Home for Christmas

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Day 10: Cookies

A few hours had passed since the carnage that could result only from over-indulging a six-year-old on Christmas morning when Angela's phone lit up with a message from Brennan.

How do you feel about Wong Fu's for Christmas dinner?

It wouldn't be the first time, Angela replied before handing her phone to Hodgins so that he could read the message, too.

"This is going to be interesting," Hodgins said. "Are they coming here, or are we going there?"

"They're coming here," Angela confirmed. The original plan had been to let Booth and Brennan host, as they usually did on this kind of occasion. However, Hodgins had only been home for one day and Angela had determined that it was too early to present his newfound freedom with the challenges inherent in visiting Booth and Brennan's glass house in the woods. Brennan had offered to move the party to Angela's house rather than cancel.

Angela wasn't inclined to tell Hodgins any of this, even though she knew that he was quite capable of figuring it out on his own. He wasn't a genius for nothing.

"Who's coming?" he asked, rather than questioning the location of the festivities.

"Just Booth and Brennan and the kids. And Max." Hodgins smiled at that, and Angela smiled back. It was always good to bring a conman to a potentially awkward family dinner so he could charm all of the participants. "And my father," she added.

Hodgins' eyes widened.

"He was here last night when I put out Michael Vincent's presents from Santa," Angela whispered, although she didn't need to. Michael Vincent did not glance up from his new set of action figures, who appeared to be preparing to do battle with a stuffed dragon. "If he didn't kill you in your sleep, he's not going to kill you."

"I'm not afraid that your father is going to kill me," said Hodgins unconvincingly. "No one else from the Jeffersonian is coming?"

"Everyone else has plans. I'm not saying that they're good plans, but plans."

"Who has bad plans?" asked Hodgins, and she was pleased that he wasn't dwelling on either her father or his unofficial confinement to their home.

"Cam and Michelle regretted agreeing to the cruise with the extended family the minute they did it, but they had no way of backing out. I can't wait to hear the story that comes out of that one. And Aubrey has decided to be romantic."

"Why is that a bad plan?"

"With Jessica and with Leslie Green."

"Good luck with that."

"I know, right? He swears it was an accident."

"I swear it was an accident," was the first thing Max said when he arrived carrying an armload of grease-stained paper bags from Wong Fu's. "Did Tempe tell you it was on purpose?"

"She didn't tell us anything," said Angela, as she tried to avoid tripping over Christine, who was racing toward Michael Vincent and his new toys. Baby Hank squirmed in Brennan's arms, wanting to get down and play, too.

"I thought it went without saying that we never have Wong Fu's on Christmas on purpose," said Brennan.

"That was definitely your fault," Booth told Brennan a little too quickly.

"I don't know what that means," said Max, borrowing one of his daughter's favorite phrases.

"Apparently this is something that happens to us every ten years," Angela explained. She directed the placement of takeout containers on the formally set table, and admired the happy incongruity of white cartons next to crystal goblets.

"They got themselves quarantined in their lab for Christmas ten years ago," Billy explained to Max. "We had to come visit them through the windows."

"Exposure to Valley Fever," Brennan told her father.

"Because she ordered her people to cut into the body when they should have been at the Christmas party," said Booth.

"Because you brought her the body during the Christmas party," Angela objected. "You know that's like waving red meat in front of a pitbull. Especially since she was trying to get out of going to the party anyway."

"So they delivered takeout Chinese to us while we were stuck in there," said Hodgins, and everyone let him get away with failing to volunteer that he was the one who hadn't worn a mask and had introduced the contaminants into the lab's air supply in the first place.

"Which brings us back to, why are we eating Chinese today?" Angela asked her guests.

"That's an excellent question, Angela," said Brennan. "There was a complete, organic, nutritionally balanced meal in our refrigerator waiting to be prepared today. Everything was perfectly fine last night when Booth took Christine to Midnight Mass."

"Tempe and I were making sure that… everything was going to be ready for this morning. I went outside to make sure that the lights were on so that Santa would be able to see the house," Max continued.

"He went outside and saw that the house down the road had a star on it that was higher than the star over our door," Brennan elaborated.

"Your house is far enough back from the next house that you can't even see them both at the same time unless you're really trying," said Angela.

"You would think that would be relevant," said Brennan.

"No, you, wouldn't," said Billy. "Go on."

"I only had to move the star a little to put it on the roof instead of where it was," said Max. "I was defending my family's honor. We went back to assembling that pink Disney princess castle thing, and everything was fine."

"Until Booth was driving home in the middle of the night and noticed the neighbors up on their roof."

"They'd gotten out a pole, and put it on their roof. The only reason that they did it was to make sure that their star was higher," said Max. "In the early hours of Christmas morning. It was not in the proper spirit of the season."

"And more importantly, it wasn't as high as that tree near our front door," said Booth. "The only problem was that we couldn't really plug it in unless we ran the extension cord around the side of the house from the kitchen."

"Which blew a fuse," said Brennan. "Which might not have been a problem if they hadn't accidentally propped the refrigerator door open, or if alternatively they had noticed the blown fuse sometime before this morning."

"You didn't have to throw out everything in the fridge, Tempe," Max scolded. "Not all of it was spoiled."

"But we like Chinese food better than turkey!" Christine piped up as she tore back into the room and took her seat.

"Chinese food comes with fortune cookies," added Michael Vincent, as if that settled the matter.

At the end of the meal, they read out their fortunes. Michael Vincent was quite disappointed when his advised him that "Good clothes open many doors. Go shopping." Angela personally thought that that was excellent advice.

She couldn't disagree with her own fortune, either. "Great acts of kindness will befall you in the coming months," she read. She didn't doubt it. The past month had been terrible, but her family had benefitted from acts of kindness great and small.

"The limit to your abilities is where you place it," Hodgins read.

Angela wondered for a moment whether Sid couldn't magically assign the correct cookie to the correct person as well as the correct meal. It turned out that she wasn't the only one.

"It's true, you know," she heard her father murmur quietly to Hodgins as the party broke up. "What you got in your fortune. Things might be trickier now, but you can still get anything done if you put your mind to it. It's especially true since you've got my daughter's love behind you."

"Thank you, Sir," said Hodgins.

"See, Angie?" said Billy cheerfully when he noticed that his daughter had been listening in. "I'm an excellent father-in-law. Didn't get anybody to climb trees and blow fuses in the middle of the night or anything."

She supposed that that was a fair point.

The End