ONE NIGHT AT DINNER, a Sunday night in late September, Morley pushed the dog’s nose off the edge of the table, looked around, and said, “I’ve been thinking about Christmas.”

Dave gasped.

Well, he didn’t really gasp. It was more a hiccup than a gasp. Although it wasn’t a hiccup, and it could easily have been misconstrued as a gasp.

Everyone at the table turned and looked at him.

“Excuse me,” he said. He smiled nervously at Morley. “I said excuse me.”

Morley began again.

“I’ve been thinking about Christmas,” she said.

“Me too,” said Sam.

“And I was thinking,” said Morley, “that it would be fun this year…” Dave was shaking his head slowly back and forth, unconsciously, staring at his wife while a confliction of emotions flickered across his face like playing cards—despair, hope, confusion, and finally the last card…horror.

“I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun this year, and more in keeping with the spirit of Christmas…” Dave was leaning forward in his chair now, staring at Morley the same way Arthur the dog stares at the vet: with a doggish mixture of forlorn hope and wretched presumption.

“I was thinking,” said Morley, “it would be fun…if we made presents for each other.”

Morley’s words met dead silence.

Then Stephanie dropped her fork.

“What?” she said.

Sam said, “Everything I want is made out of plastic. Does anyone know how to mould plastic?”

Morley said, “I don’t mean every present. I don’t mean we have to make everything. I thought we could put our names in a hat, and we could all draw a name, and we’d have to make a present for the person whose name we drew.”

Sam said, “I like exploding stuff too. Exploding things are good…especially if they are made of plastic.”

Stephanie said, “Gawd.”

Dave was nodding, a small smile playing at his mouth.

Two nights later Morley wrote everyone’s name onto a piece of paper. She tore the paper up, folded the pieces, and put them into a pot.

“No one say who they get,” said Morley.

“What if you get yourself?” asked Sam.

But no one got themselves. And no one said who they got. In fact no one seemed particularly interested in who got whom. Morley had hoped that everyone would be excited. But no one was, at all.

Several uneventful weeks went by, autumn settling gracefully on the city as the family settled into the routine of their lives. It was a beautiful autumn. An autumn for gardening and walks and stock-taking. The days were bright and blue, the leaves yellow (for weeks, it seemed). A forgiving, perpetual autumn. Until, that is, the winds began to blow. One night there was a storm, and it rained and blew, and the next morning the trees were bare. Soon the clocks were turned back, and a greyness descended on the city.

It was October and everyone was busy. Only Morley, who was the busiest of all, was thinking about Christmas. The night they had pulled the names out of the pot Morley had waited for the last piece of paper. When she unfolded it, she read her son’s name. She had thought long and hard about what she could make a ten-year-old boy for Christmas that he would enjoy. And she was stymied. She didn’t know plastics. She didn’t know explosives.

Anyway, she wanted to make her son something…meaningful.

Dave was no help.

“There’s something about boys you have to understand,” he said. “They aren’t meaningful.”

Nevertheless, Morley wanted to make Sam something he would treasure as he grew older. Like a fountain pen, or a fishing rod, or a guitar. She had wondered about a chess set for a while. She decided that although, with help, she might be able to make a rudimentary chessboard, she would never, never in a million years be able to make the chess figures, and she had abandoned the idea of a chess set, along with a sleeping bag, baseball glove, and backpack.

The idea of building a chair for Sam came to Morley like a bolt out of the blue. She saw a brochure advertising a night course at the local high school. Ten Monday nights, two hundred dollars, all materials included. Morley checked the calendar. She would be finished a week before Christmas.

It was just what she was looking for—something she could make for Sam that he could use now, but something, if she did a good job, he could use for the rest of his life. Something that he might even hand down to his children.

Morley imagined building a big, comfy chair. A chair you could get lost in. She imagined Sam as a grown man reading the paper in the chair she had made. She imagined him surrounded by his family. She imagined him saying, “Your grandmother made this for me when I was ten.”

She enrolled in the course and promptly missed two out of the first three classes. The first time it was work. The second time her mother had the flu. She had to take her supper.

She didn’t miss any more after that. She applied herself as diligently as she could. And although every step was a struggle—each screw, nail, and saw cut a mystery of momentous proportions—and although her chair was emerging so much more slowly and tenuously than all the other chairs in the class, Monday, the night she got to work on it, became Morley’s favourite night of the week.

She loved going to her chair class. The only thing that spoiled it was that no one else in her family seemed to have embraced the holiday project. She was alone on this Christmas journey.

She asked Stephanie about it one night.

“You don’t understand,” said Stephanie. “We’re different, Mom. You’re into the spirit of Christmas. I like the other stuff.”

