text: The place started descending into cheerful bedlam as more people arrived. Filif slipped out to get himself acclimated, as planned: Nita caught a glimpse of him, a tranquil shadow against the snow, as twilight set in. Tom and Carl turned up in their ski gear, to everyone's amusement, and were immediately equipped with cider (as they were apparently about to go on duty: "Back for the mulled wine later, Marina," Carl said, "you know we wouldn't miss that for anything!" ). Matt from Australia turned up, wearing jeans and a truly eye-hurting shirt covered with graphics of Christmas ornaments in Day-Glo colors. Tall rawboned Marcus with his Very Military Haircut arrived, actually in camouflage fatigues in Christmas colors, bringing chocolates for Kit's mama...
  
  The noise level in the house became amazing: gossip and laughter, some preliminary exchange of small gifts, a lot more drink making the rounds, a lot of food. Sker'ret seemed to have appointed himself catering manager, and was constantly going back and forth with buffet trays. "It's all downstairs on the other side of one of the puptent accesses," he said to Nita when he passed her once. "There's a stasis field there holding everything at the right temperatures. All the other accesses are set up, don't worry about those..." And he was off again for another tray.
  
  The music channel playing on the entertainment system was bringing out the best in some of the guests. Ronan's voice was lifted in song at one point and caused everyone to hold still in astonishment as he did a pitch-perfect, raspy singalong imitation of both the leads on the song that was playing. "They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold, but the wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old: when you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve, you promised me Broadway was waiting for me..."
  
  Moments later Matt was next to him and singing in harmony. "And the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing 'Galway Bay', and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day..."
  
  "We need them for the carol singing tomorrow night," said Kit's mama, sipping at her own mulled wine with a critical look. "Mmm, needs more cinnamon... Kit, take care of that, will you?"
  
  "Do what I can, Mama," Kit said as his mother headed back for the kitchen, and himself headed for another of the snack trays. Nita turned back to the gossip she'd been eavedropping on while pretending to watch the music video channel.
  
  "—didn't want to get into outside decoration, what with the kind of vandalism we've been getting lately," Nita's dad was saying.
  
  "Five'll get you ten I know who you mean. The Terror Twins...."
  
  "Who?"
  
  "The new next door neighbors' kids," Kit's pop said, and sighed. "I could really, really wish the Liddles hadn't had to move. I miss Dave. He was good company in the summer, at the end of a barbecue. Or most times, really."
  
  "I miss Roz," said the voice from the kitchen. "She was such a great cook. I was learning things from her..."
  
  There was a sort of communal sigh at that, audible even over the general noise. Kit's mama knew her cooking skills were limited, and knew that everyone knew it, and was regardless entirely cheerful about it and always looking forward to improving them.
  
  "So what happened there?" said Nita's dad. "I remember hearing that Dave had some job offer, but I don't know what else was going on."
  
  "Yeah. Some firm up in Seattle, I think. Washington state, anyway. It happened very suddenly. He spent most of the spring sending out resumes and got nothing: seemed like nobody needed anyone to do what he did. Repairs on these big computerized industrial printers. Then all of a sudden this one company hit on him, flew him out for an interview, and a week later, bang, deal done. They sold the house in an awful hurry... two weeks later they were gone."
  
  Kit's pop made a face. "The new neighbors, the Chastellains... Rory's all right. Nice guy, he works over at Northrop Grumman. Lena's lovely, a very lively funny woman, something in IT. But she's not working right now. Apparently she had some kind of hip injury last year and she's got another six months of physio before she can go back. I feel for her, though, because she's stuck being stay-at-home mom to, well..."
  
  Nita exchanged a glance with Kit, who'd come up next to her, and didn't say anything.
  
  "A pair of badly-behaved antisocial ignoramuses," Kit's mother said from the kitchen, sounding very much like someone who didn't care who might possibly overhear her.
  
  "There you go," Kit said under his breath. "Mama knows."
  
  "I can't imagine how two such nice people have turned out kids who're so poorly socialized," his mama said. "Seriously. Rude, destructive, foul-mouthed..."
  
