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“WHAT KIND OF CAR DO you have?” I asked. “I don’t know if mine is big enough to actually hold everything.”
“I am proud to say I am the owner of a minivan,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly.
I laughed and nodded. “You know, I’m going to go ahead and say it. I’m surprised. You don’t strike me as the type that would jump right into the whole minivan life.”
“It’s not something I particularly aspired to,” she said. “But when I started this place, I needed to have something that would let me transport supplies easily. There aren’t exactly any hospitality supply companies in Snowflake Hollow, so it’s a lot of driving all over the place getting groceries and other things. Rather than trying to stuff it into a little car all the time, I went ahead and invested in the van. I haven’t made the full leap into a whole van, but maybe that’s on the horizon.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you have it. We’re going to fill it up with all kinds of Christmas joy. Ready to go?” I asked.
“As ready as I’m ever going to be,” she said.
She went inside and came out with her purse and keys, then led me around to the garage. There was a small parking area carved out of the land to the side of the bed-and-breakfast to accommodate the cars of the guests, but I’d noticed there wasn’t a van there. Now I realized she must keep her van parked away from the other cars so there was enough space for anyone who might come with more than one car.
Using a key from her key ring, she let us in through the side door and gestured with both hands, dramatically displaying the dark blue minivan sitting there inside surrounded by shelves full of various home improvement supplies and yarn care materials that must not have fit into the shed. She unlocked the van, and we got inside. It was frigid, and she cranked the engine, turning up the heat as far as it would go. The air came out cold, and we sat there for a few seconds, waiting for the heat of the engine to warm up the air and get it thawing out the space.
Finally it was comfortable enough inside the car, and she reached up to press the button in her car that opened the garage door.
“Don’t you have a door opener you can use from the outside?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. It stopped working a while back, and I haven’t been able to fix it.”
“Then how did you get the car inside?”
“I go in the same way we just did and press the button on the inside of the wall,” she said.
She sounded like she was starting to get frustrated, so I stopped the questions. When the door was open, she drove out, hit the button to close the door, and started into town.
Snowflake Hollow did have more than one street, but most of the time, it didn’t really seem like it did. Most of everything that went on there, including nearly all the shops and restaurants, were located on Main Street that ran right down the middle of town. There were no parking lots for these little places. The only way to access them was either to find a spot to park along the street or to park in one of the small lots on either end of the street and walking along the sidewalks.
At that time of year, there was no such thing as finding a parking spot on the street. Unless someone arrived first thing in the morning or was lucky enough to slide in right after someone else pulled out of a spot, the chances of finding a spot among the dense shopping crowds were next to nothing. Dense crowds by Snowflake Hollow terms, of course. That didn’t really amount to much, but it was all relative.
Holly didn’t even bother to try driving down the street at the slow crawl other people did when they were hoping to find that elusive parking spot close to the shop where they were going. She went straight to the nearest parking lot and slid into the first empty spot she saw. It wasn’t always a sure thing to find a spot in one of the lots, either, but there were usually at least one or two places available at any given time.
She tugged a beanie down over her head, wrapped a scarf tight around her neck, and stuffed her hands down into gloves like she was putting on her uniform for the day. We got out, and she hit the button on her key fob to lock the doors. She looked at me.
“Where to first?” she asked.
“I thought we could just walk and see what we can find,” I said. “We’ll have to go by the hardware store and the general store to get some basic things, but other than that, we’ll know what we’re looking for when we see it.”
Holly didn’t look particularly delighted by this plan. Not that I really thought she was going to be. But the goal of the walk wasn’t actually just so we could discover decorations and embellishments that might be hiding in the various little shops and stores along the street. I was sure we would find some perfect additions to the decorations, but not having specific aims for where we were going or what we were going to get was more about the walk itself.
I had a strong feeling Holly never just took the time to enjoy the atmosphere around her. She’d already determined that Christmas was not her time of year, and she didn’t enjoy the activities or traditions, so she wasn’t going to give anything a chance. I doubted she spent a lot of time on Main Street as it was. She probably went to the larger grocery store outside of town for her own needs and supplies for the bed-and-breakfast. Anything she couldn’t get from there, she likely went the way of most people and shopped online.
