Wendip Week 2023
4-No Place Like the Shack for the Holidays
Thanksgiving had become a kind of movable feast. That is, some years the Pines family gathered in Piedmont and alternate years in Gravity Falls to stuff themselves on turkey and stuffing. Except the year of lockdown, when they made do as best they could with separate meals and face-time visiting. It wasn't the same.
This year everyone agreed to Gravity Falls for both Thanksgiving and then later Christmas. Mrs. Pines said she was concerned about Wendy's traveling in her delicate condition, even though Wendy herself helped her dad unload all that firewood with no ill effects whatever. Though Manly Dan allowed her to do that, he sided with Wanda on the issue of travel.
Anyway, Alex had the whole week of Thanksgiving off, and a similar Christmas break, so on the Friday before turkey day he and Wanda flew up to Portland. Dipper had offered them the guest room in their house, but Ford overruled him: "Lorena and I have a much more spacious house, we really like my nephew, and this way you and Wendy won't have to deal with cleaning and so on and you can relax and enjoy the company."
Ford first dropped off their luggage at his house, and then he drove them and Lorena up to Dipper and Wendy's house. Wanda said, "Wendy, let me look at you! What does the doctor say about the children?"
"Everything's going fine," Wendy said. She put one hand on the upper bulge of her tummy bump. "They're growing like weeds. The last ultrasound shows that my aunt Sallie was right—fraternal twins, a boy and a girl!"
"Twins run in our family," Alex said. "You're certainly looking well!"
A car stopped outside, and a moment later the door flew open, and Mabel ran in, flanked by the two happy dogs. "Mom! Dad! Hi, Wendy! Where's Teek? Oh, still behind me—here he comes!"
Teek followed her in, his face a little red from the cold North wind that had sprung up earlier in the day. "Hey, hey," he said to Tripper, who was jumping on everyone in turn. "Calm down!" Then he shook hands with Mr. Pines and exchanged a hug with Wanda. "Sorry, the doggos are a little excited."
"Doggos?" asked Alex with a grin. "Where'd you pick that up?"
Mabel laughed as Tripper and C.D. said hello by nuzzling their knees. "It's this movie he just finished working on!" she said. "The director's. Stephen Wrede, you know, he made Midnight House, Love in the Rain, and London Story. This is his first American film—"
"Shot mostly in Vancouver, though," Teek got in.
"—and he's so British! His accent's posh, and he says things like ecktually and rilly and everything's either rather or quite. 'Rather difficult,' or 'quite brilliant.' And they wrapped the film early and Teek got a bonus and Mr. Wrede wants him to be his chief assistant on Summer Romance next year!"
"Congratulations!" Alex said.
Teek, though now an adult, still had the mildly embarrassed air of a shy teen. "The interiors will all be shot here in Oregon, but there'll be two weeks of second-unit exteriors in Santa Barbara—"
"And Teek will direct those!" Mabel burbled.
"Way to go!" Dipper said.
They chatted for a while, went out for dinner—where they met Stan and Sheila—and had a good visit that day. In the evening, Dipper started a fire in the big stone fireplace, only the fourth one that season, and when the logs began to crackle, he and Wendy sat on the sofa, just gazing into the flames. "Oh," Wendy said, "forgot, I got a text from Aunt Sallie. She says she'll come on Thursday to have Thanksgiving dinner with us. She's insisting on bringing something.
"That great German chocolate cake!" Dipper suggested.
"I'll tell her," Wendy said. "She says that Mabel can bring leftovers to Waddles and Widdles after."
"The chickens will love to see her, too," Dipper said.
"Oh, yeah," Wendy agreed. "Keep meaning to ask, how's the book coming?"
"I'll send it to my agent by the first of December," Dipper said. This one would be Never Raise the Dead, the latest in the Granite Rapids series. In it the Palms twins hosted a karaoke party and, despite the sister's warning, the brother tried a spell from the mysterious diary he had found, and a host of zombies rise from the earth and crash the party. The TV cartoon series had stuck mostly to the books, each novel breaking down into a three- or four-episode arc, but it had interspersed a few original episodes that did not come from the novels.
Whatever, Dipper still received a nice income from his side gig of writing.
Wendy leaned back. "Do I look fat?"
Dipper laughed. "Don't be ridiculous!" He put his hand on her tummy. "You look like an expectant mom with a tiny little bump."
Dr. Greenberg had showed them the latest ultrasound while telling them, "The babies right now are only about the size of an orange. I don't mean a pair of oranges—just one!"
"Yeah, but just wait," Wendy said. "Along about March I'll be pear-shaped."
"You'll still be just as beautiful," Dipper said comfortably.
Soos and Melody hosted the Thanksgiving dinner, and they put two tables together in the big parlor room to accommodate the crowd. Five Pines couples, plus Manly
Dan and Ruby, plus Fiddleford McGucket and Mayellen, and then Aunt Sallie, as well as Teek's parents, Melody, Soos, and their three kids—it was quite a party.
Both Mayellen and Melody had roasted turkeys, and everyone else contributed some side dish. Sallie had brought not only a huge three-layer cake, but also home-made cranberry sauce, a salad, and a loaf of delicious challah and home-churned butter to go with it. Mabel and Teek brought a vegetable-and-cheese casserole, and Mabel had helped make the stuffing.
They chatted about everything, including Teek's and Dipper's achievements, and Mabel talked about her new project, an amateur drama group that would start rehearsing and performing in the spring—the Roadkill County Community Players. The same theater in which Mabel had once thrown a puppet show had been refurbished, and they'd be able to use that.