“The other stuff?” asked Morley.

“The shopping,” said Stephanie, “the clothes.”

“Shopping and clothes?” said Morley.

“And the TV specials,” said Stephanie.

Then one morning, when Sam was getting up from the breakfast table, he looked at Morley and said, “I want to learn how to knit.”

—

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES of motherhood, for Morley, were always the surprises. She had long since abandoned the idea of priming herself for the next stage of her children’s development. She had long ago accepted that no matter how she prepared herself she would always lag behind Sam and Stephanie. If Morley could count on her children for one thing, she could count on them to pop up, at the most unexpected moments, with the most bizarre ideas of life and how it worked. She could count on them to hold fierce opinions so contrary to what they had believed, even the day before, that they would leave her open-mouthed and totally unequipped to respond. Like the afternoon Sam had returned from the co-op nursery school and announced with quiet determination that he had “quit.” Like when five-year-old Stephanie crawled, sobbing, under the kitchen table, and refused to come out until her mother promised never to serve hot dogs for lunch again. Never! “I don’t believe you,” she sobbed, when Morley made the promise. Like the spring Sam developed a pathological fear of Big Bird, which became a fear of all birds, a fear that lasted for months.

And now he wanted to learn how to knit.

Morley gave Sam his first knitting lesson that night, in his room.

“Shut the door,” he said.

She soon found out that teaching a ten-year-old boy to knit was about as easy as building a chair.

She didn’t have the words for it.

She sat him beside her on the bed, and they both held a set of knitting needles out in front of them, as if they were about to fly a plane.

“Watch me,” said Morley as she ever so slowly made a loop in the red yarn and slipped it onto the needle.

She was trying to teach him how to cast on.

She glanced at him. Sam staring at his hands in despair.

Morley took his needles and did the first row herself. She handed them back and said, “Okay. Now, do exactly what I do.”

After an hour or so, he sort of had it. More or less.

“What is it you want to knit?” asked Morley.

“A coat,” said Sam.

“Oh,” said Morley.

Sam had drawn Stephanie’s name.

Morley had to teach him again right from the beginning the next night. And once again two nights later. He did fine as long as he kept going, but every time he put the needles down he lost track.

By the beginning of November Sam was good enough to sit in front of the television and knit while he watched TV. Whenever Stephanie appeared, he would thrust the needles into Morley’s hands or stuff them under the couch. Morley hauled an old black-and-white portable out of the basement and set it up on his bureau. He sat in his room all weekend, the needles clicking away like a train.

“My fingers hurt,” he said on Sunday night.

—

THE NEXT SATURDAY he was invited to Jeremy’s house for a sleepover and he wanted to know what he could take his knitting in. Morley was afraid he would get teased, but she packed it up nevertheless, and he headed off with his toothbrush and his sleeping bag and his bag of wool. At nine o’clock Jeremy’s mother phoned and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. You know what they’re doing? They’re downstairs watching Lethal Weapon Three…and knitting.”

Suddenly knitting was the thing to do. Suddenly everyone wanted to knit.

The next weekend there was a hockey tournament in Whitby. Dave drove Sam, Jeremy, and two other boys.

“They all sat in the back,” he said. “And they were talking about hockey and the game and how they were going to cream the team from Whitby—the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear from a back seat of little boys. And then one of them said, ‘Damn. I dropped a stitch.’

“They’d talk about hockey some more. Then all you’d hear was the clicking of their needles, and then someone would say something like ‘Look how long Jeff’s is. Jeff, you’re going so fast. You must have done this before.’

“It got quite giddy. One of them said they should knit on the bench between shifts. It was rather wonderful.”

—

MORLEY DIDN’T THINK it was wonderful at all.

As far as she could tell, her Christmas project was headed off the rails. She was worried about Sam. She thought he was getting compulsive about the knitting. He would disappear into his room and sit on the edge of his bed and knit for hours. And he kept unravelling everything he did. It was never perfect enough.

“It’s fun to destroy it,” he said. “I like the feeling of the knots coming undone.”

It didn’t seem healthy.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

On Saturday afternoon while Dave was in Whitby, Becky Laurence had shown up at the front door.

“Is Stephanie home?” she asked. She was holding a package wrapped in brown paper.

“No,” said Morley. “Stephanie is out. Shopping.”

Becky had turned to go, but then she had stopped and held the parcel up and said, “Tell her the present is ready. Tell her she owes me fifteen bucks.”

She had shown up twice more that afternoon.

“Tell her I need the money,” she said.

