Chapter Two
Stephanie
“At what point does this go from ‘charmingly festive’ to ‘fire hazard’?” I asked, stepping back from my Christmas tree that featured at least twenty strands of steady and twinkling colorful lights.
About four plastic containers full of tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments were just waiting for their turn to adorn the plastic branches.
“About five strands ago,” my best friend, Andy, said.
She was petite and redheaded with a youthful round face and big honey-brown eyes.
She was draped over my couch in a sweater she’d knitted herself that featured a French Bulldog in a Santa hat.
The inspiration for said sweater was curled up near her candy-cane-printed fuzzy socks.
He was tan and tubby with an adorably smushed face.
He was snoozing away but no longer snored since he had surgery to fix his nasal passages.
“I want it to feel alive,” I said, stepping back and squinting to look for blank spots.
I had another two totes full of lights I’d inherited from my mother—a woman who was practically Mother Christmas.
This was only my second year trying to fill her shoes.
I was afraid of failing, of losing the magic.
Especially after a good chunk of it felt buried with her.
“It’s going to be very alive when it is a blazing inferno.”
“They’re LED.”
“Why is it so hard for them to make LEDs that don’t feel too bright and too cold?
” Andy grumbled. An incandescent purist, she scoured every estate sale and secondhand store to try to find those precious strands for her own tree.
You couldn’t even blame her, since she did white lights and white LEDs were especially harsh on the eyes.
“I know. Your electric bill is going to give me palpitations, and I don’t even need to pay it.”
“Right? January is going to be rough. My credit card was smoking at the toy store yesterday.”
“That happens when you have seven nieces and nephews to buy for.”
“You’d think my brothers and sisters would have taken my budget into consideration when they decided to keep reproducing,” she said, lips twitching. Expensive or not, she adored all of her niblings. “Did I tell you Carly is pregnant again? Due in April.”
“That’s four, right?” I asked, scooping all the Christmas blankets and towels off the chair so I could drop down on it.
“Yeah. They’re talking about moving to Jersey to get more room. Speaking of kids, how have the plans been going for the charity?”
“They’re…” Slow. Frustrating. Depressing.
I never anticipated just how hard it would be to get donations to get innocent kids gifts for Christmas.
“Going,” I settled on. “We had our one big donation from that one family come in, but the individual donations have been a slow trickle. The economy…” I said, waving a hand out.
“I’m good for another grand.”
“You’ve already donated a lot.”
“Yeah, but little kids living in shelters have it rough enough. They shouldn’t have to think Santa forgot about them on top of it.”
My heart lurched, remembering being in a shelter myself as a kid and hearing the smaller kids ask their parents such heartbreaking things—like if Santa even knew where they were since they didn’t have a house anymore.
And the worst part was, some years, ‘Santa’ didn’t come. And those kids went to school come the new year to hear about the thousands of dollars’ worth of presents their classmates got from Santa while they wondered what they did that was so bad to get nothing.
It was me.
I was those kids.
Unfortunately, by the time we finally got out of the shelter for good, I was too old for Santa.
When I heard that the charity I saved up for all year to donate to was at risk of closing down because the previous director died, I felt like there was no choice but to step in and take over myself.
Because there could be approximately forty-five thousand children in homeless shelters across the city.
And they all deserved a Christmas present, dammit.
No matter how much I hated begging for donations.
To get each child one gift—all in with wrapping and logistics—we were looking at needing one point five million in donations. To get them each a toy plus a book, craft, or article of clothing, we were looking at around two million.
The latter was, of course, the goal. These kids often had next to nothing—just a bag with a few articles of clothing, maybe one precious toy.
To be able to bless them with more than one toy would be phenomenal.
If we had to settle for the former, that would do.
I absolutely refused to not reach that goal, though.
Which meant I really needed to start kicking butt on the donation drives and reach outs to the community and the wealthy city-dwellers who might be feeling extra charitable this time of year.
“How far are you from your goal?” Andy asked. I shot her a look that had her wincing. “That bad, huh?”
“I wish I found out about the opening sooner. I would have started fundraising in the early fall. It’s getting down to the line now.”
“If anyone can do this, it’s you. Sign me up to ring some bells or whatever you need.”
“What I am going to really need soon is a gift wrapper, but…”
“But I once wrapped your birthday present in paper bags from the corner store.”
“With a trussing twine bow,” I said, getting a snort out of her.
“Hey, you work with what you got.”
