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The lights dimmed. The quiet the audience settled into was as soft as the silence that falls when plump snowflakes float down onto an already cold, white world.
“You’ve got something in...hold still,” Jack whispered, crowding into Mac’s side and grumbling at his son’s attempt to fend off the hand delving into his blond hair.
“Jack!” Mac griped, trying to avoid his dad’s questing fingers but trapped as he was in the eighth row of fold up chairs filled with proud parents he couldn’t get away from them. He ducked and squirmed. “The play’s going to start!” he hissed.
“Hold still then!” Jack hissed back, his fingernails scrabbling at Mac’s scalp. “There, got it!” He held up his forefinger, triumphant. At the tip of the digit, twinkling in the lights shining down on the makeshift stage at the front of the room, sat a piece of silver glitter. “See, you should be glad I fished this out of your roots, with it sparkling away in there you looked like you should have been sat behind a piano singing Crocodile Rock.”
Mac rolled his eyes, “One piece of glitter made me look like Elton John?” he said in a whisper thick with disbelief.
“So maybe you hadn’t gone full Rocket Man but I don’t think it was gonna be a long, long time until you did.” Jack gave his best ‘see what I did there!’ wink. “And I knew the pesky thing was there,” he added, “I wouldn’t have been able to get it off my mind.” A flick of Jack’s fingers launched the piece of glitter off into the stratosphere.
Mac watched the tiny speck of sparkle vanish without regret. “That stuff is all over the house. It’s spread to every single room,” he said in a low breath. “Maybe next time Cassie makes us something with glitter on it shouldn’t get stuck onto the fridge door.”
The week before, with a bowed head and shyly shuffling feet, Cassie had handed Jack an envelope with his and Mac’s names carefully printed on the front.
“This is for me?” Jack had asked, opening the envelope and pulling out the card inside it to unleash a flutter of twinkles. “Come to my Christmas show!” the invitation requested. It had been handmade with enthusiastically applied felt tip pens, heart shaped stickers and glitter. When the invite was in Jack’s hands Cassie had tucked her blushes behind her mother’s legs leaving Helen to explain that Cassie’s school were putting a Christmas play on and each family in her class had been allocated four seats for the performance. Neither Helen’s nor her husband’s parents were able to attend the show and Cassie had decided that she wanted to give her extra tickets to Jack and Mac.
Jack had dropped to one knee on the stable’s floor and caught Cassie’s eyes through the safety of her mother’s skirts. “Sunshine,” he’d said, “I’m honoured. Mac and me would love to see your show, thank you.”
Cassie had beamed.
The invite had been stuck on to the fridge door and after it had been secured behind a magnet bits of it’s decorations started to become unstuck and migrate all over Jack and Mac’s home. Mac had found chinks of gold and silver drifting lazily in his morning coffee, stuck to the bottom of both of his shoes, mixed up with his laundry as he’d unloaded it from the washing machine and in his sandwiches when he’d unpacked his lunch at school.
“Those sparkles do seem to have a talent for getting in every nook and cranny don’t they?” Jack said.
A knowing chuckle came from beside Jack. “Tell me about it, that stuff’s a menace,” Matthias, Cassie’s father, leaned around Jack to say. “Glitter has colonised every part of my life. I’d spent a full morning at work lecturing the other day before I noticed that I had three pieces of it caught in one of my eyebrows.”
Jack snorted, “Like your own little pieces of stardust.”
Matthias shook his head. “Either my students hadn’t noticed the glitter was there, they were too polite to mention it or they were all secretly laughing at me,” he said.
“Thinking back to my own college days I’d say you probably had students that fitted into all three of those there categories in your classes,” Jack supplied helpfully.
“Probably,” Matthias agreed. “But I don’t know what my wife’s excuse for not telling me about the glitter was.”
Helen leaned past her husband to butt into the hushed conversation. “I didn’t see it!” she insisted with a grin, clearly not for the first time. “I would have told you if I had.”
As Matthias muttered wordlessly a teacher in a Christmas sweater stepped out and climbed onto the stage at the front of the hall to a smattering of polite applause. She walked to stand behind the wooden podium placed on the side of a stage that had hay bales strategically dotted around it and a wooden manger placed in it’s centre under a spotlight.
Mac, Jack, Matthias and Helen sat back in their seats and turned their attention to the stage.
The teacher behind the podium looked off into the wings and nodded at a signal someone must had given her. “Dear friends who gather here today, welcome to our Christmas play,” she recited. “Please join with us to look back far, to the baby born beneath a star.”
