The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

spelled me into living in the kitchen, baking endlessly until he was tired of the joke? Suppose he ignored me and snapped my cookies done anyway? Jasper could outspell everybody in the house except Mama, and she almost never interfered; “let them fight it out” was the LaZelle philosophy of child-rearing.

      When Jasper didn’t say anything, I leaned across the table and took one of my finished wreaths from the cooling rack. I held it out. He reached for it, his gaze still on my face.

      “This is my spell,” I said. I dropped the cookie in his hand, and the little wreath broke.

      For an unbearable moment, we stared into each other’s eyes. At last Jasper blinked, then turned away. “Thanks,” he muttered. He stalked out of the kitchen, the broken cookie in one hand, his helmet in the other.

      I pinched a ball off the chilled dough and tried to roll it into a snake. My fingers trembled too much. I got out the kitchen stool and sat down, staring at the floured surface of the butcher-block table, the leftover morsels of dough, the big ball, the little bit I had tried to work. Was I lying to myself? Was this work silly? Worthless? A waste of time?

      “I smell something burning.”

      I turned. Helmetless, Jasper stood just inside the kitchen door, his face haunted. I jumped up and looked into the oven. “Damn,” I said, and pulled out the sheet of burnt-bottomed cookies. I turned the sheet over the trash can and shook it till all the cookies fell into the trash.

      “All that work,” said Jasper.

      “Yes, well,” I said.

      “Can I—”

      I wiped the burnt bits off the non-stick cookie sheet with a paper towel. When Jasper didn’t go on, I glanced at him.

      “Can I try it?”

      So many things to say jumped into my mind, but I let one after the other pass unsaid. I brought the cookie sheet to the table and reached for my abandoned dough, then glanced over my shoulder at Jasper. After a moment, he came to join me. I gave him a piece of dough. “You roll it out, like this,” I said, and thought, thanks.

      JASPER’S CAROL

      I find it hard to be thankful for something I’m still suspicious of. Thanks for the cake (are you sure it isn’t poisoned?). Thanks for the toy (I think it’s broken). Thanks for my powers. (How come they work this way? How come Gyp’s don’t work at all?). They work really well. (When are you going to make me pay for them? If I use them wrong, will you take them away?). Merry Christmas.

      Mama told me I was to write the carol this year, an expression of praise and thanksgiving for a whole year given us by the Powers, Elements and Spirits, Lord and Lady, the Source, and of course, I should toss in a verse about hope and thanks for the year to come. I said I’d rather do any other Christmas chore than this.

      She said everything else was too easy for me now.

      But what if the carol wasn’t good enough?

      “It will be,” she said, and smiled her “or else” smile.

      I noodled on the piano and brooded about this year, wondering what had been good about it, and how I could express that in music. Art wasn’t like magic; I couldn’t just say, okay, gifts, here’s some notes, give me back a meaningful song that’ll make everybody cry and feel good at the same time. I might be able to work backwards, though; start with the feelings, and say, please supply the notes to make these feelings happen. Of course, I’d need to have the feelings first. Not very likely.

      What did we have to be thankful for? Gyp got a job tutoring English at the community college. I had a new girlfriend. Flint managed to stay alive, in spite of everything. Beryl retained most of her innocence. Opal was prettier than ever. Mama and Dad still loved each other, and Great Uncle Tobias hadn’t moved out. Those were all things we could probably agree to be thankful about. So how come I felt mad instead?

      I played the chords for anger, stomping doom chords, to get that out of my system. I thought about the Christmas carols I heard at the mall or on the radio, and tried making up something bright and gladdened, prancy and bouncy. That was easy, and incredibly unsatisfying. I started fitting words into the catchy melody I had come up with, and when I found myself rhyming “Presence” with “presents,” I slammed the lid down over the keyboard and stomped out of the living room. I had figured out where the anger came from. Mama wanted me to feel something I didn’t feel, thanks / glad / appreciate / love / return / blessing. Of all the sins I had committed, one I’d stayed away from was forcing anybody to feel something they weren’t feeling. I’d avoided that one without realizing it, and now I was trying to violate my own somewhat elastic code of ethics.

      I paced through the front hall, then through the dining room, the kitchen, the back hall, the study and the living room again. I nearly tripped over the cord to Flint’s lights as I stalked past the tree. The tree rustled at me, and I glanced at it, annoyed. It was a scruffy little oak tree, wearing Flint’s white electric lights if they were a pearl necklace. After a minute, I went over and collapsed on the couch, amid puffy squashed pillows that belched dust. I stared at the tree. “Look at me,” it said, “look at me!”

      “I’m looking,” I said.

      “I see you,” it said, its voice faint but joyous, and I thought about my trees. I had collected seven before Flint figured out how to tree-speak, and each year I’d been glad to go, because something happened in the course of finding a tree that made me feel like no matter what I was like, or who I was, I was doing something right. Trees didn’t care that I’d hurt my sisters or terrorized my little brother. Trees didn’t care that I was spiteful and mean at school. Trees just wanted to acknowledge that I was a human and they were trees and here we were, on the planet together, and it was nice to think about that at least once a year.

      “You are beautiful,” I told Beryl’s tree.

      “You are beautiful,” it told me.

      We stared at each other for a long time, and then I went to the piano and played what that felt like. It was a song with no words, and it wasn’t really about gratitude or anything like that. It just said we’re here together and I’m glad. I worked it over until it felt just right, then talked to the piano. It accepted the song. It liked it. It went on playing after I stood up, and I wandered out to the hall with my carol going on behind me. The house felt different. I ran upstairs and lay on my bed and fell asleep to the muffled sound of the carol seeping into the walls.

      OPAL’S ORNAMENT

      I held them all when they were babies, even Jasper. I remember when he was an infant and I was two and-a-half, I sat on the big couch and Mama put Jasper into my lap. I hugged him so hard he squeaked. Mama taught me to be gentler with my love. I adored them all, before they could talk.

      Something happens when babies start talking. I’m not sure what, but you just feel differently about them.

      I was thinking about my ornament. I’m sure Mama just gave me this assignment because she couldn’t think of something more useful for me to do. My gifts aren’t up to anything major; she’s already tested me on lights and Spirit invocation and fire, and I flunked them all. I’m not musical like Jasper, and even if it was all right for the eldest to tree talk, I never succeeded at that, either. So for the past six years I’ve made an ornament for the tree.

      Last year, all I thought about was how to make my ornament more beautiful than the ones I’d made before; that’s been my focus since I started. Beauty is something I understand. This year, though, I thought about babies instead of silver lace snowflakes inside iridescent bubbles, or mirror-bright stars with faint images of flowers etched into their surfaces.

      Babies, and traditions. If the heart of the Christmas tradition was love and thanks for the family being together, maybe I should try to illustrate that somehow. I thought about loving my family, and somehow it got all tangled up with babies—nontalking babies.

      I took some woodchips I’d stolen from the wood pile, and cupped them in my hands, and thought, gift me with the beloved