“I want to,” he says. “She likes it.”
He winks at Ava; she giggles.
“But you don’t have to,” I insist. “Because I get it. It’s nice, but you don’t have to.”
He props his elbows on the table on either side of his house and interlaces his fingers, rubbing his mustache against a knuckle as he looks at me.
“Get what?”
Damn him for latching on to my words.
I huff a breath at the token smirk on his lips. “Get that we are a lot of people in one house and you”—I look at Ava, considering my words carefully—“might have other plans next year.”
“I was planning on doing this again next year, actually.” He cuts his eyes to Ava and scrunches his nose as he leans toward her slightly. “If Ava will have me, that is.”
He means it. She giggles. I swoon.
“Do you like my mom?” Ava asks him, making me choke.
“Ava,” I scold in a whisper, stilling my icing bag mid-squeeze. “That’s not polite.”
“If I do like your mom,” Jay says, ignoring me, “would that be okay with you?”
She nods, smiling wide.
Jay flicks his gaze to me, working a playful tongue over his bottom lip as he leans toward her and asks with a stage whisper, “You think she likes me back?”
“Yep.” Ava looks at me and my face heats. “She’s smiling a lot.”
He gives me a smug look, but to her he says, “That’s good info. I need someone on my side.”
I press my lips between my teeth, lips begging to split with a smile. They both get back to work on their gingerbread houses like he didn’t just saythat.
Mariah Carey’s voice sends “All I Want for Christmas is You” blasting through the speaker, and Marv says something about aliens that makes the kids laugh. Under the table, I play footsie with a man I like a little more now than I did this morning.
This isn’t the day I hoped for, it’s better.
What Is a Tradition?
By: Hollis Hartwell
We are mere weeks from Christmas in a year I have done my best to resist all my usual traditions of the season, big and small. I haven’t been to any festivals, made my Christmas tree–shaped pancakes, gone caroling around the neighborhood, or sent a family Christmas card of all of us in matching sweaters. I haven’t forced my kids to put their hands in another plate of plaster of Paris so I can preserve yet another year of the size of their little fingers and palms to hang on the Christmas tree (which I also didn’t go to a tree farm and chop down).
Yet as I sit here writing this, I find myself happy. Happier than I’ve been in recent history, if I’m honest. And deeply troubled. How can I be happy in the midst of a season I love without the traditions I’ve clung to for a lifetime and the kids I love more than my own life? How am I sitting at my computer with a smile on my face writing nothing about what I’ve written about for the last decade of my life?
In a season I love because of everything the season represents, here I sit loving it anyway without any of that in the traditional sense. I don’t have my kids on the days I want them most, but I’ve found joy in spending those days with other people. My home is devoid of any usual décor, yet when I wake up in the morning, I wonder if Santa came early.
For the first time this season, over the weekend, my unexpected holiday companions of the year had a run in with my four children. I thought for sure this collision of my two seasonal worlds would be the end of something I don’t have a name for but also don’t want to let go of. Like every surprise I’ve gotten on this gumdrop-lined path I’ve been travelling, it felt like anything but the end.
Not only did we sit and make gingerbread creations out of a random and makeshift supply of groceries, but the kids had fun—I dare say we all did—even though the gingerbread houses were mostly terrible and nowhere close to traditional.
But it wasn’t what we did that had my heart clattering like the hooves of reindeer on a rooftop, it was something my kids said. When listing off their favorite things we do together each year, they didn’t list anything big or showy. There weren’t any plays, parades, or picture-perfect moments that topped their favorite memory lists. It was little things that happened in between everything else. Quiet moments filled with laughter or eleventh-hour belly grumbles leading to poor nutritional decisions but happy faces. They weren’t traditions at all.
Or were they?
As these moments have had a pesky habit of doing to me this Christmas, I dwelled on these thoughts all night, wondering what I’ve been doing it all for. Am I chasing memories for my kids or doing things because I love them? And even more, if I haven’t missed any of our usual traditions and my kids haven’t missed them, what—and who—are they all for?
In the middle of the night, I pulled out a dictionary and looked up the word tradition. By definition, it meansan inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior. I read it so many times the word stopped holding meaning, only leaving me more confused and frustrated than ever. Like I’ve unwrapped a present only to find another layer of paper beneath it.
