I've enjoyed writing the "Thaw" series of this story, but in general, romance/couples really are not my thing. So to take a little break from that, here's a chapter focusing on all six couples as a whole. I tried to give everyone at least a little individual screentime (although that got tricky with so many characters). It's currently the longest chapter in this story, and I hope you all enjoy. Merry Christmas in August!
P.S. There's a pretty obvious reference in here to one of the most famous Christmas tales. Let me know if you spot it!
Millie's pregnancy went a long way into thawing out relationships on the Pontipee farm, and in December, Christmas did the rest of the work.
On the first day of December, the girls held a meeting in their room to talk about Christmas and how they would celebrate the holiday. Some wondered if they even could celebrate it at all. For most of them, it would be their very first Christmas away from their families. They knew that it would be hard trying to bring a little Christmas cheer to this dreary, snowbound farm, especially with everything stretched so thin between them, but they decided to make the best of it. "We owe that much to Millie, if nothin' else," Dorcas said, and her friends all agreed.
Then they were left the question of how to celebrate Christmas. All the usual Christmas activities – spending time with their families, going to church, shopping for gifts – were lost to them out here. They thought about asking the boys to cut down a pine tree, but they decided against it, for even if the boys could haul a tree to the house through the deep snows, the girls would have no way to decorate it once it was inside. The Pontipee family didn't have a single Christmas ornament, and the girls had no means to make any. They could've crocheted ornaments – Liza knew how to make the most adorable little stars and angels – but there was no spare yarn. What little yarn they had was all being made into mittens, hats, and other cold-weather things for themselves or the baby. They could've cut out ornaments, but there was no spare paper. The only paper on the farm was ugly, thick brown butcher paper that the boys used for packaging meat.
So finally, instead of a tree, the boys cut a wild holly bough and brought it to the house, and the girls set it on the mantelpiece. It was bare and undecorated, but they decided that the green leaves and bright red berries looked jolly enough by themselves.
"Ain't the same as havin' a proper Christmas tree, of course," Sarah said, as they all stood around the fireplace looking at it, "but it'll do."
"Say, maybe that should be theme for our Christmas this year," Martha joked. "We'll have ourselves an it'll-do Christmas."
Most of the girls were now talking to the boys, and Millie allowed it as long as they didn't do anything more than talk. As December went on, the girls began telling the brothers about their family Christmas traditions and the celebrations back in town. They found that instead of making them even more homesick, talking had the opposite effect. It made their families and the town feel closer. The boys never tired of listening to them, for they had never done much to celebrate Christmas on the farm before. Everything that the girls described – decorating Christmas trees, baking gingerbread cookies, unwrapping gifts together – sounded exotic and exciting to them.
None of the brothers had ever been into town during Christmastime before, but that December, the girls talked about it so much that they felt like they had seen it all, too. They could picture the front window of the Bixbys' general store trimmed with holly and white paper snowflakes, and couples ice-skating hand-in-hand on the frozen pond. They could hear the laughter of children having snowball fights in the streets and the jingle of silver bells on horse sleighs as they dashed through the snow. They could smell meat pies and gingerbread cookies baking in almost every home. They could see groups of carolers walking slowly down the main road, holding candles and singing Christmas hymns in harmony.
One afternoon the week before Christmas, a group of them – Dorcas, Martha, Ruth, Benjamin, Daniel, Ephraim, and Frank – gathered on the front porch together, talking. The girls stayed on one side of the porch, and the boys on the other, but they all talked and laughed together, as if they were all friends and the kidnapping had never happened. They had good-natured arguments about whether Millie's baby would be a boy or a girl, and the girls reminisced about Christmases past.
"For Christmas last year," Martha said, leaning against the porch-post, "Mrs. Bixby actually sewed a whole Santa suit, and Mr. Bixby put it on and stuffed the shirt to make hisself look fat, and then he went around town like that, handin' out candy canes to all the children."
"I remember that," Ruth went on, nodding. "You remember, Dorcas, how I was out with you and your little sister, and that Jenny, she's such a scamp of a child, when Mr. Bixby handed her a candy cane and she saw his face, she hollered, 'Hey, that ain't Santa at all! That's Mr. Bixby!'"
"Oh, and it was so funny that I couldn't even scold her," Dorcas said, laughing. The boys listened and smiled, as bright-eyed as children listening to a bedtime story.
The girls invited the boys over to their own house – which felt a bit funny to all of them – for dinner on Christmas Eve. They baked hotwater-crust pies stuffed with wild game and dried fruits. It wasn't a fancy Christmas dinner by any means, but it felt special to them. The boys had taken all their meals out in the barn since the kidnapping, and their Christmas Eve dinner was the first time that all thirteen of them had been in the house at once and shared a meal together. That was enough to give the evening an air of festivity. The boys, knowing this was an opportunity to impress the girls and show how they'd changed, were on their very best behavior. They sat up straight in their chairs with their shirts tucked in, wiped their mouths with their handkerchiefs, and said Please and Thank you and Mm-mm, this is the finest dinner I ever ate.
After dinner, the girls announced that they had a surprise, and with a proud flourish, Dorcas stood up and uncovered a plate that they'd hidden under a clean dishtowel. There on the plate were thirteen fresh-baked sugar cookies, one for each of them. Their food stores were rationed to last through the winter – they had to be – but the girls had carefully measured all the flour and sugar in the pantry and decided that they had just enough to bake thirteen small cookies. As Ruth ate hers, she remembered the cookie-exchange party that they'd held last year at Liza's house back in town. A few days before Christmas, the six of them and a few other town girls had gathered there and each brought a different batch of homemade cookies. Ruth had made molasses, her favorite, and Alice made oatmeal, and Dorcas had brought her little sister and a batch of shortbread cookies they'd made together. Ruth had walked home that evening with a whole basket full of different cookies under her arm and thought nothing of it. But now, she ate her one small sugar cookie slowly, almost reverently, as if it were a rare, precious thing.
