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“There’s always a tree at these festivals,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be hard to put one of those Jewish stars at the top instead of a golden angel or a regular star. What do you think?”

What did I think? I thought that he was totally missing the point. “Decorated trees aren’t really a Hanukkah thing,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll want one for a Hanukkah festival.”

He sighed heavily. “All right. Let’s take a walk around, then.”

As he led me around the ghostly grounds, all set up yet empty of people, I wondered why I cared so much. The easy thing to do would be to just nod and agree with whatever he told me. It wasn’t like I was the one paying after all. Tourists would still come, curious at the novelty of a Hanukkah festival if they weren’t Jewish or, if they were, thrilled by the crumbs thrown their way. I still remembered being a kid when Hallmark’s one Hanukkah movie aired every year in the middle of their Christmas marathon. No matter how terrible the movie was, no matter how inaccurate it felt to our experiences or pandering it felt to the general non-Jewish audience, it was still so exciting to feel like someone was speaking to us.

Fred stopped before the Nativity scene, whose life-size plastic figures glowed in pale blues and pinks and whites. “I have a bunch of sets of these guys. I don’t think it would be too hard to set them up differently to show the Hanukkah story,” he said, waving his arm over them. “Would a sheep work in place of the pig? And we could put those little hats on the Three Wise Men and make them into your rebels.”

I exhaled deeply through my nose. “No, a sheep wouldn’t work in place of the pig. The whole point is that pigs aren’t kosher, so sacrificing a pig in the Temple was profane in a way a sheep was not. And no, we can’t just put yarmulkes on the Three Wise Men and turn them into Maccabees.”

He threw his hands in the air. “I didn’t even get to my idea of using a Frosty the Snowman as the evil king! You know, it’s symbolic. A cold heart and all that.”

The rest of the tour didn’t go much better. He tried to sell me on garlands of holly as a generic wintertime decoration and on using light-up reindeer noses for a menorah (“There are eight of them! It’s perfect!”) and did not take kindly to my telling him there were actually nine candles on a hanukkiah, counting the shammash that lit the other candles. By the end, I was shaking my head before he could finish telling me his idea for repurposing his rental Santa outfit into a jelly doughnut costume (don’t ask).

The food guy, who was supposed to coordinate vendors for the food booths and source ingredients, was just as unhelpful on the phone the next day. “Kosher?” he said. “What’s that?”

At least for once, Seth didn’t make it worse. As soon as I’d seen him walking past the window toward the door, I’d started preparing his pumpkin spice latte. That way I’d have it ready by the time he made it to the counter, meaning minimal time for talking. Though of course he tried anyway. “Is there any coffee in there under all that whipped cream?” he asked, picking up the cup, his glancing smile telling me he was joking. “How much did you charge me for this?”

Had he not even looked at the screen before blithely swiping his card? He was lucky I wasn’t a scammer. I always carefully examined any receipts before paying for anything to make sure nobody was trying to take advantage of me. “It’s free,” I said. “In appreciation for changing my lightbulb yesterday.”

I expected him to crack another joke or smile and say thank you, but his response surprised me in its seriousness. “You don’t have to give me anything for it. Knowing I helped you out is enough.”

Ugh. His sincerity made me want to empty the whole container of whipped cream into a pretty white tower on his head. “Whatever,” I grumbled. But he didn’t push it. He just took a sip, gave a happy sigh from underneath his whipped cream mustache, and walked away with a spring in his step.

Given my difficulties with the vendors, when Lorna’s name popped up on my buzzing phone, I was not all that eager to pick it up. And not even because I’d just closed the café and plopped down on my secondhand cracked leather couch upstairs to take a much-needed break. “Abby,” she said without preamble. The force of her voice practically shook the leaves of the half-dead plants Connor had left behind on the windowsills due to his mom’s allergies. “I hear you didn’t hire the decorator or the food vendor I sent you to.”

I slipped off my Crocs—ugly, but nothing else kept my feet from throbbing after a long day the way they did—and tucked my legs under me. “Neither of them knew what they were doing.”

Lorna sucked in a deep breath. I braced myself for her to yell, but the quiet, deadly voice that came out was somehow even scarier. “Of course they know what they’re doing. They run all the Christmas festivals in the area. If they don’t know what they’re doing, then nobody up here knows what they’re doing.”

I focused on the crack that ran from the ceiling to the floor right next to where my living space turned into the tiny kitchen. My apartment hadn’t fallen apart yet, so I hadn’t bothered to call the landlord about it. Something that had always bothered Connor, but then why hadn’t he just called the landlord himself? “I’m sure they run amazing Christmas festivals. But Hanukkah festivals are different. We need different things, different foods, different setups. You can’t just put blue and white lights and a Star of David on a Christmas tree and say it’s for Hanukkah.”

“Why not?” asked Lorna. I almost laughed before I realized she wasn’t joking.

A chilly wind blew in through my window, making me shiver. The window was closed. That was probably a problem. Maybe I should call the landlord. “If we’re not going to do it right, why bother holding a Hanukkah festival at all?”

“For the tourism dollars,” Lorna said bluntly. “That we need to keep this town alive. That, need I remind you, you need to keep your café alive.”

She let the words hang there in the air between our phones. I focused harder on the crack in the wall. Maybe, if I was really lucky, the ceiling would fall in and entomb me. Like, not enough to kill me, but enough to land me in the hospital for a little while. I’d be out my deductible, which might lead me to financial ruin, but at least I wouldn’t be expected to put together this festival from my sickbed.

Lorna sighed. “You know, it’s okay if you want to bow out. I can take over, or give it to someone else.”

Someone else who would go back to the vendors and say that, sure, telling the story of the Maccabees with the Nativity figures seemed cool, and sure, who needed a giant menorah when we could have a big tree, was what she meant. Despite literally thinking moments before that I’d rather put myself in the hospital than do this, the thought of her doing it wrong felt even worse.

It was already bad enough that the Hanukkah festival couldn’t be held on actual Hanukkah. I could just imagine the Jewish tourists traveling up from New York City and Boston, so excited by their little scrap of representation, only to find a Christmas festival colored blue and white.

I hated the thought. I hated that I cared so much when I felt like I no longer belonged among those very same people I was trying to impress. It wasn’t like I could fill the hole that they left in me by putting on an incredible festival. And yet. “No,” I told her. “I can do it. Give me a few days to find other people.”

Just the thought of dedicating more of my vanishingly rare free time to hunting down appropriate vendors threatened to bring on a Category 4. Lorna asked, “Where are you going to find them?”

“I’ll ask the local Jewish community,” I said, trying to sound as confident as I could.

A confidence I was pretty sure was misplaced, which I confirmed as soon as I hung up and googled it. There was no local Jewish community. Vermont only had a few thousand of us in the first place, and those of us who were here were scattered all over the state. There were some congregations in the bigger cities, like Burlington. I could theoretically make the long drive there and ask around.

But what if they could just look at me and know how much I felt like a fraud? How much I felt like I no longer belonged? I hadn’t been to a synagogue in years. I hadn’t celebrated any holidays, or exercised my rusty Hebrew, or observed the rest day of Shabbat, since I left home. What if they took one glance at me and told me I wasn’t one of them?

Just the thought made my long, low exhale shake.