  The two of them listened with amusement to the string of vividly descriptive adjectives flowing from the woman slicing oranges in the kitchen. Neither Nita nor Kit needed to be told more about the subject than they already knew. Bobby and Ron Chastellain had in an amazingly short time become famous at school for spending more time in detention than they seemed to spend in class. They were as much a menace on the sports field as they were in the classroom; it seemed no one was too small for them to bully or too big for them to start a fight with. They were almost universally loathed, and seemed to glory in it. Even wizards with a mandate to prevent speeding up the Universe's heat death sometimes had trouble keeping themselves from taking action against the Chastellains that would have been pleasantly robust but would probably have landed them in hot water with their Supervisories after the fact.
  
  "You have to wonder," Kit said under his breath, "whether it's still them being miserable at having to be in a new school all of a sudden, or if now they're just kicking everybody's ass every chance they get because they enjoy it."
  
  "My money's on number two," Nita said. "Never mind them. They are not spoiling my Christmas."
  
  "Mine either," Kit said. "Hey, where's Fil?"
  
  "He was out having a breath of air. I'll go check him."
  
  She slipped out of the heat and noise to glance around the back yard. Filif was standing straighter against the garage, playing the role of a relaxing Christmas tree perfectly and slowly letting down his branches. Snow was still falling gently through the darkness, but not as heavily as it had been. Still, Nita could feel something in the air, possibly something to do with the ionization associated with incoming storms: a sense that when the snow really let go, it wasn't going to stop for a while.
  
  She wandered over to him with her hot cider. "Fil? How're you doing?"
  
  "Just fine," he said. She could see his berry-eyes looking upward into the night, possibly a sign that he was engaged in the same kind of weather analysis she was. "One of the small creatures from down the road came along and watered me," Filif added. "Very kind."
  
  Nita stole a glance down at the snow. There was enough light from the house for her to easily see the yellow in it, and she burst out laughing.
  
  Behind her, Kit's side door went. "You all right out here, son?" said Kit's papa.
  
  Nita smiled at how quickly Filif seemed to reached this status after having been a first-time houseguest just an hour before: she detected her dad's subtle hand in that. "Just relaxing," said Filif. "How do the branches look?"
  
  "Very natural," he said. And then he laughed at himself. "Well, it's not as if you're an artificial tree, for God's sake. You look just fine. It's going to be a pleasure decorating you."
  
  "I hope so," Filif said. "I've been looking forward to this for a long time."
  
  "Well, whenever you're ready, we can always—" Kit's pop turned a little toward the house.
  
  Then he paused, and his eyes widened. "Uh," he said. "Maybe I'm missing something, but..."
  
  "But?" Nita said.
  
  Kit's pop swallowed. "I know they're supposed to be warm-blooded," he said, "but is it good for a dinosaur to be out in the snow?"
  
  Nita turned, stared at the shape glowing softly blue- and white-patterned out on the snowy lawn behind Kit's house. "Mamvish!!"
  
  It couldn't have been just her shout that brought them, but within a second or two every wizard in the house was pouring out of it. It occurred to Nita that the instantaneous reaction had to have something to do with the sudden presence in the neighborhood of someone with Mamvish's power levels. Momentarily she was surrounded by wizards attempting to hug her hello and others trying to get her to stick around.
  
  "No, no," she said, "I can't stay. But I had to come see you all. I didn't want you to get the idea that I didn't want to come and spin the dreidel!"
  
  The laughter that broke out confused her a little. "What?" she said. "Oh, no! Wrong holiday?"
  
  "No, just a little late for that one," Tom said. "But who cares? You came!"
  
  "I had to," Mamvish said. "Even though the season's wrong in this hemisphere..." She sounded wistful.
  
  She literally could only stay for a few minutes. "On my way to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, there's a nova about to pop and we're running short of time... But all of you do whatever you would do if I could stay!" And just like that, without even a breath of wind to mark her teleport, she was gone.
  
  "You're going to explain that to me, I hope," said Kit's pop.
  
  "It may take a while," said Kit. "Fil, want to come in and root a bit? Sker's freaking out in there, he thinks he brought the wrong flavor of compound or something and you're trying to be nice about it."
  
