March 2nd 2024

Chapter 62
The Magic of a Day

After the guests had left, with Deanne and Angie Anna returning to the Bowles house, it was high time for the Friar kids to go to bed. Some of them had already dozed off and were here and there around the couch. Before they could be carried upstairs by Lucas, MJ, and Wyatt, the others had made a special request: they wanted to sleep downstairs, around the Christmas tree, all eight of them in one place instead of in their rooms. There'd been some hesitation, part of it due to the potential this would have for the… uninformed… to find out things they were not meant to find out about the jolly man in the red suit. In the end, Marianne had been able to convince her parents with the promise that she'd make sure her young siblings and her cousin would not see or hear a thing they weren't supposed to. She'd be like their liaison.

They'd done it because they trusted her, of course, but also because they saw how much potential there was for them to have this memory to look back on when they were older. Everyone had either gone to get changed or been helped into their PJs as they slept, and then they'd been settled around the couch. They were small enough, all of them, that they were able to fit the eight boys and girls. The image was so sweet that Maya immediately wanted to draw them, or paint them. Lucas talked her into a compromise, taking pictures for the time being. They both had to sleep, too, and she could do the rest later.

The Santa visit became a story in itself, one they could later share with those of the kids who had been too little at the time. It felt like something out of an action movie, a spy thriller, as Lucas teamed up with Wyatt to bring out the presents and place them around the tree without anyone waking up other than Marianne. She was their girl on the inside, complete with a code that she had conjured up on the spot. She'd never taught it to them, but they got the intention well enough.

When they were done, Lucas and Wyatt escaped with the cookies and milk and the reindeer's carrots. The latter was snuck back into the fridge while the former was consumed at the kitchen table. Marianne was to be invited to join them, seeing as she'd helped, but she had fallen back to sleep by the time Lucas went to get her, so he let her be.

Come morning, she would wake up with her siblings, as those 'in the know' would play along while the younger ones would be thrilled to discover that Santa had come and visited their house like he'd said he would. With the littlest among them, this soon turned into the slightly difficult task of keeping them from diving into the presents and starting to open them indiscriminately. It was a good thing that the others started to arrive from downstairs when they did or the whole thing might have melted into chaos.

It said so much about how much the year's advent calendars had meant to the Friar kids that the present pile was very nearly forgotten in favor of opening the last boxes, of fitting them into their spaces in order to complete the image. It might not have seemed as though that one last bit could make that much of a difference to how they all felt about the whole thing, but then this was the final flourish of detail that Lucas had put into this thing, and there was no chance he would ever let his kids down with it.

"Wait, we're going to do it all together this time, okay?" Lucas told them when they all came to sit in front of their calendars.

"How?" Aubrey asked.

"Well, instead of doing it one by one, you need to do this one together," Lucas instructed. "Everyone pulls together, everyone looks at what's inside together, and everyone puts the box around together, too. Sounds good?" he asked them. They were intrigued, so they nodded.

They'd made it a point to not look at the back of the boxes at all until it was in the frame. They'd cover it up and then whip their hand away… When they did it this time, with a countdown and everything, they reacted with an awed squeal, first looking at their 25th box and then at those of their siblings. On the back of each of them, in a one-day collaboration with their mother, there was a portrait of each one of them, existing in the midst of their panorama, playing in the snow… It could not have ended any better.

They were just barely done making the rounds through their presents from Santa when the first of their guests arrived. They hadn't been expected so early, but then they were all so happy to see them that they didn't mind the early hour in the slightest. Sophie and Chiara were only just barely back from their trip with their children, but to look at them, it had clearly done them a lot of good, individually and as a couple. Between them, and Asher and Ray, and all the kids, they had not looked so at ease in a long time, and it was really wonderful to see. It wasn't as though everything had righted itself all at once just because they'd gone on this trip, but they'd had these days to themselves, away from everything, and it had set them on a path that felt good, promising. Now that they were back, and now that their friends could see this progress in them, there was no way any of them were going to let this momentum escape them. They would carry on and be the friends that they needed, and they would get through it all, turtles together.

