Page 2 of The Christmas Stroll

“Last week, maybe? It’s hard to say. You know how these things build.”

Maggie did know. She had spent over a decade in the event management business and knew exactly how miscommunication compounded - how one missed deadline cascaded into three, how one unclear instruction spawned five different interpretations.

She also knew her mother well enough to recognize that when it came to the island’s beloved Christmas Stroll, nothing, absolutely nothing was ever left to chance.

So what was going on?

Maggie watched the ballroom go on glittering without her, the carolers, the cider, the arrangement she had righted on table eleven standing up straight and perfect, and felt the first thin thread of dread pull tight somewhere behind her ribcage.

Two sets of instructions. Two email versions. She knew what two versions of anything usually meant. It meant certain people were no longer speaking to each other in the same room.

“I’ll call her,” Maggie said quietly.

Lucy’s relief was audible. “I really wasn’t sure if I should say anything, but - ”

“You did the right thing.” She checked her watch again. Fourteen minutes until the mayor’s speech.

Lucy hesitated. “I don’t think it’s a disaster or anything. Not yet. But Margaret Morgan also got two different setup times for the Saturday parade, and nobody seems at all sure about the harbor lighting set-up.”

“Got it. I’ll talk to her and call you back.”

They said their goodbyes, and Maggie lowered the phone, staring at the screen for a moment.

The Nantucket Christmas Stroll wasn’t just an event. It was an institution. Every December, Main Street transformed into something out of a snow globe; storefronts dressed in festive garland and white lights, carolers on corners, Santa arriving by boat to crowds gathered at the harbor.

The weekend drew tourists and year-round residents alike, and for almost fifty years Maggie’s mother and her old friend Marianne Callahan had been the engine that made the Stroll committee run. They worked as a unit, Helen handling the vision and Marianne managing the logistics, and the event often succeeded entirely because those two did.

Helen, keeper of every tradition, defender of the way things had always been done. Marianne more open to change, sharp as a tack, running the load-in and the merchants and the thousand invisible bolts that held the weekend together.

Two of the most maddening women ever to share a clipboard, had spent all those years building the Stroll into what it was. They fought like weather. They’d always fought like weather. But every Christmas for as long as Maggie had been alive, the two of them had produced out of that friction something close to a miracle.

Her mouth curved without her meaning it to, thinking of the year a tuba player fell into the harbor, and Marianne had deftly fished the guy out with a boat hook, while Helen kept the carolers singing so no one would notice.

The year the two of them had disagreed so violently about the color of the tree ribbon that they had gone ahead and hung both, red on the north end and gold on the south, and told everyone it was intentional, a theme.

The year a nor’easter came in on the Friday and they had simply refused to acknowledge it, standing in the wind in matching parkas directing traffic through the sleet, unbudging as the Brant Point lighthouse itself.

And then the other memories, the one that always came in low and quiet behind the funny ones.

Her father, Ken, who had never officially had a job at the Stroll and had appointed himself one anyway, working the hot chocolate table every single year in a ridiculous flap-eared furry hat, giving away twice as many cups as he sold because he could never bring himself to charge a cold child.

Maggie leaned back against the pillar then, phone screen still glowing in her hand, and let herself remember.

She was seven years old, holding her dad’s hand as they walked down Nantucket Main Street in the dark. The cobblestones were slick with early snow and the streetlights had halos around them, bright and blurred. Every storefront window glowed. She remembered pressing her nose against the glass at the toy shop, her breath fogging the pane, and her father laughing as he lifted her up so she could see the trains running on their tiny tracks inside the display. His hands were warm even through her coat. He smelled like coffee and warm wool.

Then fourteen, standing in front of The Flour Jar on Willow Street with Lucy, Jess Whitmore, Nadine Pike and half a dozen others from their high school crowd, passing around paper cups of hot chocolate that burned their tongues.

Marianne had been inside the bakery shouting good-natured instructions to proprietor couple Tom and Margaret Morgan over the sound of the radio playing carols. Helen had swept past with a clipboard and a headset, pausing just long enough to press a kiss to Maggie’s temple and tell her to stay out of trouble.

Then she was twenty, home from college for the weekend, helping her father hang garland along the harbor walk while Helen stood ten feet away reviewing the vendor map with Marianne, who was furious because her dad had looped the garland wrong and had to start over, and Maggie had laughed at him until he’d draped the whole length over her head like a green boa.

That was one of the last clear memories she had of her father smiling.

He’d died the following spring.

Then at thirty, standing at the edge of the crowd as Santa’s boat came into view across the harbor, feeling the same punch of emotion she’d felt as a child - but now something more bittersweet and complicated, the pull of a tradition that had shaped the rhythm of Maggie’s entire life, yet suddenly felt utterly different.

She’d long left the island by then though. Had built an entire career in Boston.