  The crowd that had dashed out of the house now wandered back in with Filif in tow. Shortly he was settled down in the broad deep bucket of rooting compound that Sker'ret had set up for him, and a group had gathered around him in energetic discussion of Solstice festivals in general. Nita stood there with another glass of cider and listened to Matt and Ronan and Kit and Carmela batting the subject around and trying to get a feel for what Filif actually knew about what was going on.
  
  "Well, I did a certain amount of reading before I came," Filif said. "The normal amount of research. But there did seem to be some, well, conflicts among various versions of the basic story..."
  
  This set off another wide-ranging discussion featuring mangers, caves versus little wooden chalets, the concept of Nativity scenes, the business of identifying angels as the Powers that Be (or not), the Annunciation, the Three Kings and whether they of Orient really Were, or whether they might actually have been wizards. "And this being called Santa Claus," Filif said at last. "Where does he fit into this? Certainly so senior a Power would not have failed to attend such an event."
  
  "Oh boy," Ronan said, covering his eyes, "here we go!"
  
  "And why is it supposed to happen at the Solstice when the documentation says that there were shepherds out in the fields with their sheep?"
  
  "Lambing time," Matt said. "He's got it in one. First-degree theft of pagan celebrations!"
  
  "Green boughs and all," Carmela said. "The Holly and the Ivy..."
  
  "O Christmas tree, O Christmas Tree," Matt started singing, "how lovely are thy branches..."
  
  Marcus, who'd been listening off to one side, suddenly looked indignant. "This is a terrible translation. What does 'lovely' have to do with anything?"
  
  They all looked at him. Marcus stared back, bemused by their bemusement. "...What? The original song doesn't say anything about the tree being lovely."
  
  "It doesn't?"
  
  "O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum," Kit sang, and then stopped, looking perplexed. "I don't know the rest."
  
  "It was a German song for a long time before it was an English one," Marcus said.
  
  "This was all Queen Victoria's husband's fault, wasn't it?" Carl said, having wandered over into this when Matt began singing. "He put a tree up in Buckingham Palace. Started a fad."
  
  "I thought it was Martin Luther's fault," Tom said, drifting up beside him. "Saw one out in the forest with its needles full of frost and starlight... brought it home to show the family..."
  
  "His fault too, yes," Marcus said. "But listen: the song—" He started to sing in a strong tenor.
  
   "O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
  
   Wie treu sind deine Blätter!
  
   O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
  
   Wie treu sind deine Blätter!
  
   Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,
  
   Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit. —
  
   O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,
  
   Wie treu sind deine Blätter!"
  
  Some of the other younger wizards looked thoughtful as they started taking the German lyric apart via their understanding of it in the Speech. "He's right, there's nothing about 'lovely' in there," Nita said.
  
  Kit shook his head. "How do you translate treu? 'Faithful?'"
  
  Marcus nodded. "Or loyal."
  
  Ronan laughed. "Like Matt said, the usual evergreen trope," he said. "The whole non-deciduous eternal-life thing." He had been working on a mug of Kit's mama's cocoa, and started to take another swig of it, then stared down into the mug with annoyance. "Bloodyell, I'm out again. Where's this stuff going? I mean, it's just cocoa, cocoa's for the wee kiddies..." He got up and headed for the back door again.
  
  Kit grinned into his own mug. "Mama's secret recipe strikes again..."
  
  Carmela glanced over at Marcus. "So it would be more like, 'You're green all while the Summer glows, and in the Winter, when it snows—'"
  
  Marcus tilted his head, thought. "Yes, that's close enough."
  
  "So where'd we get the 'lovely?'" Dairine said.
  
  Marcus shrugged. "Poor translations are everywhere in popular culture," he said. "You should see what happens to some of your TV shows when we get them at home."
  
  "Please," Carmela said. "Some of the anime dubs...!"
  
  "And do not even get me started on Raumschiff Enterprise—!"
  
  Within seconds Carmela and Marcus were off into some insanely technical discussion in the Speech of the way translation issues affecting space opera. Kit gave Nita a look as the conversation became indecipherable even in the Speech. "You see what I put up with."
  
  Ronan burst out laughing as he came back with a much larger mug of cocoa. "Oh please," he said. "Is that you I hear complaining about somebody else's geekery, Mars Boy? Oh knower of the name of every crater on the planet? Spare me."
  
