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“I don’t know if I want to do this,” I said.

“You one hundred percent don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Seth said. Of course not, but opting out when everybody else was doing it would still get me weird looks, make me feel like I alone wasn’t part of the group. “Just out of curiosity, what’s giving you pause?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said, something in my stomach squirming. And I really didn’t. All I knew was that the thought of it gave me that “this isn’t quite right” feeling.

I hadn’t felt truly Jewish in many years, not until this trip. Maybe it had something to do with that. Not that Jews couldn’t go take pictures with Santa Claus if they wanted to—Seth was evidence enough of that. It wasn’t like it made them less Jewish. But for me? It just didn’t mesh.

I wondered if this was what the Maccabees had felt like when the king ordered them to start worshipping the Greek gods. Only on, like, a way, way, way lesser scale. And with a far smaller chance of ending in blood and fire.

“Yeah, I think I’m going to sit this one out,” I said, and saying it felt right: the pants suddenly grew enough to fit, the eggplant morphed into a potato latke. “You should do it if you want, though.”

“And leave you sitting out alone? A good boyfriend wouldn’t do that.”

“Seth!” Dan called out, unfolding himself from Santa’s lap, where somehow he’d managed to curl up. “Abby! Your turn!”

Seth stared back at him. Right. Seth’s inability to deal with conflict. I braced myself for getting dragged over there no matter how I felt. Which, again, if it took that to be a Good Fake Girlfriend, I could live with it. I grabbed his hand and squeezed through his glove.

Though I’d meant it to communicate how I was feeling, it made him stand up straighter and clear his throat and say, “We’re good, man. Freya, Mike, you guys go ahead.”

He fell back, shrinking a little bit, as if bracing himself to get yelled at.

But, of course, that wasn’t what happened. Dan just shrugged and said, “Okay! Freya, Mike, you’re up.”

As the rest of the group clustered around Santa and their friends, hollering suggestions on what they should ask for for Christmas, Seth pulled me to the side. Not the side of the crowd but, like, the side of the festival. And not the cool side, the side that guests weren’t supposed to be on. The wrong side of the alleyway, the back side of one of the rows, where boxes of extra supplies waited in stacks and electrical cords snaked over the dirt in complex tangles that probably violated several safety standards. The smell of smoke drifted toward us, which panicked me for a second before I noticed the small group of workers taking a cigarette break down the other end of the aisle.

At least this wasn’t where they put the trash.

I was a little worried something was wrong with Seth that he needed to talk to me in such privacy, and then I saw his exultant smile. “I did it,” he said. “I mean, I know it was such a small thing to basically everybody else with a pulse, but did you see it?”

I cracked a smile back. “Way to deal with conflict in a healthy fashion.”

Seth gestured back toward his friends with his chin. “I’m not sure why I didn’t want to say anything where they might overhear. It’s a little embarrassing, I guess, that it felt like such a big deal to me.”

“I get it,” I said. “I mean, you shouldn’t be embarrassed, but I understand what it feels like when something that feels so big to you feels so small to everyone else.” See: being able to answer basic questions about your parents and family.

“Yeah.” He smiled down at me again, and I suddenly realized how close we were to each other, so close the edges of our coats were touching, so close I could feel his heat radiating even through all my layers. No, that had to be my imagination. And we were only standing so close because the aisle was so narrow. “And look at you, Ms. Hanukkah Spirit. Refusing to assimilate.”

My own smile was tiny, closed-lipped. “Isn’t it funny how Christmas and Hanukkah are kind of lumped together because they’re both in the winter and became examples of ‘the holiday spirit’ when they’re so different?” I laughed a little, remembering Lorna’s vendor friend Fred, dismayed at the actual story of Hanukkah. Sounds bloody. Judah Maccabee would hopefully approve of me not wanting to sit on Santa’s lap.

He wouldn’t approve of you bending to Lorna the way you did on the phone, though, part of me whispered. I did not really want to listen to that part of me, especially not now, with laughter all around us. You’re basically the Jews who said, “Sure, I’ll worship Zeus and sacrifice pigs on the sacred altar.”

Okay, I was definitely not as bad as the Jews who worshiped Zeus and sacrificed pigs on the sacred altar. Was it really that big a deal to let Lorna have a few non-Hanukkah things at our Hanukkah festival? It wasn’t like Hanukkah was even a major, super important holiday, and my goal with the festival wasn’t to present the world with a pure-as-the-sacred-oil vision of the holiday. It was to bring tourists to town and save my café.

My lips parted before I could think too much about it. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? With the festival?”

I hadn’t thought it possible for Seth to move closer, but he did. He leaned in so that his nose practically brushed mine, and yep, now I could definitely feel the heat coming off him, his breath tickling my baby hairs. “What did you say?”

This close, looking him in the eye was almost paralyzing: in the shadows, his were so dark, so deep, that I was afraid I might fall in and never be able to claw my way out. But I couldn’t look away, even to use that old middle school trick of talking to the middle of the person’s forehead so that it looked as if you were eye to eye but really you weren’t.

“The festival. Lorna. You heard our call earlier, where I gave in to her on some of the Christmasy things she wants to make the Hanukkah festival more…broadly commercial, I guess,” I said. We were only one to two percent of the American population, so basically anything made to cater to us also had to cater to the general Christian population or it couldn’t be broadly commercially successful. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

“Do you really have much of a choice when it comes to Lorna?” His lips parted, his tongue dipping out to lick them. Maybe a drop of hot cocoa had gotten caught on his lower lip.

“Did the Maccabees have a choice when Antiochus ordered them to worship Zeus?”

Seth’s lips quirked. “I think the stakes are a little bit lower in this case.”

I didn’t laugh. “You didn’t answer.”