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Six Days Until Christmas
kelsey
The rental car’swipers scraped uselessly over the thin layer of ice building up on the windshield, and I wondered—not for the first time—why I’d ever agreed to spend Christmas in Colorado.
The answer—and reason I did most things—lay with the daughters who’d tag-teamed me with a ‘tiny, little request.’
Addie’s practical arguments and Sky’s emotional pleas had worn me down until saying no would have been tantamount to canceling Christmas and disowning them both.
Now, gripping the steering wheel as the GPS cheerfully announced my arrival at what appeared to be the lost set of a Hallmark movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been played.
I killed the engine and sat for a moment, watching the sleet dance across the glass. The cabin loomed before me like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting with its warm wood and glowing windows. The only thing missing, as far as I could tell, was a statuesque plume of smoke rising from the chimney, but that could be remedied after a hot bath. After multiple flight delays, a never-ending rental car line, and awhite knuckle drive up icy mountain roads, my body felt as though it had been put through a woodchipper.
The cold hit me the second I opened the car door, sharp enough to steal my breath and sting my eyes. Texas winters hadn’t prepared me for this. I hauled my suitcases from the back, the wheels immediately useless in the ankle-deep snow. Because why would anything about this trip be easy?
By the time I managed to wrestle the luggage to the front porch, my designer boots—purchased in a fit of post-divorce retail therapy—were soaked through. I also invented several new curse words when the key code Addie texted me didn’t work before realizing I’d transposed the last two digits in my half-frozen state.
Inside, warmth curled around me like a hug I hadn’t asked for but desperately needed after the day’s events. I dropped the bags by the door and paused to take it all in.
String lights wrapped around the exposed wooden beams overhead, casting a soft glow over the living room. A pine wreath hung on the far wall—not the fake, perfectly symmetrical ones found in every craft store, but a lopsided one braided together with real greenery.
Throw blankets in deep reds and forest greens were neatly folded on a leather sectional that had seen better decades but looked comfortable enough to swallow you whole.
Someone had clearly put a lot of effort into transforming the rental into a cozy Christmas cottage. I peeled off my wet boots and ventured further inside, eagerly soaking up every little detail, from the hand-carved wooden reindeer lining the mantel to the collection of holiday mugs lining the open shelving in the kitchen. None of them matched, like they’d been collected over years of Christmases.
Pine-scented candles dotted various surfaces, unlit but still managing to perfume the air with that sharp, clean scent that never failed to remind me of him.
I pulled out my phone and started snapping pictures before my mind could detour too far down memory lane. The mismatched mugs. The reindeer with a malformed antler. A ceramic Santa that looked likeit had been around since the seventies, complete with a chip in his beard that had been painted over.
Once everything was documented, I opened the group chat Addison had named ‘Riggs Girls ’ and uploaded the photos.
Me
How cute is this? The owner of this place really went all out.
The response was immediate.
Sky
you made it
isn’t it PERFECT??!!
Addie
We knew you’d love it. It’s so you.
So me?
What did that even mean? My Christmas mugs matched, every piece of decor on display back home perfectly arranged and in pristine condition.
My mind immediately went to the reindeer with the wonky antler. Before, I would have made up a funny story about how he injured it to entertain the kids and asked Teddy to help me fix it. He would have laughed it off and told me it wasn’t worth the glue to fix.
Somewhere along the way, I became the chipped antler. Easier to leave broken. Not worth fixing.
Me