  The singing started again shortly thereafter, several rival versions of the carol breaking out. Marcus and Carmela were singing in German, Dairine and her dad and Kit's mama were upholding the more traditional American English version, and Ronan began singing an entirely different one in counterpoint, featuring the line "Thy candles shine out brightly" . "Each bough doth hold its tiny light, that makes each toy to sparkle bright –"
  
  "Wait a moment," Nita's dad said, "whoa, whoa, wait a moment!"
  
  The singing on various sides trailed off. "Candles?" said Nita's dad. "What candles?"
  
  "Sure didn't you know that lots of folks out our way put candles on their Christmas trees way back when?" Ronan said. "Though you have to wonder how many houses they burned down before the electric lights came along!"
  
  Marcus nodded. "In some families it is still traditional despite the risk," he said. "One of my uncles' families still does it. You only do it for a few minutes, though, and you watch the candles like a hawk the whole time. Then you put them out and make sure they're cold, and then everybody goes off to church, or out to dinner, or else you open the presents..."
  
  A number of people turned in some concern to Filif to see how he was handling this concept. But he looked quite relaxed: at least his needles weren't bristling, which was something Nita had seen on occasion and which she recognized as a sign of real trouble. "It's an interesting contrast," he said after a moment. "Symbolic, I suppose. The Kindler of Wildfires brought under control... even brought in where you live, as a sign of how things will be some day when It's mended Its ways." The green boughs shook, possibly in laughter. "Or else it's just a little extra defiance to go with the usual acknowledgement and greeting..."
  
  There was a little silence. And then Filif said:
  
  "You know... I would really like to do that."
  
  Nita and Kit looked at each other in astonishment. Carmela's mouth dropped open. "Seriously?"
  
  "Yes." Filif shivered all over.
  
  Carmela's eyes went wide and her mouth made an O. "My shrub," she murmured, "has an oxidation kink."
  
  "Well I wouldn't go so far as to call it a kink—"
  
  "Too late," Nita said, amused, watching Carmela's face. "It's in her head now and you will never get it out."
  
  Nita's father, who'd come in on the end of this, looked amazed. "Bit of a change of attitude on the subject for you," he said.
  
  "True. But I'm not who I was even a year or two ago." And a lot of Filif's berries glowed more brightly than they had for a second or so.
  
  "Well," Kit's pop said. "We're not really set up for that at the moment. But we have a lot of other stuff on tap. You think you're about ready to get started, big fella?"
  
  Filif bowed slightly to him. "Yes!"
  
  "All right," said Kit's pop. "Lights first."
  
  He headed for the back of the house and shortly came back with his arms full of boxes: some of them quite new, some of them looking old and beat up. "I like the new LED lights a lot," Kit's pop said. "A lot of control over them, and you don't have to worry so much about the heat. But at the same time you hate to let the old ways go completely. Tradition..."
  
  He put the newer boxes aside for a moment and turned his attention to the older ones. "Have to be very careful with these," he said, putting the boxes down side by side. They were both yellowed, thin cardboard, crumbling a bit at the edges in some places; the printing on them was old-fashioned looking, the colors faded. Kit's pop opened one. Inside it, in yellowed cardboard spacer-holders, was a row of nine candlestick-shaped bubble lights: fat bulbous bases, tall glass "candlesticks" full of colored fluid. A faint scent of very old pine needles came up from the box.
  
  "Now those are vintage," Nita's dad said.
  
  "Relics," said Kit's pop, opening the second box with the same care. "Makes me laugh to see how popular they are all of a sudden, with everyone so eager to have 'retro' stuff. My father gave them to me when I came of age."
  
  "Didn't know there was a minimum age for Christmas lights, Juan."
  
  Kit's pop laughed. "Came as news to me too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to wreck them." Very carefully he started lifting the first set out of the box, untangling the wires. "Can't blame him. You wouldn't believe what replacements for these cost. Every year I live in terror that I'm going to plug this in and one of them won't come on..."
  
