Page 47 of Minted

11

Barbara

Decorating the Christmas tree was my single favorite thing to do every year around this time. Mom would put on holiday music, and she’d wear a Christmas sweater. Dad would splurge on fancy cheese and crackers, and he’d always wear this really ugly holiday sweatshirt with reindeer that had bells around their necks.

He always sounded like one of those bell-ringing Salvation Army guys, klonking around the house with boxes of lights.

It was my job to take the old, janky strands of lights and change out the broken ones for new lights to get them going. And then Dad and I would wrap the tree while Mom directed from ten feet away. After we got it suitably lit, Mom would pull out the box of decorations, and she’d remind me of the history of each one.

My first year in the family handprint.

My kindergarten apple. It was cracked, but I’d written my name on it—badly.

My graduation hat from high school.

The bizarre and lopsided stocking I had crocheted. The hot glue holding the hook on it was always coming off, but Mom never complained.

I have the box sitting next to the mantel, and I’ve ordered a rush job on some stockings that will hopefully kind of match the one Mom knit for me. Would the girls think I’m crazy if I hung Mom and Dad’s, too?

Only, we don’t even get that far.

“I hate Christmas trees,” Nikki says.

“I don’t want it either,” Ricki says.

It’s my own fault for imagining how nice this evening was going to be. If I’ve learned anything from Dave and Seren, it’s that expectations with foster kids are always a mistake.

“You hate the tree?” I ask. “Or the lights? Or. . .”

“All of it,” Nikki says. “It’s at the heart of what’s wrong with Christmas.”

What’s wrong with Christmas? “Nothing is wrong with Christmas,” I say without thinking.

“Are you serious?” Nikki holds out her hand and starts throwing up fingers. “The commercialization, the myth of lying to kids about some creepy fat man crawling into their houses, the greed, the two weeks off for one specific holiday that lots of other religions don’t even celebrate.”

“Or what about how they club you over the head with Christmas songs on the radio, Christmas themes in school, and people ringing bells asking you for money on every street corner?” Ricki looks just as upset as her twin.

“But—”

“Listen, it’s her house,” Nikki says. “She can do what she wants.” She slings her backpack on the ground and ducks into my guestroom.

Ricki scowls at me as she follows her sister.

“Okay,” I say, “but—”

The door slams, effectively shutting down my attempt to figure out why they’re so mad. Are they really upset about how commercial it is? Or is it something else? I know from my foster training that anger’s a masking emotion, but heck if I know what they’re masking underneath all that regurgitated holiday hate.

The guy who delivered the poor unliked tree left it in a five-gallon bucket in the middle of my living room after sawing a huge chunk off the bottom to make sure it hadn’t sealed over with sap. He gave me strict instructions to keep the bucket full for more than twenty-four hours before putting it in the pretty base I bought, or rather, that Bentley bought.

And now I’m staring at a perfectly shaped, slightly leaning tree in an orange bucket, next to a pile of brand new twinkle lights. As I refill the bucket—it’s already drunk a surprising amount of water—I’m thinking about how this is so not the Christmas I had in mind when I took the girls in last night. I had, stupidly, thought that we might sing, open presents, drink cocoa, and gather around a roaring fire in the fireplace I never use.

I’ve never been Santa before.

But apparently I wasn’t missing much. He’s just a creepy, fat man who breaks-and-enters anyway. Geez. My hand is itching to call Seren, but I feel like if I call her now, I’ll never be able to figure anything out on my own. So instead, I sit down at the table and try to think.

I know very little about the girls, except that their mother got cancer—pancreatic—and she was very sick for a while, and then she was just gone. The girls were afraid of where they’d go. Dad has never been involved. They say they can’t even reach him. And after living alone—paying their bills from their relatively meager influencer checks—they were caught, by the very person paying those checks.

They must not like me much at a base line.

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