Wanda told them that Billy Sheaffer—he had visited often and everyone at the table knew, or in the case of the O'Grady family had at least met him—was in high school and doing very well, a top student in science and math, and—Mrs. Pines added, "He's still dating that cute girl, China. They've been best friends since their first day of elementary school!"
"Invite him up for Christmas," Stan recommended. "That'll help him do his, whatcha call it, rehabilitation."
"Very big-hearted of you, Stanley," Ford said, a bit coldly. Although he was always courteous and polite, Stanford sometimes found it hard to accept even this incarnation of Bill Cipher, who by living a normal human life without harming anyone and helping as many as possible, was fulfilling the Axolotl's conditions for redeeming himself.
Anyway, everyone watched the big parade on TV, ate too much, played a slow-motion game of touch football out on the lawn (Ford turned out to be a good receiver—he didn't have the best speed on the field, but his big hands never missed a pass. After the game, they relaxed, warming themselves in the house with tea, hot punch, and a few snacks of leftovers The mood wasn't even spoiled by watching the football game, though Stan grumbled that he'd come out on the losing side on a bet. "There goes ten bucks," he griped.
"You can afford that," his brother said.
Stan shrugged. "Yeah, but to lose to Blubs—I'll never hear the end of it."
The holiday weekend passed, then Alex and Wanda went back to Piedmont, and the next Monday Wendy went back to work, finishing her bear-population study and preparing the report, while Dipper helped Ford investigate an alleged UFO landing and alien sighting in a camping area of the Ochollo National Forest. As nearly as they could learn, that was the result of a group of teenagers with a largish drone and some remotely controlled firecrackers that dangled from fuses. When they were lit, the fireworks dropped from the drone and exploded in the air.
One of the teens, a basketball player, had donned an improbable costume that included a silvery robe and a hat that sat on the guy's head and was sculpted from a wig form to look like an eerie gray alien face with enormous black eyes. Witnesses swore that the menacing alien was ten feet tall and carried a heat-ray rifle. When Ford tracked down the guys, they denied everything, until Dipper pointed out the alien costume, still crumpled in the back seat of their car.
As Ford drove them back to Gravity Falls, Dipper said, "Another big case of nothing at all."
With a laugh, Ford said, "They almost all are, Mason. Outside of a few hot spots, I'd say that ninety-nine paranormal cases out of a hundred are depressingly mundane."
"So one per cent of them are really paranormal," Dipper said.
"Not quite. Half of that one per cent are puzzlers that turn out to be scams or tales from people who are seriously deluded. Except, of course, in the Falls."
As if to prove his point, when they returned home, Jeff the Gnome was there to ask Ford to help out with a haunted tree. The tree was important because a Gnome couple lived in it. That proved to be a pretty interesting case of a genuine haunting, but, well, it's too complicated to get into detail just now. Maybe later.
Dipper's and Mabel's parents came up for another week at Christmas—by then Wendy's pregnancy was definitely showing. As usual, Soos had closed the Shack for the winter season during the first week in December, but he and his family hung around until the Friday before Christmas, so he, Melody, the Ramirez kids, and Abuelita celebrated on that day. Wendy, Dipper, Mabel, and Teek had gone in together for more toys than the kids could take on the airplane with them, but as Little Soos cheerfully said, "This gives us something to come home to later!"
For some years, Soos had hired Wendy to be the winter caretaker of the Shack, but now that Stan lived just next door, that was no longer necessary. However, Soos invited everyone else to use the Shack for their Christmas party and celebration. Good and bad.
Good because everyone loved the place. Bad, as far as Dipper was concerned, because he got tagged by Mabel to help decorate (and, of course, later on to undecorate) the place. Dan supplied a beautiful twelve-foot-tall fir tree—a live one, its root ball bundled in burlap and standing in an immense wooden tub. Mabel supervised as Teek and Dipper strung hundreds of multicolored fairy lights and hung decorations, a few of them very old, on the tree.
They included, for example, a shiny, sparkly oversized snowflake that had once hung on Wanda's family tree when she was a little girl, and a small gold-colored Star of David pendant that had been a bar mitzvah gift to Alex. Manly Dan contributed a delicate glass bauble that had once decorated the first Corduroy tree and that had been hung on that one by Amanda, Wendy's mother. More of the decorations were from the childhood trees of Dipper and Wendy, Mabel and Teek. And Teek's parents provided a set of foil, popsicle-stick, and modeling dough ornaments that had been hand-made by Teek, dating from preschool, kindergarten, and up to third grade.
Stan had little to contribute, since until he married Sheila he hadn't put up a tree, and Ford similarly lacked much in the way of holiday ornaments, but Stan had saved up a lot of small tchotchkes that had cluttered the gift shop without selling, and Mabel made ornaments of these—a miniature Gobblewonker (Mabel added the antlers), a tiny plastic Sasquatch (Mabel had painted white undershorts on him) and a small red plastic viewer that, if you looked through the lens and held it up to the light, showed you a tiny photo of the Shack. Ford provided some spare Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons plastic dice,chiefly red and green (he did not include the Infinity-Sided one), plus a few very strange little metallic shapes that had come from Crash Site Omega but were, he was pretty sure, inert.
As soon as Wanda and Alex arrived, Manly Dan came over with Ruby and Wendy's younger brothers (both of them now brawny and partners in their dad's business, though neither was as tall as Dan), and of course the two younger couples all met to drink a toast to Christmas in hot spiced cider.
Merry Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year!
And Wendy added, "And to no more morning sickness!"
They clinked their cups, they drank.
It was a very merry Christmas, and it left Dipper hoping for a happy New Year.
And worrying that fatherhood was going to freak him totally out.