“Why do you think we are pressing so quickly for your marriage and kept our plans silent until last night? Because we suspected it would be met with this reaction. Halloween was merely the first to come forward with objections. This is to mollify them until we can proceed. Nothing they do would actually stop us, but the hassle of being delayed by any acts of drama from them is easily sidestepped by a few weeks of half-truths. We allow them to feel as though they are making their own play; meanwhile, our plans carry on, unmolested.”
Kris shakes his head, and I watch his brief spurt of fight ebb away.
My turn.
“This is wrong,” I say. “All this manipulation—it’swrong.And you know it.”
Dad’s face drops, showing a flicker of something like sorrow, but it’s gone in a flash. “What I know is that the type of joy that Christmas brings—tradition, camaraderie, and family—is capable of global transformation. The more we can strengthen our holdings, the more we will be able to bring that sort of joy to the world.”
“Do we?” I ask. “Bring that sort of joy now? Because from what I see, Christmas is—well, it’s what I was railing about before. Cheap plastic shit and gifts and nothingmeaningful—”
“For now.” Dad’s lips are in a thin line. “We must make concessions for what can be easily reproduced with the least amount of magic in favor of extending Christmas’s reach.”
I shake my head. “So youarefocusing on Christmas being cheap and commodified?”
“Temporarily. For this initial goal, to spread our influence beyond that of any other Holiday, we must make adjustments.”
I’d been half joking before when I’d snapped at Neo about trading Iris for cheap plastic trinkets. But—I wasn’t wrong. Dad is letting Christmas be known forstuffand ineffectual nonsense so he canstretch our control, sacrificing any true, lasting goodness we might create.
Has Christmaseverbeen capable of true, lasting goodness, though? If it was, wouldn’t things be…different?
He believed we were capable of bringing happiness to the world. The look on his face when I was younger and he’d talked aboutour—his and mine—duties. He’dbelievedin Christmas, more thanthis.
Hadn’t he?
“So Iris and I get married after youlieto Halloween,” I say. “Which gives them double the incentive to carry through on any retaliation afterwards. They could turn opinion against us, at the very least. I know you hate that.”
“Christmas and Easter will be united. Halloween will realize they won’t win.”
I grab my head, my headache doubling, tripling, until streaks of light pulse across my eyelids.
“And what if I just don’t want to marry her?” I ask. Because it’s all I have left. “What if I just hate seeing you treat my best friend like this?”
I feel his presence move.
I feel him stand in front of me.
“You will trust, then, that the decisions I make are the best things for you and our Holiday,” he tells me.
No magic threat needed. His tone is enough. Confident, calm. He honestly believes this is right.
I want to scream at him that he’s wrong, but he wasn’talwayswrong, and I don’t know how to get back to the way things used to be because I don’t reallyrememberthe way things used to be, I’m just holding on to this little ember of hope based around flashes of childhood memories.
Maybe this is who Dad has always really been. I was just too young and idealistic to realize it.
He turns away. “It goes without saying, but this discussion is not to leave this room. Now get dressed—I expect better from you both.”
He leaves.
Kris shakes his head in the proceeding silence. “We should, um—we should go see Iris.”
“Her father will probably tell her.”
“Maybe.” I hear the dip in Kris’s voice. Yeah,maybe.Or she’ll find out about it when Halloween comes back and agrees and all this shit hits the fan.
The worst part is watching my brother try to pull himself together. And imagining Iris’s face when she finds out she’s been used,again.
One of the first ways I tried to harness magic was to guarantee that my brother had a merry Christmas. But I’d created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because I made sure he had all his favorite foods—waffles and roast turkey and gingerbread cookies—and the best gifts—a bunch of video games and some really nice leather-bound notebooks because he’s always writing about something, even when we were kids—and we did all the activities he loved most—sleigh racing, snowball fights, ice skating. So he did have a merry Christmas, but it wasn’t made because of magic. It’s not that easy.
