Free Holly in Love by Caroline B. Cooney

the muffins. I had such a nice time. And congratulations on winning! I’m truly impressed.” I kept talking on and on, as if we were parting forever and I had to wrap up the loose ends of my entire life.
    Finally I managed to stop babbling. Jamie was just grinning at me. “You’re welcome,” he said. “See you.” He turned and walked off toward his house.
    I felt incredibly lonely, seeing him go. He was broad-shouldered, as big as Stein and Beaulieu and the others on the hockey team. He doesn’t look sixteen, I thought. I took one step after him. “Jamie?” I called.
    He looked back at me, with his same sweet grin. “What?”
    And then I didn’t know why I had called after him. I flushed and stammered a moment. “You aren’t really going to put an antique threshing machine in the backyard, are you?”
    “Probably not. My father’s reached his limit with that hobby. But it’s nice to daydream, don’t you think?”
    I definitely thought. He daydreams, too, I thought. I felt vaguely giddy. We said goodbye again, and more quickly this time, as the sun was gone and the air was turning downright hostile with night cold, and I went home alone.

Ten
    I LOVE CHRISTMAS.
    The gaudy lights, shaped like enormous bells, that are hung each year from the telephone poles in the village. The streams of jazzed-up carols piped through every store. The window decorations with their pretend snow and their flickering lights. Candles on the table and shiny wrapping paper and curling ribbons and bows.
    I love it all.
    In church we hung beautiful evergreen wreaths around the old copper wall sconces and tied them with fragrant winter apples and tiny, scarlet velvet bows. For me, it was the smell of Christmas: apples and pine.
    My father, who frets over everything, worries each year that someone in the village, or from the college, will be alone Christmas Day, and that sounds so awful to him that he extends invitations to anyone who might possibly require the company of strangers for Christmas dinner. So this year our table seated a few stray foreign students (including a confused Hindu and a fascinated Moslem), a few students too broke to fly home for the holidays, a couple of elderly widows, one man in his fifties whose wife had just left him after thirty years of marriage, and my grandmother.
    It was a wonderful meal, with wonderful conversation, and I noticed that Christopher and I had passed out of our embarrassed stage. For years we blushed when Dad prayed, and ducked our heads when he read from Luke, and tried to leave when he lit the Advent candles. But this year I just loved it. As the strangers at our table added their prayers for peace, I thought of Jamie, and what sort of things he might have talked about with my father, and I saw my own father differently: as the sort of man Jamie would consider a friend.
    Dad was especially happy because the church had given almost half again as much money for the migrants as he’d asked for, and so he felt he really was accomplishing something in this wicked world. My mother made no comments, just smiled. I don’t think she’s one fraction as religious as Dad, but she won’t hurt his feelings or confuse the issue by saying it. I hoped that in a few years my mother and I would discuss things like that. Or even this year. Seventeen was adult.
    I had loads of lovely gifts. Long, dangling gold filigree earrings from my grandmother—the sort you’d wear with a satin gown at the party of the year. Two beautiful sweaters—soft pastel knits with creamy snowflake patterns. New boots—thick, furry, lined boots to keep even my toes warm. Beautiful, tiny velvet draperies for the drawing room of my Victorian mansion. Dad had made me an octagonal Shaker barn to go with the mansion. It was a triumph of woodworking, although not precisely a period match.
    “A whole new world!” I said. “Now I’ll need tiny fences and shrubbery and miniature paving bricks for paths. I can make hay from yellow