What a hard lesson they had all learned this winter about taking things for granted.
After dinner, they gathered together in the parlor to talk and sing Christmas carols for a while, and it was agreed that tomorrow morning, they would hold their own church service in the parlor like they did on Sunday mornings, and the boys were invited to that, too.
"It just wouldn't feel right, not goin' to any sort of church service at all on Christmas," Millie said from the rocking chair.
"I'm sure missin' the church's candlelight service this year," Martha said, with a small sigh. Then she explained to the boys, "Every year, you see, our church usually holds a candlelight service late at night on Christmas Eve. It's just the prettiest thing you could imagine, everyone filing into the church holding candles."
"You know what I'm going to miss this Christmas?" Sarah asked. "The gatherin' on Christmas morning. Every year on Christmas morning – right at the break of dawn, really – almost all the folks in town gather in front of the church, and someone goes up into the steeple and rings the bells, and then everyone joins hands and sings I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day while the sun comes up." She sighed, too, and the brothers looked around at each other guiltily, each thinking about how it was their fault that the girls were missing out on so many special things this Christmas.
They all said goodnight cheerfully enough, and the boys went back across the farmyard to the barn. But that night, as the girls prepared for bed in their room upstairs, the holiday cheer of the day dwindled, and a bitter wave of homesickness seemed to blow in on the winter wind.
"I do wonder what all our folks are doin' back in town right now," Alice said softly, as she unbuttoned the back of Dorcas's dress for her.
"Me, too," Liza agreed, from where she sat on the foot of her bed, brushing her hair. "I wonder if they're havin' any Christmas at all this year, without us."
Their families had no idea what had happened to them after the avalanche. They didn't know that their girls were all right, safe and relatively comfortable. None of the girls wanted to say it, but they knew that their folks were surely sick with worry and heartache, imaging worst-case scenarios. Perhaps they feared that the girls were sick or starving, or that they'd been killed in the avalanche, or that the boys were taking advantage of them. Dorcas thought of how Jenny's Christmas must be ruined by not having her big sister there, and she was suddenly blinking back tears.
Alice saw the tears in Dorcas's eyes and heard Ruth sniffling from her bed, and she immediately turned and walked to the rug between the two rows of beds. She knelt down there and motioned for her friends to join her. "Come on, everybody," she said, "we gotta pray over this." The other girls knelt beside her, and Alice folded her hands, bowed her head, and said a prayer for peace for their families. "We pray you will whisper in their hearts, Lord, and help them to know that we're all right." They wished that they could do more, of course, but praying about it did make them feel better.
The next day, when Sarah first blinked awake, her sleep-muddled mind thought for a moment that she was back in her bed at home, hearing the churchbells ring for the Christmas morning gathering. But then she woke up more fully and remembered that she was still here, stuck on the Pontipee farm with her friends. She must have only imagined that peeling sound of bells from outside... but no, there it was again. She pushed her blankets off and looked around the room. The other girls were waking up, too.
"What on earth...?" Liza asked sleepily, rubbing her eyes.
Sarah listened harder. She realized now that the noise outside was bells, all right, but not churchbells. The ringing was shriller and faster.
"Do y'all hear them bells ringin'?" Ruth asked, sitting up in bed. "Whatever could that be?"
The girls didn't wait to find out. Alice, Martha, and Ruth were the first ones to spring out of their beds. Away to the window they flew in a flash, tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
The sun on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave a luster of midday to the six men below. The Pontipee brothers had untied the cowbells from their dairy cows and were ringing them loudly on the ground right below the girls' room. When they saw their faces in the window, Daniel cued the others, and they began to sing.
"I heard the bells on Christmas Day, the old familiar carols play..."
By now, all six girls were at the window, and as the boys started the song, they all grinned and gasped. A few of them clutched each other in delight, and a few mouths fell open in surprise. They didn't care that the boys down below were seeing them in only their nightdresses. Overcome with the Christmas spirit, they joined hands and sang along with the brothers on the next verse.
"The bells ring out more, loud and deep..."
When they reached the end of the song, all twelve of them clapped, cheered, waved, and called "Merry Christmas!" to each other. The boys rang their bells again, and every one of the girls made up her mind that their cowbells sounded just as pretty as churchbells – prettier, even.
"Weren't that somethin'!" Liza exclaimed, stepping away from the window to grab a blanket, for her bare feet were chilly. "How did they come up with that idea in just one night?"
"Sure were a nice surprise," Martha said. "It felt just like unwrapping a Christmas present, listenin' to 'em all sing that song."
"Imagine bein' woken up by cowbells instead of churchbells on Christmas morning!" Alice said, her laughter ringing out just like the bells had. "Almost funny, ain't it?"
"Well, it sure does make today feel more like a proper Christmas," Sarah said. She and Ruth were still leaning on the windowsill, grinning down at Frank and Caleb and looking every bit like lovestruck fools.
The boys' gesture with their cowbells was the first time that the season felt like a real Christmas to the girls, instead of a makeshift, "it'll-do" Christmas. It marked a turning point in that winter, for from that morning on, none of the girls could find it in their hearts to be angry with the boys anymore.
Christmas marks the halfway point of the "Thaw" series. Three couples have had their chapters in pre-Christmas early winter, and the next three couples will have theirs more in late winter/early spring.