The narrator gestured and a line of kindergarten children marched onto the back of the stage and stood in a haphazard line. Each child fidgeted a little, some looked out into the audience to try to spot their parents, some squinted up at the star made of fairy lights and tin foil hanging above them, some tugged at the headdresses covering their hair and one bored looking little boy’s finger started to make an absent minded journey up into his nose before the narrator waved at him.
“Mary and Joseph, a long journey they mounted,” the narrator read when the boy lowered his hand, “off to Bethlehem, where they would be counted.”
The audience ‘awwed’ as an encouraging adult led a little girl and boy onto the stage. The girl was dressed in blue and white and smiled delightedly at being the centre of attention while the boy wore a striped brown robe and followed his classmate wearing a slightly bewildered expression.
“All day they rode till the sky turned black, down the dusty road on a donkey’s back,” the narrator read. Off at the side of the stage the opening bars of Little Donkey began to play and the adults at each end of the line of children nodded and gestured at them. A collective deep breath was drawn by the choir then the first line of the song rang out.
“Little donkey, little donkey, on a dusty road...”
The carol was bellowed with gusto if not a great deal of tunefulness. As the children sang Mary and Joseph were led up and down the stage on their journey. Joseph followed the adult holding his hand with diligent acceptance but Mary’s attention kept wandering away from the path in front of her out to the audience and the lights shining down on her.
“...don’t give up now, little donkey, Bethlehem’s in sight!” One particular little choirboy roared above the other children, he must have been told to sing nice and loud and was going above and beyond to follow that instruction. Chuckles rose from the parents surrounding Mac as the boy’s ‘safely on her way!’ echoed in the rafters. The atmosphere around Mac in the darkened hall was as sweet and rich as egg nog with amusement and the comfort of revised traditions. Schools in countless countries would be telling the story being enacted on the stage and the community of the spectators Mac was part of felt very much one with the worldwide community of people watching children stand up in front of an audience, sing, find it impossible to keep still and struggle to stop their costumes slipping down. Mac turned from the front of the hall to focus his gaze on his dad. Jack didn’t notice Mac looking, his attention was locked on the children performing in front of him. He was watching events play out on stage with rapture, grinning when the innkeeper stomped on, announce that there was ‘no room!’ at the top of his lungs and stomped off to stand at the side of the assembled cast.
A twinge twisted somewhere inside Mac and he didn’t know what the barb was. It might have been regret, or loss, or a longing for something nameless that might not have ever existed. Mac had vague memories of being in school plays when he was younger, his main memory of the one he’d been part of when he was the age of the children in front of him mostly involved him being intrigued by the lantern he’d been given to hold and trying to work out how to open it to get at the battery powered candle inside. He wasn’t old enough to be filled with the layers of nostalgia for Christmases past that the adults around him had but he was too old for the anticipation lit delight of the little ones on stage. It was an ill-fitting, half way place to be and Mac felt a little out of step with the people around him.
“As the star filled the sky with golden light, the son of God was born that night,” the narrator read and Mary reached behind her to pick up a swaddled baby doll from where it had been hidden. A ripple of wry laughter bubbled around the audience.
Mac heard a humph from Helen who was rocking a sleeping Percy in her arms. “If only it was that simple,” she mumbled to herself.
“Soon shepherds came who brought their sheep, and Kings with gifts for the babe to keep.” The narrator said, she beckoned and a small collection of children clutching plush lambs and three boys wearing cardboard crowns and holding extravagantly wrapped shoe boxes filed onto the stage. It all became a bit too much for one of the shepherds who burst into tears and wailed with heartfelt sobs until her mother tiptoed to sit on the edge of the stage and pulled her distraught daughter into her lap.
“It’s the pressure,” Jack whispered at Mac. “So many sheep, so little time.”
Mac giggled. “I thought being a shepherd was a low stress kind of job,” he whispered back.
“I don’t know,” Jack said, “you have to worry about losing count of your flock, the weather, predators and the falling demand for wool and that’s before flights of angels turn up while you’re seated on the ground and tell you to haul your behind to Bethlehem.”
“That does sound like a lot to deal with,” Mac said. He studied Jack’s furrowed forehead. “You’re trying to think of a sheep related pun aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Jack agreed, “and I’m coming up empty. Bear with me, I’ll get there eventually.”
“Okay,” Mac said. He pressed his lips together to hold in a smirk. “I’ll get baa-ck to you.”
Jack turned to look at Mac head on. “That was terrible,” he said. “Well done.”
