Christmas is a time for families, and as Sister Julienne returned to her cell late that Christmas night, she felt as though every familial experience and emotion had washed over her that day. The simple, peaceful joy of placing the figure of the Christ Child in the crib during Midnight Mass, completing the Holy Family, to the far more chaotic, but equally joyous, placing of her extended family around the rooms, halls, and tables of Nonnatus House. An ever expanding extended family at that. She had intentionally asked Colette to help her with the setting of the lunch table, to ensure that the most recent addition to the family knew that she would always have a place beside everyone else at Nonnatus House.
As much as she had hoped that, this year, Christmas Day would be uninterrupted by the shrill ring of the Nonnatus House telephone, Sister Julienne knew that the vocation she had taken meant that the needs and desires of her patients would always take precedence over those of her own. That Christmas Day had been the busiest she had ever known, with herself, Sisters Francis and Hilda, Mother Mildred, Nurse Franklin, Dr Turner, Shelagh, and even young Timothy, all called out to attend births or assist with newborns.
"Young Timothy," she chuckled to herself. He was far from the little boy who had recently lost his mother whom she remembered being dragged from clinic to clinic all those years ago. And so very much like his father.
And an unusually busy day, inevitably, ends up being fraught with problems. Complicated deliveries and babies requiring oxygen, like Mrs Kaufopolous', she could handle. But a baby, screaming at the top of its lungs, unable to feed, due to heroin withdrawal. That didn't happen in Poplar. Was Mother Mildred truly serious when she said that this would become more common? The more she tried to shake such a thought from her mind the more it troubled her. Times were changing in Poplar. In many ways, life had improved so much for the good. But modernity, it seems, didn't always mean a step in the right direction.
As she was eating her rather belated, and much anticipated, Christmas lunch, Sister Julienne had silently thanked the Lord that someone had remembered that she didn't like sprouts. Only someone who knew her well would have even noticed such a detail, for, for reasons she would rather keep to herself, she preferred not to mention her aversion to the little, round, green, vegetable. As she'd wiped her lips for the final time, she had wondered who had done her such a service. Returning home from that difficult stint at the Maternity Home, she had watched Mother Mildred with the children with a sense of silent envy, wondering whether, if a certain election had gone another way, their places would have been reversed today. If she had been elected Mother Superior, would she have been the one to have swanned in on a milk float wanting to be entertained? Would she have been the one who could have spent Christmas Night, warm and settled in the parlour, reading to an audience of captivated children settled at her feet? Would such moments of perfection have outweighed the aspects of the job she had feared so much?
At the end of the evening, she had embraced Timothy, Angela, May, and Teddy one by one, before moving on to their beloved parents. All babies are miracles of course, but the creation of the Turner family was truly miraculous in nature, the product of a set of circumstances more perfectly aligned than anything that could be predicted by one of Sister Monica Joan's astrology charts. And, once she had waved the last of their guests out into the cool crispness of the Christmas night, she had murmured "someone's tired," to Nancy, having noticed a sleepy-looking Colette clinging to her. She'd gently guided them up towards the stairs before making both of them mugs of warm sugared milk dusted with cinnamon to go to bed with. As she handed Colette her mug, she read a look of hesitant confusion upon the face of the little girl, snuggled in spare blankets on the camp bed in Nancy's room for the night. Perhaps offers of kindness from a nun were still alien to her. Perhaps children didn't take warm milk and cinnamon to bed as a treat anymore. How she regretted her initial hostility towards both Nancy and Colette. It was nice to have a child in the house, even if only on the rarest of special occasions. She embraced Colette no less tenderly than she had each Turner. They would both be asleep now, catching up on their beauty sleep before the wedding and the excitement that the day would bring, especially to the younger members of Nonnatus House.
Preparing for bed, Sister Julienne stared into the mirror as she washed her face. She let out a small sigh as she caught sight of her tired eyes, the wrinkles radiating across her face, the faded beauty of that which she knew she did once possess. Her aged, jaded, reflection morphed in her mind to the radiant freshness of Lucille's visage, her beauty restored by the power of a most unlikely source.
"What a time to be getting married," she murmured to her reflection, "what a time to be young. What a time to be alive."