So, this was meant to be posted before Xmas but life got in the way. Mallory's Xmas Wish is one of the most ridiculous and unrealistic BSC books, so naturally it's one of my favorites (as well as an annual reread). I've always wondered what might have happened if the Pikes had decided to finish filming the special, so this story was born.

"Look, kids, I know this is hard." Mr. Pike rubbed the sides of his temples. "Believe me, I know. But we made a promise to Channel Three, and it's our responsibility to keep it."

Her siblings took their father's statement about as well as any of them could be expected to. The triplets cried out and clenched their fists. Nicky pouted. Claire turned on the waterworks. Margo leaned back her head and shrieked. Vanessa stomped her feet.

Mallory just stood quietly staring at her parents. Through their actions, her siblings had expressed everything that Mallory herself was feeling and they'd done so in a much more precise way than mere words ever could. Mallory wasn't even sure if there was a word for the strange mix of despair and disbelief that filled her. Even now, as she stood surrounded by lights, wires, and other assorted pieces of equipment, she couldn't comprehend how anyone, let alone a TV station, could find her family interesting. While her family was rather unorthodox, once people got used to the idea of Mallory having seven siblings, they stopped mentioning it. Like her hair and eye colors, there was only so much that a person could comment on or ask about her family before they those details became old hat.

"Your dad is right," Mrs. Pike continued, raising her hands up and outward. "When we signed that contract, we did it knowing that we'd have to help make a TV special. We might not have understood just how stressful that would be, but you can say the same for just about any job. Your job's nothing like Law and Order, is it, John?"

"As much as I might sometimes wish otherwise," her father replied.

"But Dad!" Claire cried. "They're driving me crazy!"

"Yeah!" Nicky said. "I don't want to do this stupid TV show anymore!"

Pow barked.

"See!" Adam said. "Even Pow hates this!"

"Kids," Mr. Pike said. His voice was firmer than before. "As your mother said before, when we agreed to take part in this special, we were hired for a job. Do you think your mom and I can just tell our bosses to leave us alone because we don't like what they asked us to do?"

"Does your boss wave a camera in front of your face?" Byron asked.

"Hush," Mrs. Pike said. "Children, let your father speak. He didn't open the floor up for questions!"

"Right, thank you, Dee." Her father cleared his throat. "Now, as I was saying, we promised Channel Three that we'd help them make this special. They paid us for it."

"Can't you just give the money back?" Vanessa cried. Vanessa, the one who had gotten them all in this mess in the first place, looked to be on the verge of tears.

"That's not how jobs work, honey." He leaned down and held his arms open, but neither Vanessa or any of her siblings so much as stepped towards him. "You kids will understand one day when you have careers of your own."

Mallory had to fight to keep from rolling her eyes. Her father could speak for himself! Right then, she would much rather be herding rowdy toddlers than spending so much as another minute in front of a camera. At least her charges could be bribed into behaving!

"Besides," Mrs. Pike said, reaching out and placing a hand on her husband's shoulder. "No matter how long it takes for you to change your minds, I know that one day you kids are going to appreciate the experience of getting to relive this Christmas."

"We really thought that mom was full of shit when she said that, didn't we?"

Mallory laughed. "I still don't know how I managed to keep my cool."

Mallory and Vanessa sat on a plush couch in the cozy living room of Vanessa Pike-Wallace's one-floor home. The two had only managed to herd Jada and Jerome, Vanessa's high-strung five-year-old twins, into bed a half hour before. It was only eight-thirty, but the sky outside was so dark that it felt closer to midnight. The growing blanket of clouds overhead only added to the dreary atmosphere. Rain was expected within the next two hours.

Alan, Vanessa's husband, was still a few hours shy of ending his twelve-hour shift at St. Agatha General Hospital. If it started storming, he very well might be asked to put in overtime.

At least it's not snow, Mallory thought.

Ever since she'd landed a full-time, tenure-track teaching position at Traverse City University three years back, she'd no longer needed to merely dream of a white Christmas. She thought that she would have been ready for the annual snowy onslaught considering that she'd grown up in the northeast, but Michigan winters were a whole different beast. Helping to herd Vanessa's ankle biters was a small price to pay for a chance to spend a few weeks in coastal Georgia.

Well, at least until Saturday. Then, they'd be loading up Vanessa's minivan and driving to Stoneybrook for Christmas dinner. Even if it didn't snow, the temperature was predicted to drop to the single digits.

"I still don't know how you found this." Mallory said, gesturing towards the TV screen with her wine glass. "I practically forgot about it."

"I did too," Vanessa admitted. "Then, about a week after Thanksgiving, it just randomly popped into my head. I did a few Google searches, and the rest is history."

Channel Three had uploaded most of their backlog to YouTube. This was just one of countless videos that had found its way onto the web thanks to an underpaid and overworked intern. At least that was Mallory's idea for who had done it. Having done archival work herself during graduate school, she knew what it was like to value pieces of media and informational sources that others would immediately discard to the rubbish bins of history.

They'd had a tape of this themselves a long, long time ago. It had been a gift from the studio. The tape has arrived at the Pike home about a week before the special officially aired. Not that Mallory had ever gotten a chance to watch it. She'd been at Riverbend when it first aired. Even if she'd felt like bringing the special up to her classmates and teachers, there was no way for any of them to watch it. None of the TVs at her school - not that there were many - could have picked up any southern Connecticut stations.

