was rotating slowly on the television screen.

  “I thought I’d get this one for Schuyler,” he said. “It’s only forty-nine, ninety-five.”

  “Remember this guy?” I asked, holding up the dummy.

  Ted barely spared it a glance. “Yeah, it’s that doll that used to scare the shit out of you.”

  “It’s not a doll; it’s a dummy. Mom was going to throw it away.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  So much for sentimentality. “Well, would you mind if I gave it to Isaac?”

  “Be my guest.” He gestured at the TV with his phone. “Or do you think I should pass on this one?”

  I frowned at the television. “I think you should go to bed.”

  He ignored me, so I returned to the attic and poked around some more. Then I ventured out to the garage and found some Christmas lights, but half the string didn’t work. I went down to the basement and rooted around till I found a closet holding all the snow village stuff. No monks, no walnut people, no crystal angels. Just some snow village pieces, but by no means all of them. Unfortunately, all the pieces were stored in styrofoam inside individual cardboard boxes. Already tired, I started grabbing them at random and took them upstairs in several trips. Tomorrow morning I would get up early and try to convince Mom to do a little decorating.

  Yawning, I dragged the last load upstairs, stacked them in the library, and then waved good night to Ted. “What do you think about these plates?” he asked me.

  The decorative plates were part of some kind of large cats collection. A set included a lion, a tiger, a leopard, and a jaguar.

  “They’re hand painted,” he said.

  “You should go to bed.”

  “In a minute.” It was as if a fever had overtaken him.

  Exhaustion had such a hold on me that I barely managed to stumble into bed in time to fall asleep. By that time, I wasn’t thinking about seduction, or cat plates, or anything else. The only thought registering in my tired brain was, What had become of the walnut people?

  I bounded out of bed the next morning, bowed but not broken. Positive thoughts loped through my head. I still had Jason, Maddie would probably arrive today, and my parents were bound to snap into holiday mode any moment now. They just needed a little nudge from me.

  Mom was already up. It did my heart good to see her puttering around the kitchen, just like her old self. Even if she did have her earphones on.

  I walked up to her but she didn’t see me. When I tapped her on the shoulder, she jumped, sending a spoon flying. “Holly!” she said, slipping her earphones off. “You scared me!”

  “Are you listening to Crime and Punishment at seven A.M.?”

  She shook her head. “French.”

  “French what?”

  “French language tapes.”

  I frowned. “Are you and Dad taking a trip?”

  She chortled as if I had involuntarily told a knee-slapper. “No—I’m starting college again next semester, and I’m trying to get a head start. I have to bone up for my placement test in January.”

  I stared at her, surprised. “What do you want to go to college for?”

  That probably sounds like an impolitic question, especially coming from a teacher, but her news jarred me. Mom had been around college professors all her life. It seemed odd that after all these years it was just now popping into her head to partake of what they had to offer.

  “I want a degree.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you mean, what for?” she asked, getting down some shredded wheat.

  I shuddered at the sight of that box. “We aren’t having cereal for breakfast, are we?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…because Jason’s here.” It was nice to have him as an excuse, though the truth was that I didn’t relish kicking off my morning with those little fiber pellets. My parents didn’t even buy the sugar-frosted kind. It was breakfast as punishment.

  “What does Jason eat for breakfast?”

  I bit my lip. That was the one meal we had never had together, except for one Sunday brunch. And I had never once seen my mom whip up a Greek omelet, which is what Jason had ordered that time. “What about those yummy cinnamon rolls you make?”

  “Those are yeast rolls, Holly. They take hours.”

  “Oh.” The things you learn. “Pancakes? Everybody likes pancakes.”

  “Your father has to watch his cholesterol.”

  “Fine. We’ll make them low fat.”

  “We?” my mother asked. “I’m trying to make it through indefinite pronouns this morning.”

  I sighed. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  As soon as they tumbled out of my mouth, the words seemed to presage doom. I inspected the banks of cookbooks lining one kitchen wall and picked a huge tome at random. What the heck. It had the word Joy in the title. Very Christmasy.

  “I don’t want to be the only one in the family without one,” my mother said, as I scanned the index.

  “One of what?” I asked.

  “A degree.”

  “Oh.” I had forgotten what we had been talking about. Now I was more concerned with the difference between Swedish pancakes and standard American ones. A quick glance at the ingredient lists for both showed that neither were what you would describe as heart healthy.

  “It’s not so rare for adults to go back now,” she said.

  Adults was one thing…but Mom was fifty-three. “Well, I suppose it would be fun to take a class or two,” I said, wondering if it would be okay to just leave out all the butter, “but what do you want a degree for? That’s such a pain. And what would you need it for?”

  “Why does anyone need one?”

  “To get work,” I said, “or to go on to something else.”

  “And you think that I would never be able to get work?”

