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If there is one thing Lydia truly hates about living in California, it’s the traffic.
“Are we ever going to move?” Stiles grumbles, shifting in the passenger seat as they roll forward maybe an inch. Traveling at Christmastime is always nightmarish, but the usual 45-minute drive to Beacon Hills from their house just south of San Francisco has already reached two hours today, and they’re barely halfway there.
“There must be an accident up ahead,” Lydia tells her husband, frowning at the solid red line representing the highway on her maps app. “Even at Christmastime, traffic is never this bad.”
“Mom, are we almost there?” Nolan whines from the backseat, his head falling against the headrest of Felicity’s seat. She swats her younger brother away, looking back down at the battered copy of the first Harry Potter in her lap.
“No, we’re not,” Lydia responds, and Stiles and Nolan groan almost in sync.
“When are we gonna get there?” Emilie sighs, slumping in her carseat, and Lydia twists around to look at her youngest.
“There are a lot of other cars trying to get the same place as us, honey,” Lydia tells her. “Look at your book or take a nap, okay? Daddy and I will tell you when we’re almost at Grandma and Grandpa’s.” Emilie sighs, grabbing a book from the basket in between her and Felicity’s seats. In the way backseat, Nolan groans again, kicking his feet up on the empty back bench, his head thumping against the windowpane.
“Nolan, sit in your seat normally, please,” Stiles says, twisting around in his own to look at his son reclining in the backseat. Nolan sighs again, though he does sit up.
“We’re not even moving, though!” he rebuts.
“Yeah, doesn’t matter,” Stiles tells him. “Safety first.”
“Says the man with no werewolf powers who rushes into supernatural battles armed only with a baseball bat,” Lydia mutters. Stiles rolls his eyes at her, giving her a pointed look.
“That is completely different.”
“I don’t really see how it is,” Lydia says, smirking slightly, but Stiles turns away from her, facing their kids in the back again as the car creeps up an inch more.
“What are you reading, Em?” Stiles asks, looking at the fancy pop up book in his youngest’s lap. “Is that The Twelve Days of Christmas?” Lydia can see Emilie nod at her dad in the rearview mirror— she had stocked Emmy’s basket of books in the car with a bunch of Christmas classics for the drive to Beacon Hills.
“On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…” Emilie recites, more from memory than from actual reading— at five years old, she’s just starting to learn to read now. “A…” Lydia turns around to watch her daughter sound out the word, brow scrunching in concentration.
“Partridge,” Felicity cuts in, pointing at the word in her sister’s book. “It’s a bird.”
“A partridge in a… pear tree,” Emilie finishes off, with her sister’s help. Lydia’s smile widens as her girls flip to the next page and she turns back to the traffic in front of them, pulling up a couple feet. She remembers when they had Emilie being afraid of how her older sister would react, with almost a six year age gap between the two girls, but Felicity is nothing but sweet and patient with her little sister, which Lydia is beyond grateful for.
“What’s this one say?” Felicity asks, helping her sister sound out the words, her own book abandoned. In the backseat, Nolan leans forwards to see the pictures in Emilie’s book.
“Tw… twoh,” Emilie says, brow furrowed.
“Not quite, Em,” Nolan says, pointing to the illustration of two birds next to the words. “It’s a number.”
“Two!” Em says, grinning proudly. “Two… tuh… turtle… doves.”
Lydia smiles as her three children continue making their way through the book, the car inching up a little more. There’s still a wall of tail lights ahead of them— she’s starting to wonder if they’ll ever make it out of this traffic jam.
Stiles, clearly, is wondering about other things.
“Every time I hear ‘turtle doves’ I just picture turtles with wings,” Stiles tells her, making a face that she knows means he’s picturing it right now. Lydia can’t help but laugh at that.
“You know they’re birds, right?” she asks. Her husband nods, eyes still trained on the road ahead.
“The Twelve Days of Christmas is such a weird song, when you think about it,” Stiles says, making a face as he turns back towards Lydia. In the backseat, the kids are onto day seven. “All the presents are, like, large numbers of birds. Who wants geese for a Christmas present?”
“You’re right,” Lydia says, nodding. She hadn’t really thought of it before, but now that he mentions it… “And swans, too. Who wants seven swans? Swans are mean.”
“Also,” Stiles says, as Emmy sounds out maids a milking with Felicity’s help. “These eight maids a milking. Do they come with their own cows? What are they milking?”
“All the birds that were previously gifted?” Lydia suggests, smirking.
“Gross, you can’t milk a bird,” Stiles argues.
“Well all the other presents are people , so,” Lydia says with a shrug. “Ladies dancing and lords a leaping and drummers drumming.”
“So basically The Twelve Days of Christmas is endorsing slavery,” Stiles says, and Lydia shakes her head again. “You can’t just give someone people. Unless the someone is supposed to pay all the dancers and drummers and pipers, which seems like a dumb present.”
“Maybe that’s what the gold rings are for,” Lydia says with a shrug. “When you think about it, that’s really the only present that seems like a present.”
“I know, everything else is just birds,” Stiles says. “Which also raises the question— who is taking care of all these birds? That seems like so much work. There’s a ton of birds in this song.”
“I know, talk about noisy presents,” Lydia says. “Even without all the birds, the drummers and pipers are loud enough.”
In the backseat, Emilie finishes reading the last page of the book proudly, Nolan high fiving her and Felicity patting her shoulder as she closes the book.
“Good job reading, sweetie,” Lydia tells her, turning around to smile at her littlest. Apparently the kids were oblivious to their parents’ heated debate about the practicality of the song.
“Basically, it’s a dumb song that doesn’t make any sense and the person buying the presents is a terrible gift giver.”
“Are you saying you don’t want a partridge in a pear tree for Christmas?” Lydia asks, giving him a teasing look. Stiles makes a face, shaking his head dramatically.
“Please don’t get me anything mentioned in that song, ever.”
“Seems reasonable,” she says, thinking of the Star Wars Celebration tickets wrapped up somewhere in the trunk of the car right now. “I’m going to have to return your present for this year, then. I got you four calling birds. Sorry.”
“Eh, it’s okay. I guess I can forgive you.”
Lydia opens her mouth to respond, but all of a sudden, ahead of them, the cars are accelerating.
“Oh my god,” she says, pressing down on the gas pedal for the first time in what seems like hours. “We’re moving!”
“The traffic is gone?” Nolan asks, poking his head in between his sisters’ seats.
“It’s a Christmas miracle!” Stiles says, throwing his hands in the air. “We might actually make it to Grandma’s house before dinner time at this rate.”
“We might,” Lydia agrees, accelerating on the now-open highway. Felicity picks up her book again, and Emilie turns in her carseat to watch the mountains passing by out the window.
It barely takes five minutes before Nolan asks again: “Are we there yet?”
Lydia laughs, and Stiles groans dramatically, but her son’s impatience doesn't really bother her at all.