Home for the Holidays (27 page)

The storm clouds slowly dwindled until they finally cleared on Tuesday at dawn. They left behind a porcelain blue sky and five-foot drifts of dense, alabaster snow. When Alice walked out onto the front porch, it seemed as if the world had been wrapped in white mink, sprinkled with diamond dust and presented as a gift of dazzling perfection.

The stirring up of childhood memories over the past couple of days had affected their guests even more than Louise had expected. Some of the excitement of being a child at Christmas returned as they sought to recapture something that had mattered to them years before. As a result, the five people staying at Grace Chapel Inn had undergone rather amazing transformations.

Alice found it heartwarming as well that each of the memories connected their guests to something they had shared with and learned from a beloved family member: Edwina’s aunt teaching her to knit, Laura’s grandmother making homemade candy, Allan’s mother building gingerbread houses.

It wasn’t surprising, however. Alice knew that it was family who made the holidays special, and she treasured how her father and sisters had created many wonderful memories for her.
I only hope that I can do the same for my sisters
.

“Good morning, Alice,” Edwina said as she came downstairs carrying her knitting bag. “I almost have the last one
finished.” She held up two long needles, and the red-and-white striped stocking attached to them. “Thanks to Louise for her gift of yarn, we’ll be able to hang up one for everyone by Christmas Eve.”

“I wish Viola could see these.” Alice admired her neat handiwork. “Do you think you could make one for Wendell?”

“I already have.” The schoolteacher reached into her bag and pulled out a smaller version of the stocking, this one with a white mouse worked into the red stitching. “Miss Reed made me promise that I would when she gave me the pattern over the phone.”

The two women walked into the dining room, where Ted Venson was having breakfast with Allan Hansford. Both men were discussing the house plans Allan had drawn on a sheet of paper between them on the table, but they paused to greet Alice and Edwina.

“How are you doing with the building plans?” Edwina asked, peering over Ted’s shoulder at the design. “Oh my. Should you apply to the zoning commission before you build that?”

“No, but we are rethinking the hot tub and the guest cottage out back,” Allan teased back.

“We’ve got all of our materials together,” Ted told her. “As soon as we’re finished with the breakfast dishes we’re going to start construction.”

The schoolteacher laughed. “We’ll have to look for some Lincoln Logs next.”

Alice studied the older man’s face. “Are you feeling up to doing this, Allan?”

“I haven’t had so much as a sniffle since last night.” He looked over as Jane came out of the kitchen carrying a tray. “Now if I can just tear myself away from these Belgian waffles.”

“You men ate all the Belgian ones. These are blueberry,” her younger sister told him as she placed a new stack of golden-brown waffles on the table. She paused for a moment to pick up the empty juice pitcher. “We have a new pot of coffee brewing, but the teapot on the table is full.” She went back into the kitchen.

Alice left Edwina at the table and went in to see if Jane needed any help, only to find her talking to Max, who was scowling at the stove.

“It hates me.” He showed her a slightly too-brown waffle. “See?”

“It’s a gas stove, Max. You just have to get used to it.” Jane reached down and lowered the flame a fraction. “You’re doing great.”

“I’m scorching things.”

“You are not. Besides, we can use the extra crispy ones for dessert tonight.” She looked over at Alice. “Did you see Laura? She was going outside to get some snow.”

“She must have gone out back.” Alice looked over as the kitchen door opened and the interior decorator came in carrying two tin pie plates filled with white, fluffy snow. “Here she is.”

“This had better be as good as I remember it,” Laura said as she put aside the pans in order to slip out of her coat and mittens. “I think my ears have turned to ice.” She glared at Max. “Have you been watching the candy thermometer, like I told you to?”

“Yes, and it’s distracting from my waffles.”

“Move aside, you big old grouch.” Laura casually nudged him aside and peered at the glass thermometer clipped to the side of a pot filled with a brown, bubbling mixture. “There, that’s perfect.” She used a pot holder to remove the pan from the stove and brought it over to the two pie plates of snow. “Now, if I can just do it the way Grandmother did.”

Laura carefully poured the mixture over the snow in thin scrolls, which instantly solidified and turned a pale brown.

“So far, so good,” Jane said, peering at the pans.

Laura set the pan aside. “I still have to test it.” She took a toothpick and gently prodded the mixture. “That’s it. We have real maple sugar candy.” She began transferring the scrolls from the pans onto wax paper.

Alice congratulated her, and Jane gave her a one-armed
hug. Max reached for a piece of the candy, only to earn a tap on the back of his hand from Laura.

“No candy for breakfast,” she said and gave him another nudge. “Go sit down and eat. I’ll finish the rest of the waffles.”

“I can do that, Laura,” Jane said. “Go have a cup of tea and check out Allan’s house plan. He and Ted are ready to start putting it together.”

“Yes, and if we don’t watch them, they might build a replica of Philadelphia’s city hall, complete with William Penn’s statue on top,” Alice warned, making everyone chuckle.

Alice waited until their guests had returned to the dining room before she released the laugh she had been holding. “Extra-crispy waffles for dessert?”

