The problem was the house felt empty, and that was the problem: it was a house, not a home.
All the other houses had decorations in the front yards, and you could see the beautiful ones they’d put up inside the properties, too. We stood out because we had nothing—not even a piece of holly.
Leaving the bags on the floor in my bedroom, I pushed the sleeves of my hoodie up and marched to the door leading to the garage, bat in hand.
“Shanti,” I called. “Time to get the Christmas decorations out, girl.”
There was a screech, and then my little girl came tearing down the hallway, only just stopping in time to not crash into me.
“It’s Christmas!” she cried, throwing her arms in the air. “Wait, we don’t have a tree.”
Pffffbt. Of course we did.
Last year, I’d decided I’d had enough of real trees. The pines fell of them, they made a mess, I had to keep remembering to water them, and don’t even get me started about my hair getting knotted in it when it came time to take it down. I was so fed up with ours by the time I took it down that when I went online and saw that fake trees had been heavily discounted after Christmas, I’d bought an eight-foot-tall one.
Shanti just didn’t know I’d done it yet.
Even better for me, it was poofy and pre-lit. What more could you ask for?
In my mind, it’d seemed easy peasy. Take it out of the box, fluff it out a bit, plug it in, and Bob’s your uncle. In reality, there was a little bit more to it than that, and my hair still got tangled in a branch, but by the time it was up, I wasn’t regretting my choice not to have a real tree at all. There were no gaps on this one, no needles sticking out of my hoodie, no arguing with the base to hold it upright, and no swearing because the lights had gotten all tangled.
It took Shanti all of forty minutes to put decorations on it and direct me to where she wanted the ones higher up to go, and then we went to work on the front yard.
That’s when I noticed it.
Because it was daylight when we’d gotten home, and I was so tired after being on the road for nine hours, I hadn’t seen the lights that’d been put around the house. All I had to do was plug them in, and when I did, so many came on that both of us shielded our faces for a moment and then blinked away the bright spots left dancing in our vision.
“It’s like our house is from a movie, Aunt Naomi,” Shanti chuckled, rubbing her eyes. “I can still see the lights when I blink.”
I pitied the person who’d gone up onto our roof to put the lights on there, but they’d done a thorough job of it. We even had rows and rows of icicle-looking lights hanging from the gutters.
“How did we miss this when Carter dropped us off?”
Shanti leaned into my side. “I was thinking about the fish and the babies.”
Rubbing my hands together, I did a mental inventory of our decorations. “Do you want to put the reindeers out here, or are there enough lights, do you think?”
She tipped her head back, looking at me incredulously. “Can you ever have enough lights?”
To an adult who had to put them up and take them down: yes. To a kid who just enjoyed them: no.
“All right, let’s get the reindeer and the inflatable Santa and set them up here. We’ll take the trees and stars to the back. I doubt there are any lights back there.”
Oh, ye of little faith. I should have known that if someone was going to do that amount of work to the front, they’d definitely extend it to the back.
By the time I’d finished shoving the spikes attached to the decorations into the ground, had set up the solar panels for the ones who had them, and plugged in the cables for the ones that needed it, our home looked like it’d be visible from Mars.
“Do you think Carter will like it?” Shanti asked as we washed our hands and got ready to heat the pie someone—most likely Colette—had left in the fridge.
“I think he’ll love it. Y’all can decorate inside the house together if he’s off tomorrow. Then we need to hang up the stockings, and make the cookies for the tree. Oh, and we need to make sure Santa knows Carter lives here with us so he can drop his presents off at the right place.”
Shanti stopped what she was doing and looked at me sadly. “Did we get Carter anything?”
Squatting down, I held my phone out to her. “Through the power of online shopping, I’ve been buying things and getting them delivered to Heidi’s place. Uncle Bond’s going to drive them all down when Carter’s at work so we can wrap them. We’ll get all your art stuff out, and you can make him a card, too.”