By the time that Mallory had gotten back to Stoneybrook, all of the hullabaloo her siblings might have felt about their family's TV debut had been forgotten. Not because they hadn't been excited to be on television - years later, her mother would tell her that her siblings had barely talked about anything else in both the days leading up to and following the special's premiere - but because of Uncle Joe's sudden flu-induced pneumothorax. Mallory had had to take her finals early just so that she could go home and help with her siblings while her parents frantically planned a funeral. To say the holiday had been somber was an understatement.

Mallory had never gotten a chance to see the special in any of the years since, either. It had just been one of many VHS tapes in their home. Channel Three had only played it on the year it was released, so she never caught it on cable, either. Any hopes of watching it had been dashed when a hurricane caused the Pikes' basement to flood in the spring of Mallory's freshman year of college. The water damage had been so extensive that everything inside had had to be thrown out and the walls and floors remodeled.

But despite her fresh eyes, Mallory couldn't shake the all too natural feeling of déja vu. This was her life playing before her, after all. There she was: her awkward and overly eager pre-teen self. And there was her family, exactly as they'd once been.

She'd actually had to look away from the screen a few times, especially when her mother appeared. Seeing moving video of her mother hurt far more than still images ever could. It was as if someone had projected Mallory's memories of her mother before her ALS diagnosis onto a wall for everyone to see. Even now, just a month shy of the four-year anniversary of her passing, the wound of her diagnosis and death was still fresh. Oh, Dee Pike had found a way to adapt and live, honestly and joyfully, with her disease - she'd called herself the luckiest woman alive, unoriginal as the title was for someone with her condition - but that hadn't made the sting of the news and her ongoing physical deterioration any easier for her loved ones to bear. When Mallory had first heard the news, she'd felt as if her parents had thrown a grenade at her. Even now, she still felt the hole that it had torn through her. Empty as it was, Mallory wasn't sure that there was anything in the world that could fill it.

Not that the whole video made her heart ache. In fact, she couldn't help but laugh. Not because of any jokes (of which there were quite a few, complete with canned laugh tracks), but because of just how absurd everything now looked. To think that people had once found these clothing and hairstyles to be the height of fashion! Seeing her other family members younger was downright trippy. It was hard to believe that Byron had ever been anything but his current muscular, six-foot-five, bearded self. Her father still had dark hair. And Claire didn't have any tattoos!

"We really thought that this was going to make us famous, didn't we?" Vanessa asked. "Derek Masters wasn't going to be the only Stoneybrook resident in Hollywood!"

Mallory grimaced. Reaching forward, she grabbed the bottle of Galil dry red that the two were sharing and poured herself another hefty glass. "That's just what the world needs, isn't it? Another reality TV show about a couple with too many kids?"

It was amazing that their antics hadn't woken the kids up yet. Vanessa's laughter probably could be heard from space.

"Believe it or not, Mal, but Jada and Jerome were pretty excited to watch this. They thought it was cool to see their mom as a kid."

Mallory pushed her glasses up her nose. "Not a lot of kids can say the same. Did you send the link to anyone else yet?"

Whether her other nieces and nephews would get quite as excited about it was debatable.

"Just Alan's parents."

"Really?"

Vanessa nodded. "No point in ruining the Pike family Christmas surprise. This will be way more memorable than the annual Rudolph and Home Alone rewatches." She shot Mallory a toothy grin. "You can keep a secret, can't you? I would have made you wait to watch like everyone else, but I knew the kids wouldn't be able to keep themselves from mentioning it."

"My lips are sealed."

Though as soon as all the Pikes finished watching it together, Mallory was sure that the link would start circulating around her siblings' personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. She was definitely going to send the link out to her old friends. Even if Kristy and her other middle school pals never appeared in anything except in the background of passing filler scenes, they'd still want to see this.

Though the special was only a hair short of an hour long, it brought back hours worth of memories. There they were waiting in line to see Santa at Santa's Village in Lears. Mallory couldn't help but wonder if Mary Anne was one of the costumed elves helping to guide guests through the exhibit and passing out candy canes. Then there were multiple montages of the Pikes baking Christmas cookies, from the most precisely decorated gingerbread house to lumpy snickerdoodles. The family's visit to the Christmas tree farm came next. Oh, just how many times had they had to re-film those very scenes?

There was even some quick, silent shots of Uncle Joe at Stoneybrook Manor. Mallory's chest tightened. Her family had ended up having another Christmas celebration on New Year's Eve just so that her great uncle could get a chance to celebrate with them without having to worry about cameras following his every move.

She could still remember, in the days following his funeral, helping her parents remove his possessions from his room in Stoneybrook Manor. He'd kept every letter that she'd written to him from Riverbend and even taped some to his wall.

He'd been long dead by the time that Jada and Jerome were born. This video would help give them an idea of who he was even if they'd never get to meet him. Similarly, if they ever missed their maternal grandmother, they could always watch this again.

Mallory rubbed at the sides of her eyes. "Thank you, Vanessa."

"No problem. I knew I had to show you when I found it."

"No..." Mallory's voice cracked as she spoke. "Thank you for making it possible. If you'd never sent out that letter..."

Vanessa leaned across the couch and pulled Mallory into a bear hug.

"Merry Christmas, Mal."

"Merry Christmas, Vanessa."

Happy holidays, everyone!