“With a liberal amount of ice cream, strategically applied.” Her younger sister grinned. “They hold up better.”

“I can’t believe how well this is working out.” Alice shook her head and sat down for a moment at the little kitchen table. “I certainly never expected to see Max cooking or Laura making candy.”

“There’s a kid inside everyone,” Jane reminded her. “Convincing them to let their inner child come out and play was a stroke of genius.”

Chapter Nineteen

D
espite the lack of electricity, buoyant spirits prevailed through Christmas Eve morning, as everyone pitched in to add something special to the holiday preparations. Snow fell, not as it had before, but prettily over Acorn Hill.

Allan and Ted unveiled the gingerbread house at breakfast by placing it as the centerpiece for the table. Two miniature stories of rich, dark gingerbread, exactly cut and assembled to look like Viola Reed’s Queen Anne home, rose from drifts of white-icing snow. Cookies, candies and pretzels formed the trim and house details. The crowning touch was the foil-wrapped chocolate Santa Claus going down the sugar wafer chimney.

Edwina’s ten knitted stockings—one for each guest, each of the Howards, their aunt and a small one for Wendell—hung waiting on the mantel in the parlor. She had personalized each with different combinations of stitches and yarns. She had even embroidered a set of initials on the cuff of each one to identify its owner.

Laura had made enough maple-sugar candy for everyone, and after being encouraged by Jane, tried recreating
some of her grandmother’s other homemade candies. She also showed Max how adding a bit of maple sugar to his coffee gave it a rich, mellow sweetness that, in her opinion, ordinary table sugar could not provide. Beaming, she promised everyone a surprise for Christmas Eve dinner.

The guests also insisted on taking turns in the kitchen with preparing meals, which allowed Louise, Alice and Jane time to finish working on their own gifts for their guests, along with the treats that Edwina had suggested.

“We can’t have them wake up to empty stockings on Christmas morning,” Louise had said. “Not after all they have done to contribute to our holiday.”

Since the deep snow had kept the Howard sisters from going shopping, they decided to follow their guests’ examples and make do with homemade gifts. Jane had packed five pretty boxes with her fancy angelight cookies, and tagged them with cards listing the recipes for a dish she had made that each guest had particularly enjoyed.

Alice had taken pint-sized plastic berry baskets and filled them with an assortment of tea bags and flavored instant coffee packets. Over the years she and her father had amassed a large collection of holiday coffee mugs, and she picked five of her most cheerful for the baskets.

Louise had used old sheet music to wrap five picture frames, which she had also personalized for each guest with his or her family name written down one side of the frame
in fine calligraphy, using metallic-gold ink. She had also made up five small packets of photos from those she had taken of Grace Chapel Inn and the sights of Acorn Hill. She had intended to send many of the pictures to Cynthia, but she could make more from the negatives after the holidays.

I will have to convince my daughter to take some time off from that hectic job of hers to come for a visit soon
, Louise thought as she put away the negatives in her room. She missed Cynthia most acutely during the holidays, which unfortunately were always a busy time for her daughter’s publishing company. Still, she had her sisters and her memories.
I should tell the guests about the Christmas when Cynthia gave Eliot her chicken pox
.

It was Jane, and the memory of Cynthia’s unfortunately timed bout with chicken pox, that made Louise recall another photograph, one she hadn’t thought of in years.

Did I save it?
She had tried not to think about that time very often, but enough years had passed now that she felt a pang of longing to see the photo again.

Louise went to her closet and took down the box in which she kept her old school memorabilia and sorted through it until she found her first photo album. She sat down on the bed with it and began looking through the pages, smiling at the youthful photos of herself. At last she came to the section that she had made from the time when she was a sophomore in high school.

That had been a terrible year for the Howards. Her mother Madeleine had passed away after Jane’s birth, and Daniel had had to cope with shattering grief and a new baby all at once. Louise always remembered the Christmas of that year, which might have been the saddest of her life.

On one page Louise had written a Bible verse, Ecclesiastes 7:14, which a friend of her mother’s had read at Madeleine’s memorial service: “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.”

That verse had perplexed her for weeks after her mother’s death, until Jane had started to change from a helpless newborn into a very active infant. It had been that change that had drawn Louise out of her grief more than anything else, for seeing Jane’s bright eyes and happy smile, and hearing her sweet laughter and cooing gurgles had made it impossible to be sad.

I wonder if you will ever know how much you meant to us
, she thought as she gazed at one photo in particular.
You were like a gift from God, sent to remind us that even in death, there is life
.

“Louise?” Alice was standing outside her open door.

Feeling too emotional to speak, Louise gestured for her sister to come in and carefully removed the photograph from the paper tabs at the corners. Without a word she handed it to her sister.

For a long moment Alice simply looked at the photo
too. Then she gave Louise a beautiful smile. “I completely forgot about this. Has Jane ever seen it?”

“I don’t think I ever showed it to her.” Louise gazed up at her middle sister. “I want to frame it and give it as my Christmas gift for her, Alice. What do you think?”

Alice gave her older sister a hug. “It’s perfect.”