Morley was fairly certain that Stephanie had pulled Dave’s name out of the pot on that night in October. And that placed Morley in a terrible position. She wanted to talk to Dave about what was going on. Stephanie had paid her best friend to make a present!—something so completely contrary to the spirit of the family that Morley had no idea what to do about it. But the present was supposed to be for Dave. And Morley didn’t want to hurt him.

Anyway, as far as Morley could tell, Dave hadn’t begun anything himself.

There was barely a week to go before Christmas, and her entire project was turning into a fiasco. Her chair was a mess. Stephanie was cheating. And Dave thought Sam’s knitting compulsion was cute.

“Jacques Plante used to knit,” he said.

“What?” said Morley.

“Jacques Plante was a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens,” said Dave.

“I know who Jacques Plante was,” said Morley.

“He was the oldest of eleven children,” said Dave. “And they were poor. And his mother needed his help to make clothes for his brothers and sisters. When he was in the NHL he knitted his own underwear.”

“What’s your point?” said Morley.

“He said knitting calmed him down.”

“You think Sam needs to knit?”

“I have a friend,” said Dave, “who thinks the reason Jacques Plante was such a good goalie was because of all the knitting. He believes the knitting improved his hand-eye coordination.”

That night, on her way to bed, Morley found Sam under the covers, knitting by flashlight. She went in and sat down.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“My wrists are sore,” he said.

The next night as she was preparing supper she could hear the knitting needles clicking against something.

When Sam came down for dinner he was wearing his skateboard wrist guards.

After dinner Sam called her into his bedroom. He was crying.

“I’ll never finish the coat,” he said.

He was pointing at the sum total of his knitting: a rectangle of blue wool about six inches wide and a foot and a half long. One side of the rectangle was completely asymmetrical. He didn’t seem to be able to maintain constant tension as he worked. Each row was coming out a different length.

“It’s…lovely,” said Morley.

“No. It’s not,” said Sam. “I hate it.”

He began to unravel it in front of her.

—

MORLEY BROUGHT SAM’S chair home on the Monday before Christmas. The next night Dave found her in the basement crying. She had a bolt of beige corduroy at her feet. She was trying to tack a huge piece of foam to one of the arms.

Dave watched her for a moment without saying anything. Then he reached out and touched the top of the chair. The legs were uneven. It wobbled unsteadily.

“It’s pathetic,” said Morley, dropping her hammer on the floor.

“It looks…like it was made with a lot of love,” said Dave.

“It looks like it was made by a two-year-old,” said Morley.

“Well, it hasn’t been covered yet,” said Dave. “Any chair without upholstery is going to look…awkward.”

“Pathetic,” said Morley. “Not awkward.” She picked up the hammer, swung it around her waist and laced the back of the chair.

“This is not working,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

Half an hour later she appeared upstairs, looking angry and defeated.

Dave looked at her. “I have a suggestion,” he said. “Can I make a suggestion?”

Morley didn’t say anything. But she didn’t walk away.

Dave said, “You could spend the next few days down there wrestling with that material and you’ll cover the chair, and we both know you’ll end up with a bad chair.”

Morley nodded.

Dave said, “Forget about the foam padding. Forget about the upholstery. Don’t put fabric on it. Put wheels on it. What you have down there isn’t a chair without covering. What you have down there is a go-cart without wheels. Put wheels on that thing and you will have one very happy little boy on Christmas morning.”

And then he said, “I’m going to walk Arthur.”

—

THE NEXT NIGHT after supper Sam called Morley into his room. He was frantic.

“The needles won’t go through anymore,” he said.

He waved at a pile of wool lying on his bed—another six-inch square of knitting—each line of the square getting progressively tighter, giving the work the appearance of a triangle resting on its point.

“You have to relax,” said Morley.

“I only have two days left,” said Sam.

“Two days is not a lot of time,” said Morley.

Sam nodded his head in vigorous agreement.

“But it should be enough time for a pro like you to knit a scarf,” she said.

“I’m knitting a coat, not a scarf,” said Sam.

“Oh,” said Morley, “I thought you were knitting a scarf. Let me start it for you.” Once again she began a row of stitches and once again handed it to her son. Then she stood up. “I have to do the dishes,” she said.

—

ON CHRISTMAS EVE, after Sam and Stephanie were in bed and the last present was wrapped and under the tree, Morley called Dave down to the basement. “Can you help me carry this upstairs?” she said.

She had taken the wheels off Sam’s old wagon and attached them to the bottom of her chair. Dave climbed into it and smiled. She had left the wagon handle in place. It rested between his legs like a joystick.

“He’ll love it,” he said.

And then he screamed.

She was pushing him toward the washing machine.

First gently. Then faster and faster.

