This is a Secret Santa fic for valoisqueens on tumblr. Here's the request:
Sybil, Tom, and Sybbie (preferably called Saoirse) and any younger children you'd like to add, are celebrating Christmas in Boston circa about 1924/5. Characters comment on how Christmas in Boston is different from Christmas at Downton or Ireland? What is it like for the Bransons to be immigrants? What is it like for them to be surrounded by other Irish folk but also Italians, African-Americans, Poles, Indian-Americans, Germans, Puerto Ricans, Russians, etc.; basically how do they experience their life in America in the context of America as a melting pot. Other Details/Specifics: I would love if you threw in Edith and Marigold, having them visit for the holidays, or having also moved to Boston. Also, I've always kind of read Edith as a lesbian suffering from compulsory heterosexuality.

To meet the request, the setting is thus: The Bransons live in Boston's South End, which is described thusly: Since the 1880s the South End has been characterized by its diversity, with substantial Irish, Jewish, African-American, Puerto Rican(San Juan Street area), Chinese, and Greek populations. In this story, some of Tom's extended family live nearby, and they are surrounded by a diverse lot of neighbors, including the family with whom share the Victorian walk-up. They left Downton after their daughter, named Saoirse here, was born, so she has lived most of her life in Boston as an American.

When the story begins, they are getting ready for a visit from Edith and Marigold, who is now 2 years old and who Sybil doesn't know is Edith's daughter yet.


December 20, 1925

"I said no peeking!" Tom yelled.

"My eyes are closed!" Sybil said in a huff.

Tom hoisted his load and looked around in the small sitting room of their apartment, trying to find the best place for it.

"What's happening?" Sybil asked, her impatience and curiosity getting the better of her.

"Just wait!" Tom replied.

Sybil could hear the strain his voice. Is he lifting something?

When Tom had left early that morning with Jose, their neighbor and friend who lived downstairs with his family, Tom promised they'd return later that day with a "big surprise," Sybil was positively stumped as to what he could be talking about. She sensed a smell in the air, like Tom had brought the outdoors in with him, but beyond his clunking around, she had no clue.

"This is . . . well, it's something."

Eyes still closed, Sybil turned toward the voice that had just spoken, next to her. It was Jose's wife and Sybil's dear friend, Hortenzia—or, as Sybil knew her, "Ten."

"Does it strike you as a good or bad idea?"

Ten laughed her loud, infectious laugh. "Good, I think, but messy," she said in the accented English that Sybil had initially been hard pressed to decipher but that now was as comforting to her as the sound of her own voice. Like Sybil's, it was foreign to the Americans who surrounded them, but in a different way. Ten was a native of Colombia, and had moved to Boston with Jose, a Puerto Rican, at nearly the same time Sybil and Tom.

They had moved from New York City, where they'd met and spent their first years as a married couple and where Ten had worked for a time as a housekeeper for Martha. Their journey from New York to the South End of Boston had been far shorter than that of Sybil and Tom, who'd traveled across an ocean. But both were young couples with young children, interested in arts and ideas and broadening the rights and minds of their offspring. They all took to one another straight away.

"Ay, Dios!" Ten exclaimed in her native Spanish—as she was prone to do from time to time—upon seeing her husband, who followed Tom all the way into the room carrying the back of the load. "It's big!"

Sybil jumped at the sound of moving furniture. "Can I please open my eyes now? I want to see what you're doing to my sitting room!"

Tom laughed, directing Jose to lower his end. After a bit of adjusting, satisfied that it looked about as well as it was going to for now, Tom said, "OK, open your eyes."

Sybil did so and was met with the sight of a large, natural pine so tall that the top bent down slightly as it pushed against the ceiling.

Tom watched Sybil's awed expression, unsure what to make of it. "Not exactly fit for a Downton Christmas, but it'll do for us, don't you think?"

Sybil turned to Tom and launched herself into him. "It's wonderful."

"You like it, then?" Tom said, laughing into her hair as he squeezed her tightly.

Sybil pulled away and looked at the tree again. "I love it, but darling, you didn't have to go to all this trouble just because Edith is coming for a visit."

"Edith is your eldest sister, yes?" Jose asked, still shaking stray pine needles from his jacket.

"No, the eldest is Mary," Sybil answered. "Edith is next, then me."

"The baby of the family," Ten said.

Sybil smiled at her friend. "Indeed, for better and worse."

"It's nice that she's coming to visit," Ten said. "I assume you were very close."

"To an extent. We loved and supported each other, that much is true. But to be honest, as I grew up I realized I had little in common with my sisters. I feel closer to them now, in our correspondence, than I did in my adolescence, when little of what they were after appealed to me. Edith in particular, in her great longing for acceptance in a world I never wanted to be a part of. I am glad she is coming. I think leaving Downton will do her a world of good."

"Tom said she was bringing a child," Jose said.

"Yes," Sybil answered. "A ward my family took in. I'm not quite sure what the circumstances were."

"Or why she's bringing her on such a long journey," Tom added.