The children filling the stage at the front of the hall were shuffling in their places, most of their outfits were still intact and the crying shepherd had re-joined her friends with her mother perched self-consciously at the edge of a hay bale. Shepherds brushed shoulders with kings, the innkeeper was mixed in with white clad angels and the choir were pressing forward to mingle with their friends. The star above them had been given it’s own spotlight and was gazing down on the untidy group below it with more dignity and solemnity than something made with foil and staples should be able to.
“Wrapped in love and safe from danger, the new king lay sleeping within his manger,” the narrator said and everyone gathered on the stage launched into a rendition of Away in a Manger.
Mac could feel Jack grow misty eyed beside him when the innocent voices lifted, tears that mingled with laughter when Mary, having obviously grown bored, stood, lifted up the baby Jesus, dropped him on the ground, grabbed handfuls of hay from the manger and started to happily shake the straw all over the floor. The adults on the stage all tensed as they saw what she was doing, then as one decided that she was happy and left her to enjoy herself.
Straw was still fluttering down onto the stage as Away in a Manger finished and when it’s last note faded the narrator leaned forward one last time. “It’s the end of the story, the finish is near,” she said, “all that’s left is to thank you, for joining us here. Our play is now over, we won’t stay too long, we’ll just join together, for one final song.” She looked over at the children, “One, two, three,” she prompted and the whole cast all started to sing We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
Mac leaned in Jack’s direction, “What is figgy pudding anyway?” he whispered.
“I dunno,” Jack shrugged. “And why would anyone want any? I mean, figgy pudding? Figgy. Pudding. Ew! I don’t know about you but something that gets described as being ‘figgy’ isn’t anything I want near me.”
Mac nodded. “Pudding yes, figgy not so much.”
“We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!” The children on the stage crowed and loud applause burst out in the hall as the song and it’s demands for dubious sounding dessert ended. The children bowed, waved at their parents and trooped off stage.
Jack turned to Matthias and Helen, “It’s almost the big moment, your star’s going to get her chance to shine any minute now. How you feelin’?” he asked as the props and the straw on the stage were quickly cleared away.
“Ugh,” Helen huffed out a long rueful breath,”I feel nauseous,” she said. “I’m more nervous than I would be if it was me about to go up on that stage. I don’t care if the performance isn’t perfect, the unplanned moments are usually the best bits of things like this, but I worry that Cassie will be upset if she thinks something has gone wrong.”
“We’ve spent weeks talking about how what’s important is that she enjoys herself,” Matthias said, “and that what we’re looking forward to is seeing her and her friends have fun. Hopefully that’s sunk in.”
“Talking about how perfection isn’t the destination, the journey is the destination,” Jack said, and looked pointedly at Mac. “That sounds familiar.”
“The journey is the destination? Wow, that’s deep,” Mac gushed with ironic admiration. “Maybe you should ask Diane to print it onto a cushion.”
Jack hummed and pulled an exaggerated thoughtful expression. “I was thinking T shirts are more my speed,” he said, waving a hand back and forth in front of his chest to suggest where a shirt’s text should go, “and baseball caps maybe.”
“Nice, I could set up an Etsy shop for you.” Mac said and grinned at his dad because sometimes bantering with someone who shares the experiences the gentle teasing refers to is the destination.
“You could wear one to remind you to have fun if you’re ever in your own school play,” Jack nodded to the stage. “You should audition for a show if your school ever does one. I think you’d make a cute Santa’s little helper.”
“I’m a bit old to play Rudolph,” Mac told him, “and I don’t think they make antlers in my size.”
“Those things are one size fits all, trust me,” Jack said. “And you don’t know what opportunities the Universe will present you with, never say never.”
A murmur travelled through the audience and the crowd turned towards the stage. A teacher with a large smile and a Santa outfit on looked out at everyone from where the podium had stood.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he said, “I’d like to welcome you here today and take you to the North Pole to meet the intrepid little reindeer that help me deliver presents to all the children of the world on Christmas Eve.”
The opening chords of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, as sung by Michael Buble, filled the hall. As Buble listed the reindeer’s names Cassie and her classmates walked out onto the stage, each of them dressed in a brown shirt and leggings with bells around their waists and wrists and antler headbands on top of their heads. Cassie’s nose had been painted a vibrant red that by some miracle wasn’t smudged. Yet. She was smiling nervously.