  They got down together on the floor and stretched the lights out. Nita's gaze met Kit's in amusement at the sight of the two dads hunkered down on the floor like kids with a special toy. Nita's dad picked up one of the lights and peered at the liquid inside it. "What is that in there?"
  
  "Something with a real low boiling point," Kit's pop said. "Just the light in the bottom is enough to make it bubble."
  
  Nita's dad picked up the box, turned it over, peered at it. "No warnings or anything about what it is..."
  
  "You kidding? This comes from a time when doctors did commercials about how good cigarette smoking was for you. I'm betting it's poisonous."
  
  In the back of Nita's mind, Bobo whispered, Methylene chloride...
  
  "Yeah, you really wouldn't want to break one of those," Nita said. "The place would need airing out. And forget about touching it or drinking it..."
  
  "Low on my list of things to do," said Kit's pop, rummaging around underneath Filif to slot the light set's plug into the plug strip. "Let's test the other set and then start putting the modern ones on first. These go on afterwards, on the outer branches."
  
  Shortly the first of four sets of LED lights was going on the "tree" , and rather unusually for a household in the suburbs of New York, the tree was helping. Kit's pop was on one side and Nita's dad on the other, and they were passing the strings of lights back and forth to make sure they were equally distributed. What was making the process go much more smoothly was the way that when one or the other of them was having trouble getting a light cord around into the corner where Filif was positioned, he would simply put a branch up, curl the terminal fronds around the wire, and maneuver it into the spot where it was needed. It took very little time to get the first strand up, the one that was all plain white lights and was tucked most closely in toward the trunk.
  
  "These colored ones now, Juan?"
  
  "Yeah. We'll do that string from the top down to about halfway... then plug the other one in and finish down at the bottom."
  
  The second string began going up, while more people wandered into the living room with various festive drinks in hand to watch the process. As this was going on, Carmela came up behind Nita and peered at the proceedings between her and Kit. "I thought I was going to get to do some of this," she said, very low, and laughed. "Seems like the youngsters have taken over."
  
  "I thought you'd have been all over this," Nita said. "You gonna let them do everything?"
  
  "On the contrary," Carmela said, very softly. "I'm letting them do the heavy lifting. I've got the part that matters." And she gave Nita the merest glimpse of something golden that she'd had hidden under her tunic.
  
  Nita laughed very quietly. "No Mets hat?"
  
  "Are you kidding? This is a formal affair..."
  
  Meanwhile, the two fathers were finishing with the more normal lights. "Okay, the bubblers, now," said Kit's pop. With great care they moved around clipping them to the outer branches, making sure they were secure. Every now and then Filif would curl a frond up or down and make sure a bubble-light wouldn't wiggle. All the while, a calm businesslike dialogue was going on. "Can't imagine why they never put clips on these. Alligator clips or something—" "Yeah, you're supposed to just force them over the ends of the branches and then tighten them down, I don't know what they were thinking of, it's a design flaw..."
  
  The two men took their time, and when the lights were all up stood back and examined their work so far for balance and evenness. "Not enough up top there, you think, Juan?"
  
  "Mmm, not sure. No... I think we're okay. Works better to do more garlands up there, I think. Keeps things from getting topheavy..."
  
  "Okay. Bulbs now?"
  
  "Yeah." Kit's pop went off to fetch the boxes from the back of the house, and came back with them piled high enough in his arms that he could barely see over the top.
  
  "You have a protocol for this over at your place?" Kit's mama called from the kitchen, peering briefly through the passthrough window. "Some kind of order that things go up in?"
  
  "Well. Not exactly. But the good stuff goes in close to the trunk. The ones you're less concerned about if they fall down or something bangs into them, those go on the outside."
  
  "Makes sense."
  
  Nita watched as her dad and Kit's pop carefully opened the boxes, revealing a wild assortment of mirror-polished and satin-sheened ornaments, very few alike—remnants of old sets, replacements from newer ones, all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. She caught Filif's excited shiver, smiled at it, grinned a little at Kit as he came over to lean against her, watching.
  
  The two fathers took turns, took their time, lifting the ornaments out, conferring, finding the best spots for them. "How is there are never enough hooks for these?" "I could have sworn I bought more last year." "Harry, this one's ribbon broke." "Son, would you move that branch up a little? I want to get this one in by the trunk." "Here?" "That's right, just ease it up a little..." "Perfect." "Or maybe a little to the left?" "Yeah...."
  