  I looked up from the book, startled. “Huh?”

  “I worked hard enough to put your father’s big brain through graduate school, if you’ll recall.”

  Uh-oh. She sounded angry. At some point while scanning The Joy of Cooking, I had stepped on toes. People really shouldn’t multitask at seven-thirty in the morning.

  “I dropped out of college,” she reminded me, “so he could afford to finish his Ph.D.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But that’s why I was saying, what do you want to go through all the rigmarole of college and job hunting now for? You paid your dues. Now you can take it easy.”

  “Easy!” She sniffed. “You think taking
care of this family—of your father—is easy?”

  “Well, no, that’s not what I—”

  She chortled at me in challenge. “You just go ahead and make breakfast for everybody this morning, Fannie Farmer, and then report back how easy you think I’ve had it.”

  She snapped the headphones back on her ears and skulked off.

  I guessed this might not be the right time to ask her to put the snow village together.

  I had other things on my mind now anyway. The way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, after all, not through a snow village. I decided to add holiday pizzazz to the recipe by making pumpkin spice pancakes. This would disguise the fact that I was leaving out the butter and eggs so as not to kill my father, plus it would move us a little further down the road of getting the house smelling Christmasy.

  Once I had demolished the kitchen and had something that looked reasonably like batter, I felt better. In fact, I really had the feeling that I could hold this Christmas together out of sheer determination and generous amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg. Why not?

  The next person I saw that morning was Jason. He came bounding into the kitchen in sweats and sneakers and kissed my forehead. “What’s this?” he asked, his gaze naturally drawn to the orange glop I was obsessively stirring.

  “Pumpkin pancakes.”

  “Cool—I thought I’d take a run around your neighborhood before breakfast. Do I have time?”

  Okay, I’ll admit to a tiny sag of disappointment just then. I had imagined Jason bounding down to the kitchen and helping me. Or at least diving for the breakfast table and getting ready to scarf down two short stacks. I hadn’t expected him to dash out into the freezing cold and get himself all sweaty first.

  I didn’t even know he was a jogger.

  Not that I really minded. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let him know it. “No! Great!” I practically singsonged.

  He awarded me another peck and dashed out the door. I started making coffee and getting things ready. I turned on the griddle, I dug up a red and green tablecloth with little stick snowmen embroidered on it and threw it on the table, and I unearthed the Christmas Spode and set the table in record time. I put out a pitcher of milk for coffee, and the butter, and then started searching through the cabinets for syrup.

  But there was no syrup.

  Not a drop.

  A wave of panic hit me. I had felt pretty cocksure while I was making those pancakes, if only because I knew that some grade A maple syrup covered a multitude of culinary sins. But without it that orange glop looked more threatening. I tried to think what to do. I could plead with my mother to unearth some syrup or run to the store, but she would probably just make another snide Fannie Farmer comment. Jason was jogging—and besides, he was the person I was trying to impress. Ted…

  Well, Ted probably wasn’t in any shape to be running errands.

  After a few moments of standing frozen in front of a wall of opened cabinets, I finally gathered my wits about me. What was syrup? Sugar and water. Mrs. Butterworth didn’t bother with maple trees. Homemade in this case wasn’t ideal…but I could get it done while the pancakes were cooking…and spice it up with a little cinnamon and nutmeg.

  Quick like a bunny, I yanked a saucepan off a shelf and tossed in four cups of sugar and a cup of water. To my surprise, it seemed to work. That is, the sugar began to dissolve.

  Someone knocked at the side door, and I dashed over to open it. I was expecting Jason, but instead, Isaac blew in. “My God, it’s cold,” he said, teeth chattering. He stopped, looked around the kitchen, and deposited a paper grocery bag on the kitchen table. “Where is everybody?”

  “Jason’s jogging, Mom’s studying indefinite articles, and everyone else is asleep.”

  “Jason’s jogging?” he asked. “Holidays exist so we don’t have to do stuff like that.”

  As if he ever jogged.

  “That’s how cardiovascular slackers think. Jason’s different.”

  “Right, a pillar among men.” Isaac looked around. He took off his hat, muffler, and coat and dropped them on a chair. “What are you up to here?”

  “I’m making breakfast.”

  Deep lines furrowed his forehead as he inspected my bowl of batter. “And it’s going to be…?”

  “Pancakes,” I said.

  “I like pancakes,” he said, then added, “usually.”

  I was grudgingly about to invite him to stay, when suddenly a hissing noise got my attention. My syrup was bubbling over. I dove to turn the heat down on it. Isaac was right next to me.

  “Oh, are we having glue for breakfast, too?” he asked.

  My confidence, already shaky, wavered some more. It didn’t look right—sort of thick and white. “Syrup.”

