The Twelve Christmases

Nana’s dropped the applesauce.

           “Oops!” She laughs, tipping in her seat ever so slightly, one meaty hand pressed to her even meatier bosom. “Oh, my old girl hands. Oh, the applesauce!”

           Iris continues to stare at her untouched plate of food, growing ever colder as time passes. She doesn’t move as her mother brings over the dustpan and brush, a roll of paper towel under one gold-bangled arm and a tense smile beneath her nose; she doesn’t blink as her father reprimands Nana for continuing to try and lift these things over to herself with her aging, weak hands; she barely breathes as everyone takes their seat and continues dinner.

           Pretending Nana never dropped the applesauce.

           Just like they’re pretending this isn’t the first December without Poppy.

           Nobody’s mentioned her once—the chair she used to claim each Christmas has been dumped in the garage, her embroidered stocking is absent from the mantle, and the gold-trimmed wine glass that had been saved just for her never made it out of the cupboard. None of the old Santa photos, curling over at the corners and peeling away from their taped cardboard envelopes, have been set up on the entryway table. What was once her bedroom has been stripped bare and filled again with Nana’s things for the month.

           Her memory has been wiped clear from this house just in time for the holidays, not so different from how quickly the tumour had wiped her from this Earth.

           “Wonderful job on the turkey,” comments Aunt Jamie airily, as her unlikeable husband nods with a mouth full of the aforementioned meat. “Though I’d like to be in charge of the bird next year, if that’s alright, Deryk. I’ve got a few ideas.”

           Which means she thinks she can do a better job. Aunt Jamie thinks she can do every single thing better than every single person that’s ever tried.

           Iris doesn’t break her stare with her dinner plate. Hidden by her tumbling black curls, she mouths: Jamie, your last attempt at the turkey gave us all salmonella for a week. Not two heartbeats later, Iris’ father laughs, and rumbles out loud: “Jamie, your last attempt at the turkey gave us all salmonella for a week!”

           “At least my pudding didn’t end up with a wishbone in the centre,” Iris whispers, moving her lips so little and speaking so silently that only her ringing ears can hear.

           “At least my pudding didn’t end up with a wishbone in the centre!” Jamie exclaims, faux-affronted.

           The family laughs. Cousin April gurgles and giggles, and bangs on her highchair so exuberantly that her bowl of cranberry yoghurt upends itself all over her bib.

           Iris, eyes burning, buries her face in her hands and trembles with the effort it takes not to sob. Or scream. Or vomit.

           It’s the first Christmas without her sister, but really, it… isn’t. But it is. But it sort of, definitely, is not. Because every December 25^th, Iris wakes up back in 2016, despite the seven years that have passed since—and every single repeat is exactly the same.

           Nobody utters Poppy’s name. Nobody asks Iris if she’s doing alright, or why she still wrapped the gift she bought for her big sister back in June, two months prior to her diagnosis and three before her funeral. Nana drops the sickly-sweet applesauce, Dad chides her for her clumsiness, Aunt Jamie’s childish husband drips turkey juice down his sweater, and baby April yelps and screams at the bang of the shiny crackers.

           Every cyclic year, Iris lashes out in some way or another. She shrieks for her dead sister; she lobs her plate at the wall and bawls as it clatters to the linoleum ground; she spews a litany of curses at Aunt Jamie’s offensive husband. Last year, she even grabbed the carving knife and very nearly drove it into her own chest out of frustration and grief, until she realised she had no idea if her death would carry into her real life, existing outside of this groundhog Christmas, and she stabbed the gingerbread house, instead.

           This year, she’s given up. She can’t understand what it is she must do to end this nightmarish tradition; nobody else seems to realise they’ve had this exact dinner seven times, now, and none of her outbursts have solved anything. Nobody wants to talk about Poppy, no matter what she does, or who she yells at.

           All she can do is stare at her plate and hope they all leave her alone.

           She stares. She stares. She stares. The others eat, and ignore her as dutifully as they are ignoring Poppy’s ashes, cradled in a rust-red urn, tucked away in the kitchen cupboard.

           She stares. She stares. She stares. When the crackers are tugged and April dissolves into fitful tears, Aunt Jamie and her filthy husband fuss about, and ultimately decide to take her home. Mom and Dad clean up. Nana snoozes in her rocking chair.

           Iris stares. She stares. She stares.

           Without recalling when she fell asleep, she wakes up on the 26^th of December, 2023.

~

Nana’s dropped the applesauce.

“Oops! Oh, my old girl hands. Oh, the applesauce!”

“Ma, come on,” Dad scolds. “You’re getting too frail to be lifting everything across the table, you know that!”

“I’m sorry, Kim,” Nana coos as Mom drops to the ground and scoops the shards of her favourite sauce dish into the faded green dustpan. “Oh, dear.”

