Christmas at Taos [IN PROGRESS]
Dec. 26th, 2006 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyfirestarterPresents for forty-two children of various ages, plus gift cards for staff and colleagues both local and in New York; shift rearrangements for the transient staff members so they can spend at least part of the holiday with their families --
(Charlie can remember Christmas at Granther's place on Tashmore Pond, when she was seven-going-on-eight, the winter that she and Daddy spent in hiding. More vividly than any of the bare handful of Christmases when both her parents were still alive.)
-- the tree, and the lights; planning with the staff to let the kids help put up some of the decorations, the safer ones, and to work with the ones who like handicrafts to make some tree ornaments --
(She remembers very little of the one a year after that, at the Manders farm, not quite two months after her father's death and her escape from the Shop. Except that Irv and Norma Manders tried so hard to make it a nice Christmas for her, and that it took all the willpower she had not to burst into tears at the table every time she thought about where she was and who wasn't there with her.)
-- the dinner, and special bonuses for the refectory staff working it --
(Almost a dozen Christmases are missing there, or blurred into each other, distinguishable only by remembering where she was: the ones with the foster family who knew what she was and what had become of her parents, and the ones with the foster family who didn't know, and the ones she spent on the road, and the one she spent at a shelter called Home the year before she met Nancy Deepneau at the age of nineteen.)
-- there's so much to do that there's scarcely any time to think.
(The Christmas between her nineteenth and twentieth birthdays is the one she'll always remember; the memory that she holds to through the darkest times, as she said to Charles Wallace Murry, the times when palpable evil is all too present.)
Until the day itself, and the moment that always comes near the end of a large project: the moment of looking around for the next thing to do and realizing there isn't a next thing to do. Often the accompanying feeling is one of letdown; this time what comes instead is a sudden clear singing peace.
(That Christmas Eve was when she first saw the rose.)
It's true, what she told Malcolm Reynolds once: if you're the person running the show, you often don't get to see most of it.
But every once in a while you do.
(Charlie can remember Christmas at Granther's place on Tashmore Pond, when she was seven-going-on-eight, the winter that she and Daddy spent in hiding. More vividly than any of the bare handful of Christmases when both her parents were still alive.)
-- the tree, and the lights; planning with the staff to let the kids help put up some of the decorations, the safer ones, and to work with the ones who like handicrafts to make some tree ornaments --
(She remembers very little of the one a year after that, at the Manders farm, not quite two months after her father's death and her escape from the Shop. Except that Irv and Norma Manders tried so hard to make it a nice Christmas for her, and that it took all the willpower she had not to burst into tears at the table every time she thought about where she was and who wasn't there with her.)
-- the dinner, and special bonuses for the refectory staff working it --
(Almost a dozen Christmases are missing there, or blurred into each other, distinguishable only by remembering where she was: the ones with the foster family who knew what she was and what had become of her parents, and the ones with the foster family who didn't know, and the ones she spent on the road, and the one she spent at a shelter called Home the year before she met Nancy Deepneau at the age of nineteen.)
-- there's so much to do that there's scarcely any time to think.
(The Christmas between her nineteenth and twentieth birthdays is the one she'll always remember; the memory that she holds to through the darkest times, as she said to Charles Wallace Murry, the times when palpable evil is all too present.)
Until the day itself, and the moment that always comes near the end of a large project: the moment of looking around for the next thing to do and realizing there isn't a next thing to do. Often the accompanying feeling is one of letdown; this time what comes instead is a sudden clear singing peace.
(That Christmas Eve was when she first saw the rose.)
It's true, what she told Malcolm Reynolds once: if you're the person running the show, you often don't get to see most of it.
But every once in a while you do.
