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A perfect Christmas

Pique Christmas Stories
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The tradition of story telling is stronger at Christmas time than almost any other time of the year. Whether stories are read aloud to family and friends, or alone by the fire with a hot cup of cocoa, it’s an activity all cherish during the holidays. In the spirit of sharing, enjoy these stories written by Pique writers for you.

Happy holidays

from all of us to all of you.

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A perfect Christmas

By Leslie Anthony

It had taken Andy 25 years to learn the difference between linen and cotton but he'd finally figured it out. Linen was heavier, more durable, and more expensive; basically, better. And this tablecloth — with its hospital-crisp folds, thick hems and tiny, embroidered poinsettias constellating the edges — was definitely linen. A fitting template for the display-case's worth of bone china, crystal glassware and spit-polished silver laid out at ten place settings, encircling a table that hadn't been expanded with the two large table-leaves gathering dust behind the dining-room curtains for as long as he could remember.

Mom was clearly going all out.

This, he knew, had less to do with the fact that the entire McClintock clan — mom, dad, his younger sisters Candice and Caroline, and baby brother Aaron — had all gathered, as they periodically did, at home in Prince George for Christmas, than with the expanded guest roster: from Montreal, where he now taught pre-med students, Andy had brought his fiancé Justine, a pure laine Quebecker who'd never been west of Winnipeg; Candice, six-months pregnant, had journeyed from Calgary with husband William, who they'd all first met last February at the couple's Mexican wedding; Caroline dragged along Evan, latest in a string of "I-hope-this-one-works-out" boyfriends culled from the stock-trader ranks encountered daily at her analyst job in Toronto's financial district; and Aaron, a famous textile artist currently mounting an exhibit at London's Tate Modern, had arrived from the U.K. with his "friend" Tim, a feat of inclusivity not thought possible only a few years ago.

Andy's father, Frank, had mellowed since that explosive Christmas five years ago when Aaron first came out to the family, a fractious scene that ended with negotiations over allowing him to stay for dinner. By the time of Candice's wedding, however, Aaron and Frank were on an even keel, the latter even conducting himself politely with Tim. And now here was log-builder Frank, engaged in animate conversation with both Tim and Evan about the properties and uses of various types of wood — his passion. Justine, Andy could tell from her machine-gun laughter, was in the library with the rest of the female contingent. Aaron, he surmised, was still thrashing around the mudroom having just returned from walking the dogs — his parents' ancient mutt Joe, and Caroline's two massive ridgebacks, Atticus and Caesar — through a skein of paw-deep snow. It was all very domestic and cordial. Placid even.

Maybe too placid. Standing alone in the dining room, Andy took a long sip from the latest in a day-long series of rum-spiked, homemade eggnog, the only kind he liked (the rest of the fam preferred the saccharine-sweet store-bought variety), and listened for a minute.

With this new civility added to the murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, the strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D drifting around corners, the snap of resin from their always too-large tree, and the smell of food wafting from the kitchen, it was all kind of perfect. And that, it struck Andy, was what had been bothering him: this Christmas felt unlike any he could recall. Growing up in the McClintock household, with four kids all two or less years apart in age, Christmas had always been about comings and goings, drama and chaos, catastrophe and cleanup. Glancing around, it all churned back up.

He visualized presents being torn into, paper and ribbons flying, and then, to cries of disappointment or elation, the contents traded or surreptitiously borrowed while his parents fought to distill gratitude from attitude. There was the familiar scene, when they were five and three respectively, of him tapping on Candice's head with a toy wooden hammer when she'd tried to play with his new workbench, vividly recalled because it was unintentionally captured on Super 8 film by Frank who couldn't squint well-enough into the tiny viewfinder to see what was actually going on. For years as teens they'd conjointly requested an annual Christmas screening on dad's rickety projector, laughing hysterically at Andy's malevolent determination and poor Candice's tears, evidencing the close friendship they now shared, and booing the eventual intervention of a horrified mother who, in one swift movement, stooped down to cuff the delinquent boy aside and scooping up the girl without dropping either her drink or cigarette — a vignette that always made mom cringe.

As he dredged through the muck of Christmas memories they came faster, a litany so deep it defied his ability to grasp only one at a time. There was the Christmas when, invited by Aaron to drink from the eight-gallon bucket in which it stood, the dog knocked over their 15-foot tree, the arbour and its ton of decorations saved from crashing completely to the floor by a wisp of fishing line tying it to the ceiling; with it, however, had gone the bucket, soaking all the presents and the carpet. One time Caroline had insisted on lighting candles on the tree, with predictable results; the next year she'd burned down their Finnish neighbours' precious sauna after stoking the fire for them with hot-burning kiln wood instead of prescribed pine, melting a stove pipe that ignited the entire shed. For years they'd mockingly called her "Carrie-line." He had once fallen through the ice on a Christmas Eve beaver-pond walk, necessitating a tense rescue involving belts and shoelaces tied together. There was the year when Candice, an animal-rights activist and PETA volunteer, was joined in her vegan existence by Caroline, and Frank's present to the family had been a sectional leather couch — the most offensive thing the girls could imagine, sending them storming out for the entire holiday in protest. There was an extensive litany of food gone wrong — burned, boiled into pulp, improperly thawed, and attempts to shake up tradition so disastrous they were never repeated. There was a laundry list of friends and family who'd gotten drunk — mostly those who usually didn't drink or had no business doing so. Like the time, when Andy was 18, that the three older siblings went to midnight mass with friends and a bottle of gin pinched from Frank's cabinet. They were dropped back at home in a police cruiser, Candice stopping on the way up the driveway to defiantly vomit one last time. And speaking of vomit, what about the Christmas that Norwalk virus cycled through the entire family, the single bathroom so over-utilized that they'd all taken to keeping bucket by their beds.

Andy sighed. They were adults now, and gone were the wild days when wild things might happen. He supposed he'd just have to get used to... placid. That was when he heard a sound unlike anything he'd ever heard before. More correctly sounds — though since they all seemed to happen at once it was hard to consider them separately.

It started with a floor-shuddering thud from the kitchen, then enough yelping and growling and squealing and claws against the linoleum to suggest an entire kennel loosed in a mall. Jolted from his thoughts, he was about to move in its direction when Frank flew past with a crowbar in his hand and Tim and Evan in tow. All the women seemed to scream at once, and then everyone was shouting. Metal clattered to the floor. Furniture shifted. Glass broke. Bodies — who knew whose — could be heard contacting stove, fridge, wall. In microseconds the picture had assembled itself: mom left the ham to cool on the counter and one of the ridgebacks had assumed it was fair game; it'd stood up, yanked the meat off the counter, and old Joe, on whose territory this occurred, immediately moved to defend — or at least get his share. The other dog joined and they'd all set upon the ham as hyenas on a wildbeast. Only there was no carefully honed pecking order and the ensuing dogfight had trashed almost everything in the kitchen and drawn nine humans into it.

Andy stood where he was, gazing back at the linen-draped table and it's perfectly rendered tableware, now potentially moot. He smiled, drained his drink and headed toward the cacophony. Hopefully the dogs hadn't knocked over his eggnog.



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