“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, had a very shiny nose, and if you ever saw it, you might even say it glows,” Buble sang and the reindeer on stage threw themselves into their dance. They shimmied, kicked and jumped in formation, the frantic jingles of their bells making it sound like Santa and a flotilla of sleighs were passing overhead. Cassie was glowing with glee, she moved with her friends as if she didn’t have a care in the world, any worries about having to be perfect forgotten. When Buble’s singing paused for an instrumental Cassie skipped over to join the teacher in the Santa outfit. Cassie and Santa high fived then danced with each other in a jolly, messy jive that made bells, antlers and the white bobble on the end of Santa’s hat swing. Then Cassie led Santa over to the other reindeer for joyful greetings and to form a conga line while Buble sang that Rudolph ‘would go down in history!’ And as the song reached it’s big, jazzy crescendo Santa and his reindeer friends jingled, samba-ed and wiggled their way off into the wings.
The audience cheered, Jack whooped and Santa walked back out under the spotlights.
“I think we should have all our wonderful children back out for one last round of applause,” Santa said and the reindeer and the children who had been in the Nativity trooped out to stand in behind him. The audience clapped and when Mac spotted Cassie scanning the crowd for the people who were there to see her he waved. She waved back.
“Thank you all for coming,” Santa announced when the applause died down, “it’s wonderful to see you, if you’d like to stay with us a little longer we have hot chocolate and Christmas cookies available in the room next door. Please enjoy!” He shooed the children and they filed off stage again, presumably to put their normal clothes back on so their costumes could be packed away for next year.
“Hot chocolate?” Jack asked Mac over the scrape of chairs and the chatter of people moving with casual purpose echoing around them.
“Yeah,” Mac nodded, “that sounds good.”
“Okay,” Jack stood and Mac followed him, “I mean, the hot chocolate won’t be as tasty as mine and the cookies won’t be as nice as Nana’s, of course.”
“Of course,” Mac interrupted loyally.
“But that’s no reason to not give them a try. Are you two coming?” Jack asked Matthias and Helen.
“We are,” Helen said, easing herself up out of her chair, “this one,” she lay a hand on Percy’s head, “is still fast asleep so we’re going to enjoy a warm drink and a cookie in peace while we can.”
“Solid plan.” Jack rubbed his hands together. “Shall we?”
Tables covered with green and red cloths lined one of the walls of the room next to the hall where the play had been held. The smell of the hot chocolate a group of older children were serving sweetened the air and a genial, festive spirit sweetened the mood of the adults in the room who mingled, chatted and admired the seasonal displays hanging on the wall that had been made by the school’s children.
Mac lingered by a display of a winter scene decked with wonky snowmen and off kilter pine trees. Some of the carrot noses stuck on the snowmen covering the dark blue background were lopsided, there were coal eyes that had been placed every which way and some of the trees looked like they had just gone super nova with their branches being blown outwards by an internal explosion. The pictures were perfectly imperfect; that the children who’d created them had been allowed the freedom to make them the way they wanted gave them a charm they wouldn’t have had if they’d been controlled to look the way they were ‘supposed’ to. The destination hadn’t been a picture featuring trees of a regimented shape and snowmen who all passed muster, the destination had been the journey of sticking coloured shapes wherever the whim suggested and taking joy from the process. Jack would love it.
Jack was working his way across the room with two cups of chocolate and two cookies balanced in his hands. He was stopping to say hello and to be said hello to by people that he knew so it was taking him a minute for him to get to where Mac was waiting. Pausing by Matthias and Helen he clucked over Percy who had blinked himself awake and was watching the activity around him with interest.
Jack’s obvious delight at Percy’s attention, his pleasure at watching the children perform, his joy at being special enough to Cassie that she wanted him to see her dance... Jack loved kids, and the way Percy was waving his chubby little hands in Jack’s direction reminded Mac that kids loved him. It made Mac wonder and he was still wondering when Jack finally wove his way through the crowd to stand in front of him.
“Do you think you and Diane will have children?” he asked before Jack had chance to say anything.
“Umm...?” Jack ‘umm-ed’ with his face slack and his eyes almost comically wide with surprise. “What?”
“You and Diane,” Mac repeated, because he’d said it now and there was no point trying to take his question back. “Do you think you’ll have kids?”
“We have kids,” Jack replied, nonplussed.
“I mean will you have kids together?” Mac persevered.
“We have kids together.” Jack looked as perplexed as before. “Diane has a kid and I have a kid so we have kids together.”
“No, I mean will you have babies that you have together, like together?” Mac raised his hands but as he did he realised that any gesture he made to demonstrate ‘together’ would be completely inappropriate so he reached for a cup of chocolate and a cookie from Jack instead.
“We both love babies but I think me and Diane are too old for sleepless nights and dirty diapers,” Jack said, handing Mac his drink and a star shaped cookie. “Besides, it’s not like our family would be incomplete without one. I have everything I need.”