  They stood back again and took stock. "Okay," said Nita's dad. "Garlands now?"
  
  "Heresy! Tinsel first. Garlands after."
  
  This provoked a brief storm of opinion from some of the onlookers. "You'll crush the tinsel!" "Especially the mylar stuff!" "I never went for this crinkled kind myself, it's not as shiny..." Nita watched Filif starting to tremble a little harder and briefly wasn't sure whether it was out of nervousness. But then she realized he was laughing, and trying to keep anyone from noticing.
  
  The "tinsel first" school of thought finally prevailed, and Kit's pop went off and came back with several boxes of it. He and Nita's dad started applying it, and once more a brief good-natured exchange of ideas broke out. Nita's dad was one of the "One strand at a time" school: Kit's pop was more of a "fling it on from a distance" type. Laughter spread around the room as each one started trying to convert the other to his way of thinking. Kit's mama leaned on the shelf of the passthrough for a few minutes, watching this drama unfold, and then vanished.
  
  A minute or two later she came back with a couple of glasses full of something amber that didn't look like cider. These she put on a side table and said, "In case anyone wants to take a moment and get a grip..."
  
  The two fathers looked at each other. "Not smart to ignore medical advice, Juan..." said Nita's dad.
  
  Smiling, they took a few moments' worth of break, sampling what Kit's mama had brought them while standing back again to examine their handiwork. Among the lights, Nita could see Filif's eye-berries doing what the lights didn't do: moving around a bit. Her dad noticed this too, leaned in. "You okay there, big guy?"
  
  "Fine."
  
  "You sure? You're not ticklish or anything?"
  
  "Oh, no. I just... Finding places to see out of is going to be interesting." Filif was laughing.
  
  "All part of the game," said Kit's pop. "The informal object of the exercise is to leave as little of you showing as possible. It's all about the decorations."
  
  "Though most of the time," Nita's dad said, "the tree isn't in a position to offer any opinions. This adds a whole new level of challenge to the endeavor." He pushed a clump of tinsel aside. A berry peered out from under. "You tell us when you've got visibility problems: we'll shift things around."
  
  "All right."
  
  "Now the garlands," said Kit's pop, and went off for a final couple of boxes. These were glittery mylar, one in silver, one in gold, and one in dark green. With care Kit's pop tucked the end of the first one just under Filif's topmost upstanding bough, the one where he normally wore his baseball cap, and he and Nita's dad started passing the looped remainder of it back and forth between them as they wound it around and around. "What goes on top?" said Nita's dad.
  
  "These days, a star," said Juan. "Though we had an angel once."
  
  "Not any more? What happened?"
  
  "It melted," Kit's pop said. "Something went wrong with the bulb inside it. The thing actually exploded one evening. The plastic—"
  
  "It wasn't plastic, Juan, it was celluloid," Kit's mama said as she came in with more cider and mulled wine for those who wanted it. "With fiberglass hair. The thing went up like a torch. It's a miracle it happened while we were awake and actually in the room with it. God knows what would have happened to the tree if we hadn't got that thing off it."
  
  "The next two Christmases completely sucked," Kit whispered in Nita's ear. "They refused to leave the lights on unless there was somebody in the room. You couldn't come downstairs in the middle of the night and find the lights on and everything glowing."
  
  "They got over it, though..."
  
  "Eventually." Kit rolled his eyes expressively. Nita, though, was watching Filif again. The shiver that went through him at the mention of the fire was not one of unease. Definitely, she thought, something new is going on...
  
  "I heard that," said Kit's pop, sounding amused. "Never mind, it got better." He picked up another garland, the gold one. "So where is it?"
  
  "You haven't got the last garland on yet," Carmela said. "We'll wait."
  
  And they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star—about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket—and reached way, way up to put it on.
  
  And couldn't quite reach. "You've been getting taller without telling me," she said. "Give me a hand here, shrub."
  
  Very carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.
  
  "Merry Christmas, Fil," Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.
  
  The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.
  
  Now, though, it was Nita's turn to get nervous.
  