  “Holly…”

  “Could you hand me the cinnamon, please?” I said, cutting him off. The last thing I needed right now was nay-saying. I started shoveling spices into what was beginning to look like sugar cement.

  “Maybe you should add something else?” Isaac ventured.

  “What?”

  “Butter? That usually helps.”

  “I can’t use fat, because of Dad.”

  Real alarm spread across Isaac’s face and he nervously eyeballed the orange sludge in the bowl at his elbow. “What’s in that batter?”

  “Would you just sit down and relax? I had this all under control before you showed up.” I glanced at the bag he’d left on the table. “What did you bring?”

  He seemed to have forgotten it. “Oh! My mom’s been making gingerbread houses this year.” He pulled out a picture-perfect example of confectionary architecture. “Happy holidays from the Millsteins to the Ellises.”

  I have to admit, after my pancake gambit, I felt almost jealous of it. It looked like something out of a children’s picture book. “That was so nice of her!”

  Dad shuffled in, dressed in his usual uniform of khakis, dress shirt, and cardigan. He peered over the counter to see what I was doing and a hint of worry crossed his face. When I shot him a warning glance, he offered, “Smells good.”

  Mom sauntered back in, inspected what I was doing, then hummed something Wagnerian and gloomy as she refilled her coffee. Then she caught sight of the gingerbread house, which she positioned in the center of the table. “Just darling!” she exclaimed. “I’ll have to call Leona up this morning to thank her.”

  By the time Jason came bounding back from his jog, cheeks rosy with health, not even breaking a sweat, it was obvious a disaster was in the making. He looked at the pancake lumps squatting on the griddle and exclaimed, “Gosh, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I could have just had cereal.”

  When Ted came down twenty minutes later looking like death warmed over, everyone was slumped stonily over their inedible pancakes, which sat like leaden pumpkin cowpies on everyone’s plates. Let’s just say that folks weren’t digging in. There was nothing to be done with them, either, since the syrup I had prepared had somehow turned into a sugar brick on the way from the stove to the table. They were all too polite to suggest alternatives just yet.

  Ted sank into a chair. Immediately, the rest of us straightened and attempted to lift his spirits by sheer force of will.

  “I didn’t expect to see you this morning,” I joked.

  Ted stared bleary-eyed at me.

  “You were up late, remember?” To jog his memory, I added, “QVC.”

  “Oh. Right.” He buried his head in his hands. “Oh no!”

  “What is it?” we asked.

  “QVC. I thought it was a nightmare.”

  Having lost entire weekends zombified in front of home-shopping networks, I could sympathize. “We’ve all been there,” I said, trying to comfort him.

  “Not the way I was.” His eyes seemed full of anguish. “I bought those cat plates.”

  “What?” Dad asked.

  “Collector’s plates with cats on them. They were on sale—I think I bought some for everybody. Twelve sets.”


  We gaped at him.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  This news only added to the general gloom. As the minutes dragged by and people only picked around the (burnt) edges of their servings, I felt myself sinking lower in my chair. Even I was longing for a bowl of shredded wheat along about that time.

  I was about to utter the word of surrender—IHOP—when Dad, in desperation, reached over and snapped the chimney off Mrs. Millstein’s gingerbread house.

  “Laird!” my mother scolded.

  “Well, it’s food, isn’t it?” Dad chewed quickly. “Tastes good!”

  Ted suddenly yanked off a little of the roof and popped it in his mouth.

  I couldn’t blame them. They were hungry, and breakfast was inedible. Even Jason, who had piled pancakes on his plate out of loyalty to me, was eyeing that gingerbread house longingly. In resignation, I nudged it toward him. Avoiding my gaze, he hurriedly chipped off a shutter.

  I looked over at Isaac. He wasn’t eating the centerpiece. (Then again, he wasn’t eating my pancakes, either.) “Did you hear about the mistletoe blight?”

  “No.”

  “Apparently there’s no mistletoe this year,” I said.

  “I’ll bet I could find some,” he said. “I’ll poke around near my house and see.”

  For a moment, my spirits lifted. “You would do that for me?”

  My hero! Even if his mother’s gingerbread house had stolen the thunder from my pancakes.

  Speaking of stealing thunder, at that moment, the door flew open, letting in a gust of wind. And my little sister.

  Chapter Five

  Maddie was dressed in one of those nylon goose down–stuffed vests that would have made me look like a marshmallow. On her it looked adorable. (Everything did.) It was minty blue and matched the helmet she was carrying jauntily under her arm.

  When she blew into the house, the atmosphere shifted radically. Mount Doom turned into Munch-kinland. The very floor seemed to lift beneath our feet; I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if we had all started talking in high helium voices. Mom became more like her old self, and Dad dropped ten years in two seconds. Maddie’s arrival even seemed to perk Ted up momentarily. As he looked at her, his grim countenance cracked into a dopey smile.