“It’s alright, love. It’s only applesauce.”

Iris pinches her nose, and bites so hard on her tongue she tastes metal. She hates this never-ending Christmas, this day that haunts her, keeps coming back around and around and around—baby April should be nearly nine years old, now, not the tiny, chubby thing in the highchair, Jamie divorced her oaf of a husband months ago, and Nana’s been in hospice since August. Poppy’s death has gotten easier over the years, but for whatever awful reason, it stings fresh and biting every Christmas, as Iris reverts back to her eighteen-year-old self and shudders in her chair, mourning the woman that once taught her morse code so they could talk through their bedroom walls at midnight.

How foolish she had been last year to think that doing nothing might change things; that there is anything she can do to change things. After more than half a decade, she should have figured that she’s doomed to live this year over and over, until she sees Poppy again in whatever wretched afterlife exists. Nothing she does will fix her absence, nor will it bring about a new Christmas.

What’s the point of trying? Why bother staying?

Without a word, Iris stands suddenly and swiftly, sweeps her plate to the ground with the back of her hand, and storms out of the house amid shouts and pleas for her to return.

This year, Iris spends Christmas Day slouching in a swing set that rusted at the chains before she’d even begun high school, wondering what it means that nobody comes to get her.

~

Nana’s dropped the applesauce.

“Oops! Oh, my old girl hands. Oh, the applesauce!”

           “Jesus, Nana, would you learn to carry something properly?” Iris snaps. She drops her cutlery on the table with an awful clutter, and drags her hands down her reddening face, aching from her chest outwards, a flow of pain that twines through her body like holly. “Or, better yet, ask for help? Anyone here would be happy to hand you the fucking applesauce, but you insist on grabbing it yourself, because even though you’re eighty-something and falling apart with every cough, you still think you’re young enough to do everything on your own!”

           It doesn’t feel as good as Iris had imagined it would. Yelling at her Nana. Nana, who died in March; Nana, who should not be sitting at this goddamn table with the rest of them, who should be buried in the same lot as her granddaughter.

           “Iris,” Mom threatens, voice low. “Behave.”

           “Why should I?” Iris flings her arm out to point in the vague direction of Poppy’s old bedroom, which—in the real, consistent life, not this never-ending annual nightmare—has become an office for her father to write in, finishing a novel he’s started fifteen different times since Iris was born. “What’s it matter? None of this is real! Nothing that happens here affects anything! Tomorrow, I’ll wake up, and it’ll be Boxing Day 2025, and Nana won’t even be here! April will be counting down until her tenth birthday, Dad will be hunched over his typewriter, Aunt Jamie will be eyeing off the men in her local café, desperately searching for someone to replace April’s deadbeat, gross father, you’ll be off to your book club, and I’ll have to spend the entire day recovering from today! Because I’m the only one that realises we’ve done this before, again and again and again! Because every year, I’m thrown back to the year I lost my sister, who none of you have said one fucking word about!”

           The dining room descends into utter silence. April’s eyes well; Aunt Jamie’s mouth closes up and down like a dying goldfish; her husband blinks, idiot he is; Dad closes his eyes, brow knitted; and Mom swallows, thick and loud.

           “Darling,” she whispers. “Maybe you should go to bed.”

           “What on Earth is she on about?” Nana booms, flattening her wrinkled, applesauce-covered hand over the tablecloth.

           “Don’t worry about it, Ma, just—”

           Iris doesn’t hear what excuse her father pulls out of his ass. She storms upstairs, seething, and sleeps on her floor, pressed up against the wall she once shared with the only person who knew what a half-open door meant.

~

Nana’s dropped the applesauce.

“Oops! Oh, my old girl hands. Oh, the applesauce!”

“Fuck’s sake,” Iris whispers, and stalks away, flipping the bird over her shoulder. She wanders through the snow until her feet bleed and the clock strikes midnight, and she wakes in her apartment.

She throws the duvet over her head and sobs her throat raw.

~

Nana’s dropped the applesauce.

“Oops! Oh, my old girl hands. Oh, the applesauce!”

“I want to talk about Poppy,” Iris mumbles.

“Ma, come on. You’re getting too frail to be lifting everything across the table, you know that!”

“I want to talk about Poppy,” Iris says, a little louder.

““I’m sorry, Kim. Oh, dear.”

“We are talking about my sister!”

Six heads shoot up, staring Iris down, threatened by the mere reference to the dead girl they’ve all buried the spirit of. The air in the room drops even colder as Iris draws the deepest breath she’s ever taken, and pushes her plate gently away.