  In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn't make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine's Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.
  
  This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit's family's tree. "To remember me by," she'd said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. "What, are you going somewhere?" he'd said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. "What? No! No, I just want to... I'm covering all my options, okay?" And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn't too sure herself.
  
  In any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit's tree she'd gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker'ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.
  
  "Now then," she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she'd been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.
  
  "Early present?" Kit said.
  
  "Early present for the tree. Go on!"
  
  He carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. "Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we needed paper!"
  
  Nita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. "I'll give you paper somewhere else," she said. "Don't get cute."
  
  He threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.
  
  Suddenly Kit was holding his too. "Ohh..." he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.
  
  Carefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.
  
  "It's a sathak," Kit whispered, "from Mars, it's absolutely Takaf, Khretef's guy, his dog, and Ponch was in him, and—!" He swallowed. "Neets, where'd you get this?"
  
  "Had it made," Nita said. "Do you like it?"
  
  "Oh wow," Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita's neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. "Wow," he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.
  
  His Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. "You okay, son?"
  
  "Mama, look at this! This is so great!"
  
  He broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.
  
  "That was a good gift, then," he said.
  
  "Yeah," Nita said. "Yeah. Don't drop it when he hangs it up, okay?"
  
  "Outlier forbid!" Filif said. "I'll take good care of it for you, never fear."
  
  A few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. "Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more... No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better."
  
  "Like this?"
  
  "Yeah, it'll catch the light there. Don't want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is... Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes."
  
  "Should I move this frond?"
  
  "No, you're okay. Then again... I don't know... You're not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?'
  
  "No, not at all."
  
  Finally the sathak ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.
  
  "That is so super. Thanks," Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.
  
  Nita just nodded.
  
  Nita's dad turned away from where he'd been standing near Tom and Carl. "And one more thing—" he said, more or less in Juan's direction.
  
  A few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.
  
  "Well, it's kind of an event, isn't it?" Nita's dad said. "So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit."
  
  He reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.
  
  Nita's breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth—but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who'd thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.
  
  Nita's dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif's decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. "Looks good," Nita's dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.
  
  Kit's pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita's dad one of the glasses sitting there. "Absent friends," he said softly.
  
  Nita's dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit's pop's. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.
  
  "Kit? Would you turn the lights off?" said Kit's pop.
  
  Kit headed over to the switch for the main room light, flipped it. In the darkness that fell over the room, Filif had become the only bright thing. Everyone held still, caught in the warm light as if in amber.
  
  The Demisiv stood there quietly, glittering, glowing. Nita saw that he was shivering with some emotion, or some combination of them. But then he was always good at picking this stuff up, she thought. To him, silently, she said: are you okay?
  
  More than okay, he said. I am honored to bear this weight.
  
  Slowly, softly, conversation started up again around him as lamps were turned on around the edges of the room. People got themselves more cider and cocoa, and everyone spent at least some time in front of Filif commenting on how terrific he looked decorated, some of them adding details on how they did it at their place: all white lights versus colored, or all blue: matched ornaments all in one color versus the "chaos theory" approach that Kit's family favored: blinking lights or steady ones...
  
  Around them, people started hitting the buffet trays again: the mulled wine came out. Nita stood off to one side with Sker'ret for a few moments, enjoying the sight of Kit pulling people over one at a time to point at his ornament and explain it to them.
  
  "That worked, then," Sker'ret said to her.
  
  "As the boy says," Nita said, "more than. Thanks for helping me with that."
  
  "Well, thanks for keeping my facility and everything I hold dear from being overrun by hostiles!" Sker'ret said. "You don't pull down half the perks you're entitled to for that."
  
  "I'll start working on that, I promise."
  
  "No you won't," Sker'ret said. "I know you too well. Expect me to start bothering you about it."
  
  "Hey Legs," Kit's mama called from the kitchen, "I need the rest of those trays, it's time for more of the buffalo wings!"
  
  "You do that," said Nita, "and I'll tell your broodmates you're slumming doing catering work!"
  
  Sker'ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. "Don't get me started," he said. "I might get my revenge some other way. She's got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff..."
  