After this first arrival of ten guests came a single one, and it was striking to consider it in this way, far more than they would have liked it to be. Maya had opened the door for him, and she hugged one of her two eldest friends with the care that this distinction deserved. Farkle hugged her right back in the same manner, and they remained this way for a good while before letting each other go and meeting one another's gaze with a smile.

"Merry Christmas, my Farkle friend," she told him.

"Merry Christmas, and hello to you, too," he tipped his head to her. "And to you… two," he took in the size of her belly, which made her laugh.

"I know, I think I hit a growth spurt," she assessed, and he agreed. "And he's not even measuring that much bigger than the girls. He's right about where Marianne was at this point…"

"Yeah, but look at her now, she's as tall as you are…" Farkle pointed out, and Maya shushed him at once.

"Do not even go there, okay?" she pleaded, and he made as though he collected the words and threw them away. "Thank you, that's better."

Isadora and the kids were next to arrive, and seeing how happy Ada and Bertie were to find their father had already made it, Maya could see the way it made her bandmate as happy as it made her sad. The divorce had not been a choice made lightly, and even though it had been the right call, something both she and Farkle agreed on, it didn't mean that either one of them did not grieve for the family that they had been together for all the years they'd had. How much easier it would be if they could just have all this together, holidays, birthdays, all the big and small moments of their lives… But it wasn't meant to be, and they had made their peace with it, as much as they could. When this was all said and done, they couldn't pretend that they didn't see the spots that could never be smoothed down. They would always be rough, would always trip them up as they moved along. Maybe, in time, they would learn to circumvent them. Until then, they tripped, and they bumped their toes, and did their best not to fall on their faces.

It wasn't as though they hosted 'the big party' every year, but it did tend to be them more often than not, and they were really, really okay with that. They loved having their friends and their family over, loved having so many of them around that they would hop from one conversation to another, and the kids would be running all over, so many of them being in one place that it was a frenzy, an endless possibility for play… The more years went by, all of them growing older, they would have their own thing, traditions for the games they would play from one Christmas to the next… Then there'd be the new couples, new people introduced into the fold, like there'd be new babies, the born and the soon-to-be born…

"What do you guys have there?" Maya asked, as Haley and MJ came along, surrounded by their young nieces and nephew, while she sat alongside Nellie. Both of them had their feet up, a good rest for the pregnant sisters, but now they were surrounded as though this moment had been waited on. MJ lifted Ezra, the better for him to hold out a pair of Christmas stockings that were nearly as long as he was tall. He found the whole thing hilarious, enough that the stockings slipped from his hands. They were caught by his mother and his aunt, which was almost exactly what the others had wanted to happen.

"It's for them," Lucy declared, pointing to her mother's belly and then her aunt's. "For next year." There were no names on either one, the future cousins as yet unnamed, at least as far as anyone else knew, but even in their current state, the stockings had a whole lot of meaning to them. It was only a matter of time now, wasn't it?

As much as they loved their crowded home throughout the day and evening, when all the guests had gone away and it was only them, the home team, it was its own brand of special. They ended up where they had begun the day, most of them at least, as they were piled up together around the couch. The kids would all end up in their own beds this time around, and they knew they would, which was fine. But in the meantime, as busy as the day had been, they were all still just hyped up enough that sleep didn't come so easily, and the best way they could remedy this was by being together this way.

"You want another game?" Lucas asked when the girls had made this request, and they confirmed their choice, loud and eager. "What kind of game?" he asked.

"With music!" Mackenzie called out, and her sisters chimed in, as did her nieces, as Ella and Taylor and the girls were spending the night with them.

This got them all talking back and forth, constructing this musical game that involved a prompt and everyone revealing the Christmas song it had made them think of to see how many of them had chosen the same one, which choice had been most popular. By the time they had the rules more or less figured out though, several of their potential players had gone and dozed off, and it really didn't seem fair to carry on without them. So, they called it a night and went about getting the sleepers upstairs, changed, and into their beds, on the promise to the rest of them that they would still play the game eventually. They were taking off for Arkansas in the morning, so that was a perfect activity for them on the long drive, wasn't it?

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners