Hollis stands red nosed and smiling with a green beanie on her head and her face lit up from the glow of the lights hanging around her. Her fist hovers midair like she was about to knock.
“Jay,” she says, sounding surprised that I’m here. “You’re here.”
“Looks that way.” I lean against the doorframe, pinching my lips together. Under her usual black coat, she’s wearing bright red-and-green striped pajamas. “As are you.”
She laughs; it’s nervous. “I—yes. I’m here and you’re here.” She’s beautiful. “I’m—” She laughs again. “I’ve missed you.”
“It’s barely been a day,” I say, stroking my mustache so I don’t grab on to her. “You can’t miss me.”
She shrugs with a slight smirk. “Looks like I can.”
I step down the two steps so I’m directly in front of her. “Looks like it.” Over her shoulder, her minivan is still running, and four little faces are pressed against one window. I chuckle. “And you brought company.”
“Right,” she says, once again nervous. “About that. I realized when I left, maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe you didn’t want me to.” She pauses, eyes searching mine. “And I thought, I didn’t get this far by not inviting myself into places I didn’t belong. So, maybe, if you’ll have us, we can have Christmas here. With you. As a new tradition. Christmas Eve in an Airstream has a ring to it.”
When she pauses again, adoration for her bends my bones.
“I brought food,” she adds quickly. “And I don’t want to impose. I know this is your time. And I talked to them about the space. To not touch anything without asking. We can also go home—if this is too much, I mean. I don’t want you to think?—”
I kiss her. Because I can’t not as much as to shut her up. “Hollis,” I say, keeping my mouth close to hers. “I want you here.” She opens her mouth. “All of you.”
She bites her lip but smiles around it. “We also brought you pajamas.”
I chuckle. “Can’t wait.”
She turns and gives the kids two thumbs-up, and they barrel out of the van, boots on their feet, hats on their heads, and wearing the same pajamas as she is. Under their arms: sleeping bags. Goose pounces around me toward them, making them scream with delight.
Right on time, snow flurries start to fall from the dark Christmas Eve sky.
Marv’s truck pulls up; I look at her.
“Also, I invited Marv,” she explains. “Apparently he has a bed in the back of his truck, a generator to run a heater, and something called a composting toilet.”
Marv emerges from his truck wearing a pelt hat on his head and holding a game strap of ducks. “Merry Christmas, tiny humans. I brought dinner.”
No surprise, the kids scream.
I look at Hollis’s heart-shaped face and full lips, kissing them again before running my fingers through the hair peeking out from the bottom of her hat. “Ilike youlike you, Hollis the Writer.”
She smiles and thumbs my mustache. “Ilike youlike you, Jay the Beertender.”
When the kids are done screaming and the bonfire over which we cook the ducks burns out, we cram into the Airstream like sardines in a cozy can. At midnight we drink hot chocolates while we watch the kids open presents and litter the camper with wrapping paper.
And the next morning, we wake up early, all wearing matching pajamas, and surprise my family by joining them for breakfast at my parent’s house ... with Marv.
It’s the best season for The Holiday Club yet.
The Gifts We Get Instead
By: Hollis Hartwell
When I was eight, I wanted a bike for Christmas. Not just any bike: a Princess Sparkle Unicorncycle. It had a hot-pink frame I could put my Lisa Frank stickers on, silver sparkly tassels coming out of the handlebars that would flutter in the breeze, and, perhaps the best part, a unicorn horn sticking right out of the front and a rainbow tail sticking right out of the seat. Advertisements showed little girls in fantastical (albeit impractical) gowns speeding down the sidewalk with big smiles on their faces and tails flying in the wind. That bike consumed my every waking thought. It was all I wrote about for my school assignments and all I doodled on scrap pieces of paper. That bike wasn’t just gorgeous, it represented a special kind of freedom that only a child could understand. Did I mention the unicorn hornandtail?
Christmas morning came that year and I just knew that bike would be waiting for me. After all, I’d written Santa five times.
And yet, none of the gifts were Princess-Sparkle-Unicorncycle sized. They were package-of-ten-socks sized. They were Barbie-doll sized. They were pajamas-from-grandma sized.
My mom got a new vacuum.