“Where’s the brake?” is the last thing he howled before he crashed into a wicker basket full of dirty clothes.

—

THEY COULD SEE light spilling out from under Sam’s door when they went upstairs. They could hear the sound of his needles rocking together.

“He’s still at it,” said Morley. “What should we do?”

It was almost one.

“Come to bed,” said Dave. “His door is shut. He wants to do this himself.”

“He was working on a scarf,” said Morley as she prepared the bed. “But this afternoon it changed into a headband. It wasn’t going to be big enough to be a scarf. When I suggested headband, you know what the little bugger said? ‘But isn’t her head the fattest part of her?’ It is the most pathetic headband you’ve ever seen. God, I hope she’ll wear it…at least around the house.”

“He’s going to love his go-cart,” said Dave.

Morley was sitting on the edge of the bed. She turned around.

“Stephanie drew your name,” she said. “There’s something you should know about her present.”

“No,” said Dave. “Don’t tell me anything. I want to be surprised.”

Morley stood up and walked toward the bedroom window.

“Don’t worry,” said Dave. “It will be fine.”

—

AND SO IT was.

Stephanie, it turned out, had not paid Becky Laurence to make her father’s present. She had written to her grandmother in Cape Breton and asked her to ship a photo of Dave and his father to the Laurences’ house C.O.D. It was a photo that had amazed Stephanie the moment she saw it—which had been two summers ago—when she had gone to Big Narrows for a week by herself.

The picture was taken when Dave was five years old. In it, he is standing on the piano bench in the parlour, which makes him the same height as his father’s bass fiddle, which they are both holding between them. And laughing—both of them—her grandfather’s head moving backwards and to the side, her father (a little boy) starting to fold over at the waist, his hand moving toward his mouth. The way her brother’s does in moments of hilarity.

The photo had haunted her for two years. The first time she saw it she thought the boy was her brother and the man standing beside the fiddle her dad.

“Where am I?” she had said.

She didn’t believe her grandmother when she said, “No, no. The boy is your father.”

When Becky Laurence gave her the picture, Stephanie took it to a photographer and had a copy made. She sent the original back to Cape Breton. She had her copy framed. It was wrapped and hidden in her cupboard two weeks before Christmas. Three times she had opened it so she could look at it. Three times she had to wrap it again.

—

BUT MORLEY DIDN’T know any of this as she climbed into bed. As she fell asleep she was still worried about Christmas morning, about Stephanie, and about the go-cart. She slept for a restless few hours, and then woke up. When she couldn’t get back to sleep, she decided to make herself a cup of tea. She was almost out of the bedroom before she noticed the ribbon tied around her wrist. Red.

It ran to the floor, into a red pile, gathered at her feet. She was still dopey with sleep. She started to gather the ribbon up, and it was only as she did that that she realized it didn’t end in the pile at her feet but continued toward the stairs. She followed it: down the stairs and past the tree and into the kitchen. By the time she got to the back door she had gathered an armful of ribbon. And she was smiling.

Dave and Morley have a pear tree in the corner of their backyard. Morley followed the trail of ribbon out the back door and across the yard to the pear tree. The end of the ribbon, the end not tied to her wrist, led to a switch fastened to the base of the tree. There was a note: Merry Christmas. I chose you. Love, Dave.

Morley flicked the switch. The most amazing thing happened.

The pear tree slowly and gracefully came to life.

Little lights began to snap on in the branches above her head and then, as if the tree had been animated by Walt Disney himself, the lights spread along the branches until the entire tree was glowing a dark-red crimson, a crimson like dark wine, a red light that cast a magical glow over the backyard.

Dave woke at three and sensed he was alone in bed. He reached out his arm for his wife and didn’t find her. He lay still. He tried to will himself awake. He got up and called her name. He walked to the back bedroom and looked out the window. Morley was sitting at the picnic table. She was wearing his work boots, the laces undone, and his winter coat over her nightie. On her head was a toque that belonged to Sam. She was cradling a mug of tea between her hands. From the perspective of the bedroom she looked twelve years old.

It had started to snow—big fat flakes of snow were dropping lazily out of the sky. Morley was staring at the snow as it floated out of the darkness and into the circle of red light.

Dave pushed the bedroom window open and said, “Merry Christmas.” Morley bent down and made a snowball, glowing now as she stood in the red light of the tree, her hair wet and sticking to her forehead. She was not working so quickly that Dave didn’t have time to gather a handful of snow off the window ledge himself.

The two of them threw their snowballs at almost the same moment, and they both laughed in wonder when they collided in mid-air, spraying snow like a shower of icy fireworks through the silence of the night.