her grandmother had been alive, the house would have been decorated by now, December 21. There would have been lights along the roofline and a huge wreath on the front door, the word HOPE peeking out from under a big red bow. The huge blue spruce in the front yard would have been dripping with lights. But this year there was not a single decoration, and it made Noelle’s eyes smart, even if her grandfather had waited for her to do it.
Behind the house was a barn, once red, now mostly gray. In the near distance the foothills, snow dusted, rolled away from them, and in the far distance the peaks of the Rockies were jagged and white against a bright blue sky.
They passed the barn on the way to the house, and two large gray horses with feathered feet and dappled rumps came running out of a paddock behind it.
“Hello, Fred, hello, Ned,” she said affectionately.
Noelle went over to the fence and held out her hand. Fred blew a warm cloud of moist air onto her hand. She reached up to touch his nose, but just as she did, a tiny little horse, as black as Smiley, exploded through the snow from behind the barn, and the other two took off, snorting and blowing.
The tiny horse, having successfully chased away the competition, strained its neck to reach over the fence, and nipped at where her fingers dangled.
She snatched them away, and the pony gave an indignant shake of its scruffy black mane and charged off in the direction it had come.
“Who—or what—is that?” she asked.
“That’s Gidget,” her grandfather said. “She seems like a nasty little piece of work, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find a pony close to Christmas.”
“A pony for Christmas?”
Noelle shot her grandfather a look. Again, she had the terrifying thought her grandfather might be slipping, that maybe he thought she was a little girl again.
“She’s a Christmas surprise.”
“Oh! You’re keeping someone’s surprise pony until Christmas?”
“Something like that. Look at you shivering. City gal.”
He took his toque off, revealing a head of very thick silver hair. He placed it on her own head and pulled it tenderly over her ears, as if she was, indeed, twelve again and not twenty-three. This time, instead of terrifying her, the casual gesture made her feel deeply loved.
He moved to her car, an economy model that had struggled a bit on the very long, snowy road that led to his place from the secondary highway. Her grandfather wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. It was a big suitcase, filled with gifts and warm clothes, and her skates. The pond behind the house would be frozen over. The suitcase had wheels, but her grandpa chose to carry it and Noelle knew better than to insult him by offering to help.
When they walked in the back door into the back porch, the smell of coffee was strong in the house, though she immediately missed the just-out-of-the-oven aroma of her grandmother’s Christmas baking.
They shrugged out of jackets and boots, and left the suitcase there. Noelle pulled off her grandfather’s toque and smoothed her hair in the mirror. Her faintly freckled cheeks and nose were already pretty pink from being outside, but she knew herself to be an unremarkable woman. Mouse-brown hair, shoulder-length, straight as spaghetti, eyes that were neither brown nor blue but some muddy moss color in between, pixie-like features that could be made cute—not beautiful—with makeup, not that she bothered anymore.
The dog had already settled in his bed by the wood heater when she got into the kitchen. While her grandfather added wood to the heater, Noelle looked around with fondness.
The kitchen was nothing like the farmhouse kitchens that were all the rage in the home-decorating magazines right now. It had old, cracked linoleum on the floor, the paint was chipping off cabinets and the counters were cluttered with everything from engine pieces to old gloves. The windows were abundant but old, glazed over with frost inside the panes.
Aside from the fact that her grandmother would not have tolerated those engine pieces on the counter, and would have had some Christmas decorations up, Noelle felt that sigh of homecoming intensify within her.
Her grandfather and grandmother had raised her when her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was twelve. In all the world, this kitchen was the place she loved the most and felt the safest.
“Tell me about the helicopter pad,” she said, taking a seat at the old table. The coffee had been brewing on the woodstove, and her grandfather plopped a mug down in front of her. She took a sip, and her eyes nearly crossed it was so strong. She reached hastily for the sugar pot.
“Well, it really started when I was watching the news one night.” He took the seat across the table from her and regarded her with such unabashed affection that it melted her heart and the intensity of that feeling home grew.
“There was this story about this girl—not here, mind, England or Vancouver—”
Both equally foreign places to her grandfather.
“—who was going to be all alone for Christmas, so she just put an ad on something like I-Sell and all these people answered her, and she chose a family to have Christmas with.”
Her grandfather was beaming at her as if this fully explained the helicopter pad he was building in his cow pasture.
“Go on.”
“So I was on there anyway, trying to figure out how to put up a posting for my old junk in the barn, and I just had this thought that I missed Christmas the way it used to be.”
“You and me and Grandma?” she said wistfully, thinking of music and baking and decorating, and neighbors dropping by.
“Even before that. You know, TV was late coming to these parts. It was better without it. And a whole lot better without the interstate.”
No point telling him again. Noelle waited.
“Don’t even get me going on what cell phones are doing to the world.”
“I won’t,” Noelle said, though in truth she knew it wouldn’t be long before she missed all her social media platforms. Or more to the point, relentlessly and guiltily spying on someone else’s newly exciting life through their prolific postings.
“We used to have big gatherings at Christmas,” her grandfather said longingly. “When I was a boy, on Christmas Day the whole community would show up at the old hall, and there would be a Christmas concert, and dinner, and games. Those tables would be groaning under the weight of turkeys and hams and bowls of mashed spuds and pies. Oh, the pies! The women would try to outdo themselves on pies.
“People sang, and talked together. They exchanged gifts with their neighbors. Not much, you see, a homemade whistle, a flour sack, bleached white and embroidered with something nice, like Bless This House. If you knew a family that was having a rough go, you made sure all the kids had a present, and that they got a big fat ham to take home.”
Noelle’s sense of worry was gnawing at her again. As lovely a picture as he was painting, her grandfather had never been like this. Grandma had pretty much looked after Christmas, he’d done the outside decorating and hitched up the old horses
