Carol Arens - Christmas Cowboy Kisses

Gideon stepped back from the pantry, then made haste to bank the cookstove after ushering her into the kitchen. She watched him finish his task, then walked into the hallway and toward her bedroom. Gideon made his way to the stairs. “Good night, Joy,” he sang out cheerfully, for he felt he had much to be pleased with, given the events in the pantry and Joy’s response to him.

“Good night,” she called back, bending to light a lamp on the hallway table to carry with her into her bedroom. She disappeared from his view and he quickly went up the stairs to the loft, where Joseph slept soundly. He undressed, slid beneath the sheet and quilts next to his son and curled his arm around the boy, the better to keep him warm throughout the night. The heat from the stove in the kitchen made its way upstairs and he found himself ready to sleep, even as visions of the woman downstairs drifted through his head. His lips curved in a tender smile as he closed his eyes.

Chapter Five

The scent of apples filled the kitchen as Gideon used Joy’s grinder to fill a large pan with juice and pulp from the fruit he’d gathered from the cellar. He’d washed the apples, sorting through them and discarding the ones with bad spots. Although this was a new endeavor for him, he felt confident he would be able to make a decent batch of cider in his own makeshift way.

The grinder worked well for the job, and he set about straining the apples into another container with Joy’s large strainer. By the time he was finished, he had over a gallon of the fragrant juice, along with a goodly amount of pulp, and had set aside the rest of the pulp and skins for the pigs who lived in a pen with a sheltered lean-to attached to the barn. There were three pigs, all of them ready for butchering, a job Gideon meant to inquire about in town or perhaps with the nearby neighbor once the snow cleared up. Surely there would be someone in the area who specialized in such things.

Joy worked at the table, mixing the dough for the cookies, finally dumping a part of the dough onto the flour-covered table. She patted it into a circle, then used her rolling pin to flatten it and ready it for Joseph’s task of cutting out cookies. He knelt on a chair, one of her aprons tied around him to protect his clothing from all the flour that would be flying about as he worked.

He cut out first one star, then another, until he had almost two dozen, not all of them perfect, but all of them suitable for the cookie sheets Joy had readied. Using her spatula, she transferred one after another of the stars until she had filled the sheet.

“This one goes into the oven, Joseph. We’ll give them ten minutes and then check them out. They should be pretty near baked by then.” After sliding the pan into the hot oven, Joy brought her other cookie sheet to the table. “Now let’s fill this one,” she said with a smile for the eager boy who watched her.

In no time, she found room for the rest of his stars on the cookie sheet and placed it on the warming shelf to await its turn in the oven below. She piled up the remnants of the dough and added more from her bread pan, then went through the same process as she had the first time. This time, Joseph was given a cookie cutter that resembled an angel. His tongue was caught in one corner of his mouth as he worked, and Joy and Gideon exchanged smiles as they watched him, Joy lending a hand when needed, for Joseph wasn’t yet adept at fitting the angels closely together on the cookie sheet.

The morning passed quickly as one pan then another left the oven. The cookies were just a touch brown, marking their readiness for the next step. After the table was piled high across one end with ten dozen cookies, according to Joy’s count, they got ready to frost them. Joy filled a bowl with white icing and found some small bottles of colored sugar in the pantry, which she transferred to empty salt and pepper shakers. “I never did this before,” Joseph announced as Joy began frosting the cookies.

“Well, it’ll take you and your father both to keep up with me, I fear,” Joy said with a laugh as she moved her frosted cookies closer to the boy. Gideon joined him, and they all sprinkled the colored sugar on the stars and angels before them, Joseph more than generous with his shakers, colored sugar flying about with gusto. Gideon announced that one of them was damaged by too many sugar crystals and must be eaten immediately, calling forth laughter from Joy and his son.

He made a big production out of eating the angel he’d considered to be damaged, sharing it with Joseph bite for bite. “That’s the best cookie I ever ate, ma’am,” the boy declared fervently. “It surely was good. I’ll bet I could eat another one, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I’d be happy to get you a glass of milk to go with it, if you’d like, Joseph. And perhaps even one for your father,” Joy said happily. She hadn’t had this much fun in a month of Sundays, she decided, watching the wide grin spread across the boy’s face.

“Would you, ma’am? I’d sure like that and I know my daddy would, too,” Joseph said, smiling through the icing that adorned his lips and cheeks.

Within a few minutes, Grandpa had joined them, and all four sat at the table, drinking milk and sampling the cookies before them. Joy moved as many cookies to the cooled cookie sheets as she could and then found two more in the cupboard to hold the excess. The kitchen dresser held all four sheets and still the table was almost half full.

“We’ll have enough cookies to last us for a month,” Joy said happily. “We’ll hang some on the tree later on, when the icing is completely dry. Probably by tonight. And in the meantime, I have some other tasks to finish up before the day is over. If you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to sit on the rocker in the corner and get out my knitting.”

“Can I go in the parlor and look at the Christmas tree?” Joseph asked. “I just want to sit on the sofa and enjoy it.”

“You sure can, son,” Gideon said, ushering the boy away from the knitting scene lest he figure out that the work keeping Joy so busy was intended for him. She’d finished the hat last night and had begun working on the scarf before her eyes closed midway through a row, almost causing a calamity when the stitches came close to sliding from her needles. Now she knit the final ball of yarn into the length she’d determined would fit around the boy’s neck and crisscross on his chest to keep him warm beneath his coat. The mittens would have to wait till after Christmas, for she had another task she wanted to complete before dark.

She’d found a large ball of brown yarn in her basket of supplies and determined to do a scarf for Gideon, even if it took all evening. She was quick at the task, for she’d been knitting since she was but a youngster. She’d made Grandpa a new hat and scarf over the past weeks, working at it in her bedroom to keep it a secret from him, and had fashioned a vest for him out of the deerhide she’d cleaned and stretched. Now if Gideon’s scarf was ready in time, she’d wrap them in the tissue she’d bought in town a while ago. It was red and would look festive under the tree come morning. She needed only to make out small name tags for the packages and then scoot into the parlor after everyone else was in bed to put them beneath the tree.

* * *

Christmas morning began before the sun came up. Joy was busily making cinnamon rolls, having put them to rise atop the warming oven the night before. She fried up a panful of bacon and a dozen eggs, sliding them onto her big platter to sit in the center of the table when everyone had assembled for breakfast. She toasted six slices of bread in the oven, then buttered them and presented them on another small plate.

“This is a feast fit for a king,” Gideon pronounced. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold and he sat closest to the stove to soak up the warmth. The chores were done, he’d said as he came in the backdoor, and after he’d washed up at the sink, he helped Joseph wash, then sat him on a store catalog atop his chair. Grandpa came in, a smug look on his face as he joined the group around the table.