“You have a protocol for this over at your place?” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, peering briefly through the passthrough window. “Some kind of order that things go up in?”
“Well. Not exactly. But the good stuff goes in close to the trunk. The ones you’re less concerned about if they fall down or something bangs into them, those go on the outside.”
“Makes sense.”
Nita watched as her dad and Kit’s pop carefully opened the boxes, revealing a wild assortment of mirror-polished and satin-sheened ornaments, very few alike—remnants of old sets, replacements from newer ones, all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. She caught Filif’s excited shiver, smiled at it, grinned a little at Kit as he came over to lean against her, watching.
The two fathers took turns, took their time, lifting the ornaments out, conferring, finding the best spots for them. “How is there are never enough hooks for these?” “I could have sworn I bought more last year.” “Harry, this one’s ribbon broke.” “Son, would you move that branch up a little? I want to get this one in by the trunk.” “Here?” “That’s right, just ease it up a little…” “Perfect.” “Or maybe a little to the left?” “Yeah….”
They stood back again and took stock. “Okay,” said Nita’s dad. “Garlands now?”
“Heresy! Tinsel first. Garlands after.”
This provoked a brief storm of opinion from some of the onlookers. “You’ll crush the tinsel!” “Especially the mylar stuff!” “I never went for this crinkled kind myself, it’s not as shiny…” Nita watched Filif starting to tremble a little harder and briefly wasn’t sure whether it was out of nervousness. But then she realized he was laughing, and trying to keep anyone from noticing.
The “tinsel first” school of thought finally prevailed, and Kit’s pop went off and came back with several boxes of it. He and Nita’s dad started applying it, and once more a brief good-natured exchange of ideas broke out. Nita’s dad was one of the “One strand at a time” schooclass="underline" Kit’s pop was more of a “fling it on from a distance” type. Laughter spread around the room as each one started trying to convert the other to his way of thinking. Kit’s mama leaned on the shelf of the passthrough for a few minutes, watching this drama unfold, and then vanished.
A minute or two later she came back with a couple of glasses full of something amber that didn’t look like cider. These she put on a side table and said, “In case anyone wants to take a moment and get a grip…”
The two fathers looked at each other. “Not smart to ignore medical advice, Juan…” said Nita’s dad.
Smiling, they took a few moments’ worth of break, sampling what Kit’s mama had brought them while standing back again to examine their handiwork. Among the lights, Nita could see Filif’s eye-berries doing what the lights didn’t do: moving around a bit. Her dad noticed this too, leaned in. “You okay there, big guy?”
“Fine.”
“You sure? You’re not ticklish or anything?”
“Oh, no. I just… Finding places to see out of is going to be interesting.” Filif was laughing.
“All part of the game,” said Kit’s pop. “The informal object of the exercise is to leave as little of you showing as possible. It’s all about the decorations.”
“Though most of the time,” Nita’s dad said, “the tree isn’t in a position to offer any opinions. This adds a whole new level of challenge to the endeavor.” He pushed a clump of tinsel aside. A berry peered out from under. “You tell us when you’ve got visibility problems: we’ll shift things around.”
“All right.”
“Now the garlands,” said Kit’s pop, and went off for a final couple of boxes. These were glittery mylar, one in silver, one in gold, and one in dark green. With care Kit’s pop tucked the end of the first one just under Filif’s topmost upstanding bough, the one where he normally wore his baseball cap, and he and Nita’s dad started passing the looped remainder of it back and forth between them as they wound it around and around. “What goes on top?” said Nita’s dad.
“These days, a star,” said Juan. “Though we had an angel once.”
“Not any more? What happened?”
“It melted,” Kit’s pop said. “Something went wrong with the bulb inside it. The thing actually exploded one evening. The plastic—”
“It wasn’t plastic, Juan, it was celluloid,” Kit’s mama said as she came in with more cider and mulled wine for those who wanted it. “With fiberglass hair. The thing went up like a torch. It’s a miracle it happened while we were awake and actually in the room with it. God knows what would have happened to the tree if we hadn’t got that thing off it.”
“The next two Christmases completely sucked,” Kit whispered in Nita’s ear. “They refused to leave the lights on unless there was somebody in the room. You couldn’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and find the lights on and everything glowing.”
“They got over it, though…”
“Eventually.” Kit rolled his eyes expressively. Nita, though, was watching Filif again. The shiver that went through him at the mention of the fire was not one of unease. Definitely, she thought, something new is going on…
“I heard that,” said Kit’s pop, sounding amused. “Never mind, it got better.” He picked up another garland, the gold one. “So where is it?”
“You haven’t got the last garland on yet,” Carmela said. “We’ll wait.”
And they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star—about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket—and reached way, way up to put it on.
And couldn’t quite reach. “You’ve been getting taller without telling me,” she said. “Give me a hand here, shrub.”
Very carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.
“Merry Christmas, Fil,” Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.
The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.
Now, though, it was Nita’s turn to get nervous.
In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn’t make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine’s Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.
This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit’s family’s tree. “To remember me by,” she’d said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. “What, are you going somewhere?” he’d said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. “What? No! No, I just want to… I’m covering all my options, okay?” And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn’t too sure herself.