I wanted to put her right down in the middle of Snowflake Hollow in all its glory and let her experience that magic again. Part of me felt a little bit bad for doing it that way. I didn’t want it to seem like I was forcing her to do anything she really didn’t want to do or that I was manipulating her. But she didn’t argue. She didn’t tell me she didn’t want to go or suggest that we go a couple of towns over to one of the big-box stores that sold just about everything.
If she’d made one of those suggestions, I would have gone along with it. Holly wanted her bed-and-breakfast to be a success. She wanted to make sure her guests enjoyed themselves and might want to come back at some point, or at least tell other people they would enjoy going. I still didn’t fully understand what had gotten into her mind to make this sound like a great idea to her, but she was committed to it, and she wanted to do what she needed to do to make it a success.
And I could help that happen for her.
I really believed if I could help her see Christmas again and encourage her to really enjoy it, her perspective might change. Or, at the very least, she might be able to better give the guests the experience they wanted.
We walked along the sidewalk slowly, but when a cold breeze whipped up around us, Holly tucked her head down and picked up the pace of her steps a little. We got to the hardware store and went inside. It was a small space on a normal day, but most of it went by the wayside come Christmas. That was when the owner blew up as many of the inflatable decorations as he could and stuffed them into the front corner of the shop.
We pushed past a snowman with swirling lights in his stomach and made our way over to the display of lights and other outdoor supplies. I helped Holly pick out several things and asked that the owner have them delivered to the bed-and-breakfast. When he agreed without hesitation, Holly looked over at me in surprise.
“They do that?” she asked.
“Of course they do,” I said. “Haven’t you ever asked any of the shop owners to deliver something to you?”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t realize that was even an option.”
“Do you use any local products?” I asked.
“I pick things up from the bakery,” she said. “And sometimes I get salad dressing from the Italian restaurant on the corner.”
That gave me a bit more confirmation that she didn’t spend a lot of time down here. She’d lost touch with the community that had once been everything she knew.
“You should look around at the different little shops,” I said. “There are some amazing things down here. Cassie Meyer makes bath products my mother loves that would be really nice in the guest rooms. There are a lot of people who make snacks, jams, and other foods.”
She nodded, seeming to think about what I was telling her. One of the inflatables drifted closer to her, and she jumped when it touched her and turned to look at it.
“This candy cane puts my little ones to shame,” she said.
“But it isn’t solar,” I said.
“Well, there you go. Mine win.”
“Want to add a couple of them to the decorations?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I can make that leap.”
“We’ll work on it.”
We left the hardware store and continued our way down the street. Ahead of us was the general store, where I figured we’d find a lot of the smaller pieces I was hoping for. She looked up at the carved wooden sign hanging over the door and let out a little bit of a sigh.
“Mary and Brighton’s General Store,” she said and shook her head slightly. “Do you think Mary went out with the specific goal of finding a husband with a name that would sound appropriately Christmas adjacent, or was that just a happy accident?”
“I hear he changed his name when she decided to buy the store,” I said with a straight face.
Holly looked over at me with a slightly horrified look on her face. “Seriously?”
I laughed and shook my head. “No. I think it just worked out that way.” I nudged her playfully. “Come on.”
A smile played on her lips as she fell into step beside me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it came from the joke or from the nudge.
By the time we left Mary and Brighton’s, we had another large delivery on the way to the bed-and-breakfast, and Holly seemed to be warming up to the idea of decorating. The longer we shopped, the more my attraction to her built. I knew it had never gone away, but now it felt different. It wasn’t just admiring her from afar. She was different than I thought she was in high school, and I very much liked who I was discovering.
She walked along a little closer beside me as we left another shop, and her cheeks flushed when the wind blew a strand of hair across her cheek, and I reached up to move it aside. She looked away.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said, almost like she was trying to distance herself.
I nodded. “I know I don’t. But I really want to. Decorating the house was always one of my favorite Christmas activities, and now that there’s no house to decorate, I am really going to miss it. This is a chance for me to enjoy that again.”
“You don’t decorate your own house at home?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I live alone. It’s not quite the same thing when I’m decorating by myself. But I really enjoy doing it with you.”
Holly smiled and looked like she was going to say something but stopped herself just before we dipped into the next shop.
