Title: Memory Holder
Characters: Reid
Rating: PG
Word Count: 371
Disclaimer:. Not mine
Prompt: Dec 29 wreath

A/N: Not beta read

Spencer Reid had one Christmas item the he had moved about with him after he'd had his mother committed, one single item they had used during the holiday season which he hadn't pack away and stuck in storage.

It wasn't very big, just the size of a dinner plate.

It wasn't very fancy.

It was a small pine cone wreath. His mom said that it was the type of wreath her mom loved and she had made it for them when Spencer was three. He sat with her, handing her the small pine cones and watched as she wired them to the form. She told him about Christmas with her family, before…

Before she'd gone off to college clear across the country to a Godless city of sin, studying a useless subject like Literature and aiming to become a professor instead of focusing on being a wife and mother and getting married right out of high school to the nice boy across town, whose family would be a good family to have connections to even though the son (nice as he was) had already been nearly arrested six or seven times for beating on his girlfriends. (His daddy was the DA and his uncle the sheriff, nothing even stuck.)

Before she'd gone and married someone from out where she was living without the proper connections and who would add nothing to the family. Someone who didn't even promise to raise up the next generation to the Lord.

She spoke of baking cookies and making candy. Of delivering homemade jams and jelly to the neighbors and waiting to see what their neighbors brought them. She spoke of ice skating on the pond and going to the town's Christmas party and dance and always having a fancy dress with ribbons and lace in bright red or green. She told of hearing her grandpa read the children tales whenever her dad wasn't home to stop him.

It was about the only time she spoke of before. She wove the only stories Spencer remembers her telling of her childhood into the pine cone wreath. Each cone a story, a memory, a name to be recalled when Spencer was older and wondered from where he came.