  Nita turned back to find Kit's pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. "You going to be okay standing there all night like that?" said Kit's pop. "I don't want you to be stuck away from the fun."
  
  "Oh, this is fun! But I don't have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here."
  
  Kit's pop blinked at that. "Uh, am I missing something?"
  
  "Watch."
  
  The "Christmas tree" seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place... but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.
  
  "That being is an artist," Ronan called from across the room, "and if he drank, I'd buy him one."
  
  Filif burst out laughing. "Of course I drink," he said, "what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?"
  
  "No, I didn't mean water..."
  
  "Drinking habits aside," said Kit's pop, "that is some stunt."
  
  "Nothing much at all," said Filif. "It's a constructed appearance, what we call a mochteroof."
  
  "I won't even try to remember how to say that..." Kit's pop said. "Or to pretend I've got the slightest idea what you're talking about."
  
  "Think of it as like a hologram, but solid," Filif said. "I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in..."
  
  And suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in mochteroof construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita's jaw dropped.
  
  "How is he doing that??" she said to Sker'ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.
  
  "Reverse-proactive Speech recension," Sker'ret said. "He's a many-talented lad, our Filif. The reverse recensions take a lot of work..."
  
  Nita knew they did: she'd hit them more than once, and bounced. Idly she reached down for a buffalo wing as Sker'ret headed off to do the rounds.
  
  She was just turning around to see if she could find a napkin, because the sauce on the wings was fairly aggressive, when Carmela came wandering over to her, bent toward Nita's ear, and whispered:
  
  "You know something?"
  
  "What?"
  
  "It's not enough."
  
  Nita blinked. "What? This was what he always wanted."
  
  "But there's more now. You know what else he wants."
  
  "What do you—" Then she realized.
  
  "The rest of his Christmas present. Neets, come on. He wants the candles. We have to figure out a way to give him this!"
  
  Nita thought about it. Carmela's mischief was a bit infectious and hard to resist right now. But so was the intensity of her feeling about this... and Nita's sense that Mela had this right. That was what finally tipped Nita over into agreement. "The parental types would pitch a fit if they found out..."
  
  "Better make sure they don't find out, then," Carmela said. "We'll handle it later. Down in one of the puptents."
  
  "Makes sense," Nita had to admit. "Not even in the same space as the house, really..."
  
  "And believe me, this time of year my folks don't have the staying power to ride herd on us when we'll be staying up all night. If they even wanted to try." Carmela snickered. "Dairine did a smart thing. Installed her own puptent downstairs and took Mama in to show her."
  
  "And?"
  
  "What the decor didn't do to her, the size of it did. All the gilding and jewels and weird alien furniture..."
  
  Nita blinked. That description meant only one thing to her. "She installed Roshaun's puptent..."
  
  "Uh huh. I assume the Mobiles have a version of it saved. Or she does, in her manual..."
  
  That was food for thought. "Well, at least in there you've got a lot less chance of burning the house down..."
  
  Carmela laughed at her. "With a house full of wizards, good luck with that happening. And anyway there are about fifty more interesting things that could happen, with the cellar full of elective pinched spaces. All you need is a portal fringe overlap and the whole area collapses into a superdense black hole. Good thing the Master of the Crossings is here walking the hors d'oeuvres around."
  
  Nita cracked up laughing.
  
  Things got a little more relaxed after that. "Now about this Santa Claus being..." Filif was saying to Kit's pop. "Perhaps this is only an avatar of one of the Powers? Working clandestinely, and hoping to be mistaken for a chaotic force aligned with the Lone Power? Because the presence of the associated small nonhuman workers does confuse the picture somewhat. That said, possibly that's its whole idea..."
  
  That was the point at which Nita got around to actually putting the buffalo wing in her mouth. Instants later, she was incredibly, incredibly sorry.
  
  "Oh, it's a he?" Filif was saying. "Thanks. Sometimes it's hard to tell around here. In any case, certainly the appearance of being in violation of common Galactic labor accords could lead an unwary observer to believe—"
  
  Nita's eyes were tearing with something that wasn't laughter. "Got one of the hot ones did you, sweetie?" Kit's mama was saying. "Legs, leave that tray with me and go bring her some sour cream...!"