“But...”
“I have,” Jack lifted the hand that was holding his cup to stroke the back of his fingers along Mac’s cheek, “everything I need.”
Warmth spread through Mac like he’d just taken a large sip of Jack’s homemade hot chocolate straight from the stove. “Me too,” he said.
Jack smiled, eyes twinkling. “Let’s try this stuff out then,” he said, raising his cup to his lips and sipping. “It’s okay,” he said after a moment of consideration, “not great but it’s okay.”
Mac took a sip of his own drink and let the flavour linger on his taste buds. “It’s not bad,” he said. It was hot and it was chocolatey but it wasn’t as rich and creamy as the hot chocolate Jack made. “It’s not as good as yours is it’s but it’s not bad. I’d give it two and a half out of five.”
“Yeah.” Jack slurped his drink like a wine connoisseur and smacked his lips. “Two and a half out of five sounds about right to me. I suppose they are cranking out jugs of it for a large crowd, they can’t spend as much time carefully balancing the ingredients as I would.”
Mac took a bite of his cookie. “These are good though,” he said around the crumbs sticking to his mouth.
“Mmmm,” Jack said after his own bite, “they are good.”
As Mac and Jack chewed a parent walked past them wearing a Christmas sweater with a reindeer decorating the front. Jack eyed them thoughtfully. He turned to Mac.
“You might be too old for antlers and Christmas plays now but were you ever in any shows when you were younger?” he asked.
“I was in a nativity in Kindergarten like everyone has been, I was a shepherd” Mac said. “Then when I was about ten years old my class did a Christmas play about the angels trying to find a way to tell the world that the baby Jesus had been born.”
“Were you a shepherd in that too?” Jack asked. “Or did you get to stretch your acting chops?”
“No, in the play the angels ask the four winds to spread the word about Jesus so I was part of the line of kids who were the Desert Wind. We had to swish round the stage pretending we were travelling across the sky to share the news.”
“Wind? You were wind in your play?” The corners of Jack’s mouth twitched with the imminent arrival of a guffaw of laughter.
“I was part of the wind!” Mac corrected. “The Desert Wind. We had to, you know,” Mac watched hilarity build behind Jack’s eyes as he wobbled his arms in what was supposed to look like a flowing gust of warm air, “swish.”
“You were wind in your Christmas play!” Jack cackled. “I suppose wind is kind of festive, its what can happen if you eat too many vegetables with your Christmas dinner.” He sniggered. “Or maybe the figgy pudding would be the problem.” He chortled, snorting and wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.
Mac figured it was going to be a long time before his dad let go of his amusement at Mac’s Christmas show story. He sighed and let Jack enjoy himself.
“Ah, kiddo,” Jack said as he gulped back another chuckle, “I would have liked to have seen that.”
“No you wouldn’t.” Mac pulled a face as he thought back to the show, “I can’t remember what the costume was but I remember being given sticks with strips of fabric stuck on to wave around. I must have looked ridiculous.”
“No, buddy, I would have loved to see that. There’s nothing wrong with looking a little ridiculous, it’s good for the soul, especially at Christmas.” Jack hooked an arm around Mac’s shoulders and pulled him close, “I think everything’s a little bit ridiculous at Christmas and the season is all the better for it.”
Maybe Mac and Jack’s Christmas was a bit ridiculous with it’s sweaters and movie marathons and the gingerbread men mugs that Jack had picked up from a stall in town and insisted they drink from for the whole of month December, but it was what they both wanted. They weren’t striving for a picture perfect Christmas – but who sets the standard for what a perfect Christmas should be anyway? Glitter invasions, off key carols, wonky snow scenes, hot chocolate that didn’t score ten out of ten but was enjoyed because of who it was shared with, laughing at memories and being with the family you choose was Christmas. It was Mac and Jack’s Christmas and it was the right one for them.
“I think,” Mac said, looking out at the festive cheer all around, “that we’re going to have a very merry Christmas.”
“And a happy new year?” Jack asked, gently squeezing Mac closer to him.
“Yes,” Mac said with confidence because he and Jack were going to do what they could to make it a happy one. A sparkling, silly, joyous, warm, seasonal journey was their destination.
Jack nodded. “But one without any figgy pudding?” he said.
“I can look the recipe for figgy pudding up if you want?” Mac offered. “I could Google it, or I bet Nana Bea or one of her friends know how to make it, I could call and ask.”
“Nah, kiddo,” Jack said, “that’s fine, we don’t need it.”
“Yeah,” Mac told him, “like you said, we have everything we need.”