Page 7 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas
I paused and looked around at the scraps of paper, ribbon trimmings, and the empty cardboard tubes of wrapping paper. There weren’t any other baubles or trinkets waiting to be wrapped. “Wait, are we really done with all of our presents for this Christmas?”
“I think we are,” Addy said, rising to her feet. “I’ll go check the closet to be sure.”
“Thank you, Addy.”
“Daddy, I counted, and we got all the presents. We had fifty-seven, and we’ve wrapped fifty-seven,” Eva said.
I stood up and turned around to the present pile that I thought was just behind me but actually had spread out to the loveseat, the couch, and our coffee table as well as the floor in between.
“Huh,” I said, looking over the wrapped blankets, toys, photo albums, drawings from my daughters, and other small things we’d gotten for many of our relatives. While presents weren’t required at the upcoming family gathering, I was happy to bring more than a few, especially since we’d missed last year’s event. It had been our first Christmas without Zara, and we hadn’t been up for a massive get-together.
Thankfully, everyone had been incredibly understanding, and no one had pressured us to be social. I was incredibly grateful for that. Although both sides of my family had been there for us, they’d also known when to give us space.
“We’ve never been done this early before, have we?” I asked, thinking back to when Zara was still alive. No matter how prepared we’d tried to be, there was always a rush of wrapping, packing, and getting the girls ready at the last minute beforewe left for the campgrounds where our families celebrated the holidays together.
It had been a twist of fate that both our clans celebrated the holidays out north, with my family on our ancestral camping grounds complete with multiple large cabins and amenities, and her family—who were newer to the area—at a rented campsite at one of the state parks. In high school, I’d invited Zara and her family to our Christmas celebration, and from that point, more and more of her relatives were asked to come until we decided to make it a joint event.
I loved it. My side of the family was a bit more French Creole, while hers was Portuguese, but we were both Creole through and through, with little dashes of people who married into our family. It was a chance to celebrate the differences and similarities in our cultures, and be a part of a massive community, which wasn’t always guaranteed with bear shifters. Try as some might, we simply couldn’t keep up with the reproduction rates of other shifters, like wolves and great cats. I’d met wolf alphas with six or seven children, but the average among bears was three. Four was pushing it.
I wasn’t worried about our species disappearing or anything, but our numbers were getting smaller. It was almost as if the increase in technology was sapping the magic from the world, and with a finite amount of it left, it was limiting how many of us magical folks could exist at once.
I tried not to think about those things, however. I had enough on my plate.
“No, I don’t think so,” Addy said, hands on her hips like she was surveying her kingdom. With her hair pulled up into space buns on top of her head, she looked like a cartoon princess come to life.
Although her curls were thick and large, she didn’t have the 3-C type Eva and I did, so I couldn’t put her hair into afro-puffslike I did for Eva. It was funny how that worked out, really. Addy wasn’t tender-headed at all, with her long, brown hair being more like her mother’s, but Eva wasincrediblytender-headed and could only tolerate puffs and twists. I hoped her scalp would desensitize as she got older because I enjoyed styling her hair—it was a little more daddy-daughter time—but I would never force something painful on her.
“How about we have some hot cocoa, watch a movie, then settle in for bed?”
“Okies!” Eva said, also standing up and heading toward the kitchen. “First, we gotta clean up!”
“Nah, I’ll take care of that.” My daughters were excellent with chores, but it was the holidays. “Why don’t you two pick out a fun holiday movie?”
“No cap?” Addy asked. That was enough to stop me in my own tracks. I was plenty familiar with the fact that the younger generation used all sorts of slang that I didn’t understand, but it was unusual forAddyto use it.
“No cap?” I responded in a much more questioning tone, but she just nodded.
“Cool. Eva, come with me. I’ll help you reach the ones on the higher shelf.”
“You’re notthatmuch bigger than me!”
“Says you!”
“Yeah! Saysme!”
The two continued to banter back and forth as they headed over to our revolving movie case. I got a trash bag from the kitchen and made quick work of cleaning up. Within fifteen minutes, we were all sitting in front of the TV with our hot cocoa.
They’d chosen the claymation Rudolph movie—their mother’s favorite—and we were all relatively quiet. It wasn’t somber, per se, but there was plenty of introspection. It hung in the air above us, not suffocating but definitelythere.
A lot of our relatives thought it was morbid that we’d told the kids their mother was sick and got them familiar with the idea of death as soon as they were mature enough to understand it, but honestly, I was sure that was the biggest reason they were so well-adjusted. Although I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, I’d met a couple of people who had lost a parent or both parents very young in their life, and each of them mentioned how difficult the shock was to handle. One day they had a healthy, happy guardian, and the next day they didn’t.
Did I wish my girls didn’t have to experience that at all? Of course! I’d give my soul ten times over if it meant Zara could still be around for them, but I’d known what I signed up for. Our love story was no tragedy—it was a beautiful novella I would carry deep within my soul for the rest of my life.
“All right, girls,” I said when the credits started rolling. “Time for bed. You two go brush your teeth and change into your jammies. Addy, take down your hair. I’ll be upstairs in a bit to read you a story.”
“You can pick out the story this time, Eva,” Addy said as she stretched and yawned. Technically, she could have a later bedtime than Eva, but my little scholar was more of a morning person. She woke up early to read a book or—being the considerate girl that she was—she’d come downstairs to watch a YouTube deep-dive or tutorial on the smart TV so she wouldn’t wake her sister, since they shared a room.
And the crazy thing was, she had her own room, but she preferred to stay with Eva. Zara and I had bought the house during her first pregnancy, using a small portion of the pack funds to put a deposit on a sizable place in the suburbs a fifteen-minute drive from the city. We hadn’t been sure how many children her body would allow her to have, but we decided to be hopeful rather than cautious, and had fallen in love with the four-bedroom home.
