Sam stepped carefully down the concrete stairs holding the huge box. He had to step carefully, feeling gingerly with a foot before resting his full weight on it, because the box was simply huge. Huge enough that it blocked his view of his own feet...and the nondescript walls gave him no clue as to whether he was at the bottom of the stairs or not, though the doorway to the bunker crept into his vision as a marker.

When he reached the bottom, he fumbled around in the small space, angling the box away from the door, holding it with one hip as he fished in his jeans pocket for the key, pulled it out, and stabbed it into the lock. He twisted the knob, pushed the door open with his chest, and wrangled the box in, angling it back and forth to make it through the door, then dropped it, jingling and jangling, on the landing.

"Dude! What the hell's that?" came Dean's voice from the common room down below. Sam stepped around the box, leaned on the railing, and peered down.

"Christmas!" he answered cheerily.

"Christmas?!" Dean sounded dubious. He was craning his neck, trying to get a look.

Sam reached down, heaved the awkward box up into his arms again, and slowly made his way down the stairs.

"Yup. Yard sale. Some lady was selling off all her old Christmas stuff, so I decided to buy it. We've got plenty of room, and it's about time we tried Christmas decorations here." He waddled forward and dropped the box on one of the old oak tables. Dean moved forward, old gray bathrobe swirling, to watch while Sam popped open the flaps, dug in, and began to haul Christmas items out.

"Lights...snowy village doodad...wreath...another wreath...stuffed elf...fake tree, I think?"

Dean picked up one of the carefully coiled strings of lights, frowned down at it, and began untying the twisty-ties holding it bundled together. "So what brought this on? Not that I disapprove or anything, but, dude, this really isn't your style."

Sam froze, hands halfway out, still holding the box with the artificial tree. He looked down at the remaining decorations, sucked in a deep breath, and said, quietly, "Charlie."

Dean's head jerked toward him. "What?!"

Sam bit his lip, focused on pulling out the tree box. He couldn't look at Dean. "Remember how...how she used to call out 'Merry Christmas!' when we woke her up from a nap...?"

Dean pulled out one of the oak chairs, sat down in it. He looked down at the coil of lights, began slowly pulling it apart to find the plug. "Yeah. I remember," he finally said. His voice cracked a bit.

"Well. Um. This is for Charlie. Because." With that, Sam placed the box of fake tree in the last open space on the table and stood back. He still didn't look at Dean. He remembered the bitterness in his brother's voice as he told him he should be the one on the Hunter's funeral pyre, not Charlie. Talking about her now...well, it was a fraught subject. They hadn't talked about her at all since then.

Dean grunted. Then he stood up, carried the lights over to one of the many outlets they had had to fix to take modern plugs, and plugged the string in. He now had a handful of brightly glowing multi-colored lights that, as he watched, started randomly blinking. It was bright and cheery, and damned if it didn't remind him of Charlie. It hurt. He sighed, turned back to Sam.

"Okay. Yeah. For Charlie." Though he couldn't say it in words, his voice held a kind of peace offering. He knew how much that scene at Charlie's pyre had sliced into Sam, hurt him. "So. Where do we put this damned tree?" he added.

A few hours later, the common room had been transformed. The tree was up (it took some cursing and fiddling to get it right), decked with ornaments and a string of white lights. One wreath had been hung on the outer door of the bunker. Sam had wired the other to the railing of the landing inside. The Christmas village was laid out, complete with soft white fabric representing snow-covered ground, on the common room table they used the least. The silly little stuffed elf perched on the top of the liquor cabinet, guarding their bottles of scotch. Dean had carefully put up the strings of multi-colored lights, outlining the doorways to the common room and the bookcases in the walls.

Sam had tuned in to a Christmas radio station on his phone, plugged it into the speakers. Cheery Christmas carols had accompanied their struggles with the tree: longtime classics, new rock tunes, and songs from the thirties, forties, and fifties.

When Sam finished off the tree with the cheesy plastic star, Dean swung by the liquor cabinet, grabbed a bottle and some glasses, and plunked them down on the table. He began to pour, but Sam held out a hand, holding his back.

"Just a minute. Wait here, and don't pour that yet." And he was off at a run, going up the stairs two at a time, and out the door. Within a few minutes, he was back with two bags of groceries. He strode forward, dug in one of the bags, and hauled out a carton of eggnog.

"Gotta have this, or it isn't a real Christmas. Right?"

Dean grimaced and shrugged. "Dude. You're asking me? I haven't the foggiest. It's not like we've done this a lot. Uh. Yeah, I guess so?" Sam dropped the carton on the table and headed toward the kitchen with the bags.

He called out, "Just hold on a sec." He soon came back, running his hands through his long hair, pushing it away from his forehead, and plopped down with a sigh in a chair across the table from Dean. He opened the eggnog, carefully poured it into the two glasses, then grabbed the scotch and added some. He stirred them with a spoon he had brought with him, then pushed one of the glasses to Dean. He held up his own, tilting it forward.

"To Charlie. And Christmas."

Dean picked up his own glass, clinked it against Sam's, and responded, "To Charlie. And Christmas." Then he downed a gulp and looked around the common room, smiling slightly. "We done good, I think, Sammy."

Sammy looked around, too, taking another sip. "Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right."