“You can’t all pretend she never existed,” she begs, her voice shattering, as fragile as the applesauce dish, the plates she’s smashed over the years. “You can’t—you can’t just treat her like her death means she’s been completely written out of the story. She was my sister. I loved her! I can’t… I can’t do one more year without speaking about her, I just…”

Iris gnaws on her lower lip, covering her eyes with one hand, hissing through her teeth. “I know she’s gone. I know she won’t come back. I know that the death of the body is permanent, but for Christ’s sake, that doesn’t mean we have to kill her memory, too!”

Nana stares at the spilled applesauce with wet eyes as her son shivers with grief, and his wife chokes down a gulp of her merlot. Aunt Jamie hiccups at the end of the table. Baby April, who will never remember the girl that played peek-a-boo with her, begins to wail. Jamie’s dull husband drums his fingers on the edge of his fork like this is a roadblock of a conversation, and he can’t wait for it to be over so he can start up yet another meatless argument about the economy.

“I will not sit here and ignore her one more year, you hear me?” Iris seethes. “Not again. Never again.”

           “The hell do you mean ‘one more year’?” Her father asks, deadly quiet.

“Nothing, I just—it will not fucking happen. I will not fucking let it.”

It takes a moment, but dinner starts up again eventually, albeit more solemn than before. Still nobody breaches the topic of Poppy, but pride sparks in Iris’ heart at the note that it’s not because they’re avoiding her name, specifically. It’s only because they don’t want to speak at all.

Progress is progress.

~

It’s Christmas 2016 once more, and Iris is rooting around in the garage, hands wrapping around a high-backed dining chair that had been dragged in here this morning. She slides it into the spot beside her own seat, and hangs a soft felt stocking, stitched with loopy glittery letters, on the back. She stands on tiptoe in her parents’ closet and smiles when she finds the stack of old Santa photos, a timeline that takes her and her sister from their absolute youth to just last year, and sets them out in a perfect row on the entryway bench.

When her mother enters the dining room, applesauce dish in hand, Iris takes it gingerly away from her and sets it on the other end of the table to that which Nana will sit at.

“Iris,” Mom warns. “Where did that chair come from?”

“We are not ignoring her,” Iris demands. Her mother sighs. “I mean it, Mom, it’s no good for anyone. She was my sister—your daughter—and we’re going to sit here with her one last year, you understand?”

Mom shakes her head. A slow, fat tear rolls down her plump face.

“Alright,” she cedes. “Alright, Iris. But it will hurt.”

“Everything hurts. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Sometimes what’s best hurts the worst.”

At dinner, Nana gets up to walk around the table and reach for the applesauce, but Iris bats her hand away and guides her back to her chair with one hand on the small of her back. It’s been a long time, now, without her Nana, back in her real life. Part of her almost misses the sound of that applesauce dish splintering. All of her misses her grandmother.

“I’ll get it for you, Nana,” Iris whispers, and pats her on the cheek. Nana grins.

“Your sister used to bring it to me,” she tells her, as though Iris didn’t see it happen every year until her death.

“I know. But it’s my turn, now.”

“You remember the terrible Christmas jokes she always had up her sleeve?” Dad asks, hesitant and cautious. Aunt Jamie laughs, startling Baby April into a fit of giggles, too.

“Who could forget?” Jamie nudges her husband, who hasn’t said a word all dinner. It pleases Iris to see him scowl. “What’d Santa say when the elves asked him for a day off on Christmas Eve?”

“I’m not buying into that.”

“I’ll bite,” Mom says through a mouthful of carrot, though she already knows the answer. “What did he say?”

“Snow way!”

Nothing sounds better on Christmas than an uproar of laughter, bar Poppy’s name finally being used. Iris inhales slow and contently, and leans back in her chair, glancing over to her sister’s old room. She can’t do anything about how empty it is. She can’t just ask Nana to sleep in the living room. It’s the only thing she can’t fix.

But maybe Poppy would have preferred Nana had somewhere to stay, anyway. She’s getting old, she’d say. She needs a proper bed, and curtains that actually do something.

It’s the twelfth Christmas without Poppy. To the others, it’s the first.

Maybe Iris did solve the puzzle this year; maybe she fixed the problem and flipped the switch that turns Christmas off replay, and maybe next year, she’ll be able to attend dinner with an April old enough to crack jokes at the table, and Jamie’s new—better—husband, and her aging parents. Maybe.

Or maybe nothing will change. Maybe she’ll wake up next year and realise that this is it for the rest of time—Christmas will only ever be the first without her sister. Maybe it wouldn’t matter, because she’s finally found a way to bring her sister back into the festivities. Maybe she’d even be relieved—it will be difficult, otherwise, to have her first Christmas without Nana.

It’s not something worth stressing about right now. All that’s left to do in this moment is appreciate the stories her family swap over good food, and the memory of her sister finally being set free.

For the first time in years, Christmas doesn’t feel so dreadful.