Диана Дуэйн - How Lovely Are Thy Branches

And Nita brushed her hand through his fronds and headed back toward sleep, glancing only once over her shoulder to see the shape behind her settle back into the snow and go back to glittering softly in the moonlight.

This, she thought as things went dark around her again, is the best job in the world…!

6:

I’ll Be Home For Christmas

The kitchen and dining room area at Kit’s house could in Nita’s experience feel fairly full sometimes just with Kit and his sisters. This morning it was rather fuller than usual when Dairine’s puptent emptied out.

Everyone was in bathrobes or pajamas. Everyone was ravenous (despite having stuffed themselves with popcorn the night before. (“It’s a conundrum,” Kit’s pop said, going back for a second bowl of oatmeal.) Some parties had opted for cooked breakfasts: to take the weight off Kit’s mama, Nita was officiating at the pancake end of things, and was presently making a third batch of batter. The cereals were being hit particularly hard, and when Helena got home for the holidays Nita knew she was going to complain bitterly about the loss of her stash of Grape Nuts—apparently Marcus had never heard of the stuff before and had fallen deeply in love with it. The cornflakes were vanishing down Matt about twice as fast as the Rice Krispies were evaporating in front of Darryl. And Ronan was favoring a box of Lucky Charms with an utterly scandalized expression, and shaking it at anybody who’d hold still. “Nothing to do with us,” he was saying to anyone who’d listen. “Nothing whatsoever. Shamrocks have three leaves! Who is this gobshite in the hat?”

While all this went on around her, Kit’s mama was sitting back in her chair at the dining room table, sipping coffee and scrolling through messages on her phone. Kit’s pop was reading the paper. Off to one side, Sker’ret reared up at the edge of the table and looked longingly at the box of Cheerios from which Kit was dumping the remainder into his bowl. “Is that finished?”

Kit handed him the box. “Sorry, Sker’.”

“Don’t be,” Sker’ret said, and promptly ate it.

Kit’s pop watched this speculatively but without comment. Nita, in the kitchen, glanced at Kit and smiled a little. They’re getting the hang of this…

Looks like it.

Kit’s pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. “So about all that noise in the middle of the night…” he said conversationally.

“Noise?” said Kit.

“Some kind of racket outside, seems like,” Dairine said. “I missed it. Must have been asleep.”

“Got a text from the hospital this morning,” Kit’s mama said, completely straightfaced. “The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up, anyway. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn’t show anything.”

“Do tell,” said Dairine.

“Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.”

Everybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple and a few ornaments to clunk gently together, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.

“You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,” Nita said, “there’s no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you’d been drinking.”

“Mmm,” said Kit’s mama, taking another drink of her coffee.

“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Kit’s pop said.

Kit shook his head, finishing his cereal. “First guess?” he said. “Leave everybody’s Christmas decorations strictly alone after this. Maybe the mailboxes’ll even catch a break.”

In the living room, Filif rustled. “That was more or less the injunction…”

“Well,” Nita said “you didn’t absolutely mandate it.“

“No,” Filif said. “That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.” He rustled his boughs reflectively, and even the non-blinking lights twinkled. “Let’s just consider it… a very strong suggestion.”

Nita laughed softly. “If that was a suggestion,” she said, “remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.”

“In any case, an unexpected gift,” Kit’s pop said.

His mama nodded in agreement. “In the spirit of the season…”

“So what’s on today’s agenda?” said Ronan.

“Easygoing holiday sloth,” said Kit’s pop.

“Continuation of the Christmas Movie Marathon,” Dairine said. “Love Actually, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, Home Alone, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and A Christmas Story.”

“‘You’ll shoot your eye out’!” Darryl crowed (twice).

“Carols this evening,” said Kit’s mama. “You are all invited. You,” she said, pointing at Ronan, “are required. As many of you as want to come along… we’ll find room for you.” She looked over at Sker’ret. “Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?”

In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was leaning against the table where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.

Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?”, and his pop went back to his paper.

Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.

“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.

“Got it all figured out yet?”

Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”

Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.

“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass by old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”

Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”

They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”

“I’d really like that,” Nita said.

“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “As family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”

“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.

“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”

Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.

“Twelve days,” she said.

Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Afterword

How Lovely Are Thy Branches has been in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Many thanks again to Bob Schooley for his assistance with matters relating to Hank.)