Snowflakes and Sugar Plums

Pillow stuffed with snowflakes, Paige dozed. These weren’t the snowflakes of legend that succumbed to heat and time. These were the snowflakes of the Pole and they never lost their cool. Because they were always cold, they were perfect companions for Christmas Eve, the night one froze the sugar plums in their dreams.

Paige had a large collection of sugar plums, but thirsted for one in particular. In her dreams she sees her mother, father, parents of long past. She lives alone now, in an igloo, lucky her skin is resilient as the snowflakes, numb. If she can freeze that sugar plum, that memory too old to remember, she has a chance to have her parents.

She stumbles through lanes of giant candy canes, avoids cloven hoofs raining down, presses her palms to her ears over the bellow of partridges and turtle doves, until she finds them. They wear red fur rimmed in white. Her father smiles wide, his cheeks flush, his belly bouncing. Her mother stands with the sweet aroma of cookies wafting from her. In her dream, Paige pinches her eyes shut, attempting to freeze the moment. When she opens her eyes, her parents are gone.

Again, she opens her eyes, this time in the real world. She gasps. Her snowflakes have vanished. In their place rests a candle magically lit so it can’t burn, only warms her hands. Through moan of wind and snow, she hears the jingles that find her once a year.

Static

A hiss interrupted Janice’s Christmas tunes, always. Not the usual radio static, no. She heard it over the mall intercom while watching shoppers stumble with gift bags weighing down one arm, a screaming toddler hanging off the other, men browsing women’s clothing stores here and jewelry shops there, all with the same baffled look on their faces. She heard it when she tried plugging her ears with headphones. She heard the noise then too, coating the holly, jolly music streaming in, noise like a slow unending sigh streaming from her iPod. She yanked out her plugs. People passed on by. Everyone was so oblivious, and none of them heard the hiss masked with holiday cheer.

Why should she hear it, Janice with her unadorned apartment, parents MIA, and nonexistent love life? Janice bought one lonely Christmas present for herself and placed it under her naked tree. She couldn’t wait to open it. She had been searching the mall for the perfect set. Finally, she’d come home with one, provided by one of the men in the jewelry store. They’d been a chore to wrap, the hue of the wrapping paper going from white to pink to red in a minute’s span. Still, they were wonderful ears.

Perhaps, when she put them on, the noise would go away.

Ornament Too Many

“Tree’s a bit cluttered this year,” Xen tells his wife. He flips through his newspaper, casting glances at the tree, watching his wife bustle with ornament after ornament atop a ladder. The tree spans a good ten feet, its tip tapping the ceiling. The ornament’s rainbow décor blots out the tree’s natural green, weighing down its limbs like oversized dewdrops.

“What do you suggest, dear?” Xen’s wife sweeps her hair from her eyes, searching a place for a bulbous red globe in her hands. “Most of these have been in our family for years.”

“New ones are crafted every day.” Xen shifted his reading glasses. “I say, ‘out with old, in with new.’ Snuff out the ones going on a few billion in age, dear.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Xen’s wife moans. Xen watches her fumble, unhanding the ladder. The red sphere still in her hand, she brushes over a couple blue ones, shifts one with lollipop-bright rings, another with a perfect red spot. “They are old, indeed. But they add something to the atmosphere, I think. Like this one here— Opps, oh my!”

An ornament leaps with the branches, sails down, down, to shatter on the floor. Shards of blue dotted brown and blue disrupt the tile.

Xen sighs as his eyes return to his paper. “Don’t worry, dear,” he says with a dismissive wave of his purple hand. “That one was getting dull anyway.”