“What are you going to do with all those presents for your nieces and nephews?”
“Oh, there’s this amazing invention called gift bags. They save the lives of the wrapping-impaired. I will have Sammy go around her office for donations. Lawyers always have money to spare. And guilty consciences from defending bad guys all the time.”
“Every penny will help. Okay. I need to get a couple of hours of recording done before bed.”
“Ah, yes,” Andy said, unfolding. “What is it this week? An orc with a twelve-inch ding-dong?”
“Ding-dong?” I snorted.
“I’ve been happily with Sammy for eight years. I haven’t seen one of those since my freshman year of college.”
“Well, this week it is a moody cowboy with a rental cabin on his ranch and a social media influencer doing a digital detox there over Christmas. It’s actually really cute.”
“Alright. Well, I will let you go to your doom-closet. Come on, Meatball,” she said, patting her leg.
“Oh, come on, dude. We’re literally walking down the hall.
Fine. Have it your way,” Andy said, scooping up the Frenchie and making her way toward the door.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” she said before she was gone.
Alone, I locked the door and went down the hall toward my ‘doom-closet.’ In Andy’s defense, it was an actual closet—the big hallway one that provided precious storage space in my small city apartment.
But when I stumbled into book narration thanks to continuous comments from people encouraging me to do it, I decided to take the closet and turn it into a recording studio, so I didn’t have to spend a huge chunk of my income on studio rental time.
Being windowless, it was dark and a little claustrophobic. I’d tried to brighten it up by using baby pink foam soundproof tiles on the walls and ceiling. And recently, I’d strung some twinkle lights up to turn on when I was inside.
Inside, there was a comfortable chair—since one finished hour of narration was usually two to three hours of actual recording—a cozy blanket, a tiny table with my laptop and mic setup, and an even smaller table for me to keep my tea and water.
Closing the door, I felt some of the anxiety of the past day slipping away as I opened up my laptop and found where I left off the day before.
I was almost done with this book, and my deadline was looming fast, with Christmas not far off. I was hoping to do the last two hours of it before the night was over. Then I could master it and get it back to the author in time for her release date.
With only Andy and Sammy to buy presents for this year, I figured I could sink a big chunk of the money from this book into the charity.
It would hardly touch the bottom line we were working with, but, hey, every twenty-five bucks was another child with a present on Christmas morning. It made a difference.
Sometime around midnight, I finished the book just in time for me to stumble out of the studio, drop down on the couch in the living room, and sob.
I’d always loved the holidays. My mother made sure of it once she got us on our feet and in our own apartment.
This year, though, there was a loneliness that had crept in to permeate every aspect of the season.
It was the loss of my only family, of course. And while Andy and Sammy had offered—if not outright insisted—that I come with them to their many holiday events, it just didn’t feel right.
Not for the first time, I longed for what I saw in most of my favorite Christmas movies: tons of people, drama, traditions, and love.
My mother often told me it was what she hoped for too.
But she’d never found a partner to have more kids with, or one with kids of their own for us to make a family with.
As for me, well, I’d never been lucky in the whole love department. Lord knew I tried hard in my teens and twenties too. It was only in the past five years or so when I started to think that I was going to follow in my mother’s footsteps and never marry.
It didn’t have to be depressing.
Plenty of people were blissfully happy single forever.
And, hey, if I wanted children, I could always adopt. I could be bursting at the seams with holiday traditions that I created.
Just not this year.
This year, I had to chug along.
Try to ignore the empty feeling in my chest.
Fake it.
Until, hopefully, I started to feel the spirit.
“Okay,” I said, wiping my cheeks when I heard the radio flick onto my mom’s old favorite Christmas song: The Little Drummer Boy.
“That’s enough of that.” I slapped my hands on my thighs and set to putting the Christmas blankets, towels, and pillows all around my apartment before dragging myself down the hallway toward my room.
Christmas was all over in there too. I’d framed my windows in twinkle lights, so people passing on the streets below would see them.
I remembered one Christmas when the shelter was full, my mom and I needed to brave a freezing holiday huddled on the street. So we picked a spot across the street from a beautiful lights display. I stayed up until dawn just watching the lights.
You never knew who needed the pick-me-up. So I left them on even as I turned all my other lights on to climb into bed.
I turned to look out the window, watching fat, lazy snowflakes falling.
And for just a moment as I drifted off to sleep, the loneliness seemed to slip away, replaced with that floating sensation of wonder.