I am awakened,
no earlier than usual,
with a gentle cry of,
"Mommy, it's Christmas!"
I open my eyes to a blue-lit bedroom,
the sun having not risen to christen the day with joy.
Though tired,
I grin at my mirror-image practically jumping up and down at the foot of our bed,
her baby brother still asleep in his room.
Peeta's morning sigh of content sounds out in the space just above my head,
and I look up to give him a morning kiss before we venture downstairs.
"Merry Christmas, Katniss," he smiles down at me.
"Merry Christmas," I say, rolling out from underneath his arm and
placing my feet onto the cold floor.
My daughter takes this as her cue to tug on my hand with the stubborn persistence that can only come from me.
I laugh instead of being irritated, because it's Christmas,
as she drags me down our staircase and into our living room,
where a simply decorated tree gleams in the early morning darkness,
brown paper packages clumped around its base.
Peeta is not far behind us,
holding the baby close to his chest.
He passes him to me with another kiss,
then moves to start a fire as I settle down to watch our daughter unwrap her gifts.
It's snowing outside,
a pretty white fluff that we never would have gotten twenty years ago.
Without the thickness of the coal dust, though,
it can settle purely on the ground undisturbed,
and glistens white instead of turning gray.
It is the perfect backdrop to the squeals of excitement coming from our girl,
the gentle gurgles of our baby boy as he wakes up in my arms,
the contented sips of hot chocolate (which we have loved since the trains).
It goes on like this for a while,
even after she has gone through all her presents.
She plays on in the light of the colorful tree and the ever-rising sun
until we tell her we have to get ready,
because our crowd of non-family family is coming soon.
Peeta is in the middle of baking all sorts of delicious treats and breads and cakes,
the kind that fill you full with a sweetness,
when the first batch of them start trampling in through the cold.
Gale stomps in with his hooligans of a family,
Johanna not bothering to tell her children to take their snowy boots off before running through our house,
in her typical Johanna fashion.
I decide to forget it since their first destination is me,
hugging me with cries of, "Merry Christmas, Auntie Katniss!"
and running off to Peeta in the kitchen.
Hazelle and Posy and Rory and Vick traipse in sometime after them,
with their respective spouses,
and Haymitch waltzes in,
only tipsy on some eggnog,
and adding to the noise in a festive sort of way.
Annie and her son are last,
coming in with Effie on their heels,
straight from the train station.
And so,
in no time at all,
our house is filled with the kind of muted noise that comes from big families at Christmastime.
Children are comparing gifts,
running to play hide and seek or some other silly nonsensical game.
Peeta bakes and Hazelle helps.
I would offer, except we all know that dinner would then be delayed for forever since Peeta would be stuck correcting my errors.
I really am no baker,
even after all these years with him.
Later I will bring the turkey Rory and I caught yesterday in from the freezer outside,
and Gale will probably help me cook it,
and the kitchen will become very busy with bakers and cooks and salad-tossers.
But for now,
we sit comfortably in any seat we can find;
around the table,
on the sofas in the living room,
even on the stairs.
We laugh and sip eggnog and nibble treats Peeta has finished,
cookies with trees and Santas iced onto them,
bite-sized cakes
and peppermint flavored candies.
I imagine we'll stay this way until dinner,
and again afterwards.
We do.
The kitchen is clean and Peeta is finally on the couch next to me,
joining in our casual conversations.
I just put our son down for a catnap,
and some of the kids are tittering from our daughter's room.
I'm leaning my head on his shoulder,
letting my eyes rest,
when she comes downstairs.
I suppose this is the start of it, then;
the gradual parade of worn out children seeking parents' laps that always inevitably takes place at gatherings such as these.
She is almost always the first,
and so I am not surprised when I see her shuffling toward her father and I.
I reach up over Peeta and,
without missing a beat in the conversation,
pull her onto my lap,
tickling her little sweater-covered arm gently as she sits,
content to stare out at all of the people she knows to love her,
not making a peep.
And I can't help but think of the moments leading up to her conception,
the still dark moments of the night where I felt almost nothing but fear,
save for a few peaceful thoughts.
One of those thoughts was of Christmas, I remember.
Thoughts of how she would be happy and content,
just as she is at this very moment.
I remember my Christmases as a child.
They were not like this.
In fact, they were anything but.
Was there a gathering of people in the small shack we called our home?
There was.
But it was not warm.
There was hardly a feast. Perhaps my father picked up some sort of rare root or something, but that was the extent of it.
Our bellies were not full as we fell asleep.
We could not look around the room and meet eyes with healthy, happy people who loved us with all that they had.
There were no gifts,
no Christmas songs,
no trees.
My memory is quite tainted as hers never will be.
Which is how I know we have succeeded.
My child is full and happy and succumbing to the exhaustion of a busy day with her cousins,
and she is listening to my heartbeat through my shirt and the deepened echo of my voice through my chest,
and she is sucking her thumb in the warmth of mine and her father's love,
and we have succeeded.
It is Christmas,
and she is happy.
And I have a child because of thoughts of this memory-making,
and I am happy.
So I settle into the curvature of my husband's neck,
tuning out the drabble of spoken words by our dearest friends,
and let my breathing fall in tune with that of my daughter,
who is falling asleep as I am,
contentedly in my lap.