"Edith has been rather unlucky in love," Sybil said.

"I'll say," Tom cut in again.

Sybil shot an annoyed look at him, which made Jose laugh. "There's a story there, I take it?"

"There is, but—"

"But she's your sister and a sister's trust is never to be betrayed," Ten said quickly and seriously, leveling her own husband with her eyes.

"I suppose Edith has come to think of the child as the one she never had. I don't mind saying she was never one to hold out much hope for herself—that's another reason I'm glad she's coming. I hope it means she has a more hopeful outlook."

"We can't wait to meet her," Ten said with a smile, squeezing Sybil's arm. "What time does she arrive tomorrow?"

"WHAT IS THAT!?"

The four adults turned their heads to see that their children, Saoirse and Miguel, had run in from Saoirse's room, where they'd been playing together, and spotted the huge tree.

"It's our Christmas tree!" Tom said, walking over to his daughter and hoisting her up to his hip. At now five years of age, Saoirse was hardly a babe any more, but Tom hadn't stopped spoiling her.

"But Da, how is the star going to fit on top if the top reaches the ceiling?"

"We'll find a way," he said, setting her down again and tickling her sides.

"Papi, did you get us a big tree too?" Miguel asked Jose eagerly.

"No, mijo."

"But why!?"

"Because this one is big enough to share!" Saoirse said, matter-of-factly.

Sybil smiled brightly, always awed by her daughter's generous nature. "Absolutely, this shall be our tree. Why don't you help us decorate it?"

Miguel's eyes brightened. "Can we, mami?"

"Yes, OK," Ten said looking to Sybil, who nodded in reassurance. "Let's go get our stuff and you kids can do it while we sing the novena. You don't mind hosting it tonight, do you?"

"We'd love it!" Sybil said.

The novena was a Colombian tradition that Ten had grown up with involving a mix of prayer and song over the nine days leading up to Christmas Eve.

Though Sybil had converted to Catholicism, she remained rather ambivalent about religion. Still, she loved how the Irish traditions brought Tom's extended family together here in America, especially during the Christmas holidays. And Miguel and Ten had introduced the Bransons to a new perspective on the Catholic faith, given their Latin American roots. The amalgam of old world and new amid which Saoirse was growing up was exactly the kind of life Sybil had hoped her daughter would experience when she and Tom, Saoirse still only a tiny bundle in their arms, stepped onto the ship that would bring them to America.

Support from Tom's family, and Martha's generosity (she'd bought the house they lived in) had landed them in a comfortable home and neighborhood in Boston where the Tom continued his newspaper work and Sybil her nursing. Jose taught music at their local parish school where Saoirse and Miguel would enroll the following year. For now, they stayed home with Ten, who spoke to them both in Spanish when it was just the three of them alone.

Between Ten's Spanish paired and the Irish words she'd picked up from her Branson cousins, Saoirse had proven quiet adept at languages, which tickled both of her parents. Sybil in particular, who remembered long, boring sessions of French with her governess, who'd promised learning a new tongue would make Sybil a true woman of the world. Sybil had never thought of herself as such, but her daughter, even living a more humble life, was on a trajectory that might one day actually give that phrase—woman of the world—true meaning.

"Shall we go find our decorations?" Sybil asked Saoirse, after the neighbors had left. Sybil immediately started jumping up and down, then ran down the hall ahead of her mother.

"I'll find something to secure this so it stays up—and make room for the star," Tom said.

"Good," Sybil said, moving off. Before she'd gone two steps though, Tom grabbed her hand and pulled her back into him.

"I didn't do this for Edith."

"What?"

"What you said earlier, about going to all this trouble because Edith was visiting? I didn't do this for her."

Sybil tilted her head slightly. "Why, then?"

Tom smiled. "For you, of course."

"But I—"

"You would never ask for something like this, darling, but every time we pull out that sad little plastic thing my cousin Charlie gave us, I could see it. I know you don't miss the things you never liked about Downton Abbey, but you miss it during the holidays."

Sybil looked down and bit her lip. This much was true. She never realized it was so plain on her face, but then Tom could always read her so well. "It's not that I don't love our holidays here."

"I know. There's plenty I miss about how we grew up in Ireland, and as much as we disliked your family's way of living . . . standing in the great room with everyone during Christmas and the servants' ball. It was a lovely time of year. I miss it too."

"We do have wonderful traditions here—and friends. It's wonderful to see how different so much of the world is through the eyes of Jose, Ten and Miguel, and everyone else on the block. I wouldn't give any of this up for anything. But I don't want to forget where I'm from, if for no other reason than I always want to remember how far I've come."

"For Saoirse too. She was born at Downton, after all. For that alone, I'll never forget the place. If having an impractically large Christmas tree is how we teach her about your childhood, then so be it."

Sybil laughed, then looked up again, tears in her eyes. She leaned into Tom for a long hug. "Thank you."

"This isn't quite like your father's tree, but it's . . ."

"It's ours," Sybil said. "And it's perfect."