Page 79 of A Heartfelt Christmas Promise
Vanessa finally put all the pieces together. “I had no idea he was your father.” She turned to Mike. “This is your daughter who went skiing on Thanksgiving?”
“That was me,” Misty said as Mike nodded.
The snow fell in smaller flakes now, but they were covering everything at an incredible rate.
“My, thisisa small town.” Vanessa had herself braided right into everything in this town. Something she’d never meant to do.
“Small towns,” Mike said. “Whole different animal.”
“Dad, Vanessa is helping me implement some of the improvements I’d suggested at Porter’s.”
He looked at Vanessa. “Really?” Lifting his chin. “You’re not just leading her—”
“No. Not at all. I’m serious.”
He shook her hand. “Well, thank you. I jumped to some wrong conclusions about you.”
Thank goodness.
Anna rushed to Vanessa’s side. “Hey, buses are taking people over to the tree lighting. We need to go if we don’t want to miss it.” Anna shoulder-bumped Vanessa. “And you,” she said to Mike. “You seem to be pretty perfect. Handsome, knows how to admit when he’s wrong, and you do make a mean chicken stew.”
Mike pushed his hat back on his head an inch, grinning. His eyes locked with Vanessa’s. “I like your cousin. She’s one smart lady.”
“You’d like anyone on your side,” Vanessa teased, but she still wasn’t sure he wasn’t just throwing himself at her to get his way for the town.
“Thank you, Mike. We had the best parade seats around,” Anna said. “And the boys took good care of me.”
Mike did a half turn, his back to Anna, but thumbing that way. “Shelikes me.”
He was cute all right, but she’d never admit that to him. Vanessa gave him a flirty grin, then turned away. “Come on, Anna, we’re going to miss that tree lighting if we let this guygo on and on all night.” She lifted her hand in the air, calling out over her shoulder, “Thank you, Mike. We had a great time.”
One by one, school buses filled up and took folks over to the hospital for the tree lighting, then circled back around to get another load of passengers. It wasn’t all that far, thank goodness, else those five buses would have taken forever and they would be lighting the tree at midnight.
Still excited from the parade, people chatted and laughed, sharing goodies they’d purchased earlier. Some families had laid out blankets on the ground and sat down around the huge tree that stood tall in front of the hospital building.
Colored glass and metal, the architecture looked sorely out of place in the small town. New too. From here she noticed that each room of the hospital’s second and third floors had a single candle in the window. Some patients stood at their windows peering down on the activities.
After the second round of buses unloaded, teens wearing white choir robes carried wooden trays filled with beeswax candles with red ribbons wrapped around the bottom of each one toward the crowd.
“Here you go.” A young lady plucked two tapered candles from the tray and handed them to Vanessa and Anna. “The paper keeps the wax from dripping on you. You can light yours from mine.”
“This is so neat. I’ve never done this,” said Anna.
“Merry Christmas,” the young woman said as she moved through the crowd handing out more candles.
As the minutes passed, more and more candles were lit, bringing a joy to the crowd.
The moan of brass instruments was followed by the rest ofthe band in an instrumental version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Everyone hushed and moved in closer to the Christmas tree. The choir circled the tree, holding their candles in the air, and began singing along with the orchestra.
A single guitar plucked a few notes of “Silent Night,” and then everyone joined in and sang along, followed by “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”
Then a special trumpeting sound, not so different from one announcing that a bride was going to walk down the aisle, sounded, and everyone began singing “O Christmas Tree.” At the end of the first chorus, the lights on the tree lit up. Bright red, green, blue, gold, and white brightened the hospital lawn, and everyone collectively gave a gasp, then picked up with the next verses of the song.
Everyone cheered, then began blowing out their candles and making their way to the buses to go back to Main Street.
Anna pointed toward one of the windows above. “Look.”
“There must be six kids in that window.” Vanessa wondered what was wrong that kept those children inside tonight. It was easy to forget the heavy sorrows of the world when you were concentrating on the big picture.
