Every year it was the same from her. A dorky, often itchy sweater of some shade of blue-How many were there? Dipper wondered when he was eight-and stitched with… something. A star, dragon, cookie… one year he even got one with a sheep's head. He preferred not to think too deeply on that.
But hey, barely anyone got anything for the eighth day anyway, so he took each sweater with a grain of salt and always remembered to thank his sister.
"So… what's this supposed to be?" But this year was a bit of an exception.
"You don't see it? Come on; I give you three guesses," she urged him.
"Well… it'suh…" Too widespread to be just a shape, too random to be a pattern, and too colorful that… Alright, I'm stuck.
"Mabel, you mind giving me a clue?"
His sister rubbed her chin in teasing smugness, made all the more transparent with the cheeky grin she failed to hide. She widened her eyes as if in a trance and started to speak in a faux-tambor.
"Look within to find the cluuue and connect the sides one and… uh, two."
He raised an eyebrow. She was usually so straightforward with her gifts; why the mystery now? But as he looked down at his present again, he noticed something.
Well, no wonder he was thrown off the first time he saw it; the sweater wasn't blue like it was for every year. There was some sky blue around part of the collar, which faded into lavender, then a dark navy, and then a soft pink and orange before it circled back to the blue again. From the midsection down were many variations of green, yellow and brown yarn with some smatterings of red that reminded him of the trees and wildflowers that grew near the shack. But then there were those odd shapes smattered all around the surface; just bare stitchings of figures that seemed to pepper the ground and sky.
And that's when he saw it: a little figure on the ground with a pointed head, a striped arc coming out of where its mouth should be. Dipper flipped the sweater over to see the true extent of Mabel's handiwork-and could barely believe his eyes. There at the ground were red cloth pieces cut out to form the gnomes, with one emitting rainbow vomit. Hulking masses of brown represented the Manotaurs; ethereal blue shapes near the top became the ghosts from the convenience store, and deep within the trees was the distinctive hat and yellow mask of the Summerween Trickster. Most, if not all of the strange creatures from that unforgettable summer of long ago were here, symbolized in one color against the rich greenery and shifting sky.
"Mabel, this isn't a sweater-it's a mural!" he whispered in awe.
"I knew you were getting kind of sick of all the sweaters after about twenty years, but I wasn't going to let go of old traditions just yet." Dipper looked at her with an admiring smile and gave his sister a tight squeeze around the shoulders. They stayed like that for awhile, recalling that summer where their lives took a turn for the surreal. Nothing besides Gravity Falls could have put them through so many scares, tears, and laughs.
"Too bad that this took WAAY longer than I expected, though, or else I could make more!" she exclaimed with an exasperated sigh.
"Well, it'll be hard to top this."
"How about I make one for that weird future place we went to, with the big baby head? Oh, I got it! The time when Quentin Trembly was President!" Her eyes lit up like light bulbs as the flood of good memories and new ideas swept around her brain. Dipper exhaled through his nose and smirked. Even after the crazy that continued with their lives after that insane summer, there was him and Mabel: Mystery Twins, opposite in many ways and yet unmistakably peas from the same pod, laughing and pushing buttons and patting each others' backs like that first day after beating a gang of gnomes.