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The month of December always brought an air of organized chaos to the Firehouses of Los Angeles. What with the combination of people requesting time off to spend time with family, throwing shift schedules into disorder, to being selected to host various community outreach events, such as the annual Toy and Food Drives.
Then there were always the holiday events that were station and families only, such as the 118’s annual showing of the Polar Express that happened last shift. And Buck didn’t think he would ever forget Chimney’s reaction to seeing Jee call the movie ‘creepy and scary.’
Tomorrow was the Gingerbread House Building Contest. And Buck fully planned on winning this time. Last year Mumford stole the win by brown nosing the judges by utilizing his four year old daughter as a ‘helping hand.’ But since Chimney was a judge this year, Buck had convinced him to let Buck ‘borrow’ Jee.
(There was no way Chimney would be able to vote against his own daughter.)
As the timer went off, Buck pulled the tray out of the oven, his eyes raking across the walls of the gingerbread house he had just spent the last six hours perfecting the dough for.
“Look at it,” Buck said as he set it down on the cooling tray. “Once it cools down, they’ll be perfect for tomorrow.”
“You know,” Tommy said as he looked at them from his seat on one of Buck’s kitchen stools. “When we did this at Harbor last year, most people used graham crackers.”
“That’s what everyone else is going to be doing,” Buck said. “We need to be different. Plus, these will taste a whole lot better than those stupid graham crackers.”
“But no one eats Gingerbread houses,” Tommy said. “Or do they do that as part of the competition there?”
Buck thought back to last year. The judges last year, Bobby, Hen, and Harris, hadn’t. “But when they see I didn’t just use regular graham crackers, I’ll make them!”
Tommy laughed. “Okay then, what else do we have for this competition?” he asked.
Buck’s eyes lit up as he grabbed two grocery bags from one of the lower cabinets and brought them up to the counter, prepared to detail everything he bought to Tommy.
🎁 🎁 🎁 🎁 🎁
“Uncle Buck! I want to build a princess castle!” Jee said as she ran up to him and Tommy as they walked into the 118 the following morning. Buck held tupperware containers filled with the gingerbread house walls as Tommy carried the shopping bags of candy decorations and ornaments.
“A princess castle?” Buck asked. The pre-baked walls he had baked yesterday looked nothing like a castle. If anything they looked like a small forest cottage. “That’s not very… Christmassy,” he stuttered out.
Jee stopped, her excited smile turning into a shocked and somewhat sad ‘o’ shape. “No princess castle?” she asked.
Before her shocked/sad face turned into one of tears, Tommy jumped in to save Buck. “Hey, we can’t build a castle, Uncle Buck already made the walls, but we can still make it princess themed,” he said. “We can mix the red and white icing to make it pink.”
Jee seemed to consider his idea critically for a moment. “I guess so,” she said, a small frown still on her face. She then turned on her heel and made in the direction for the stairs. “Come one, we need to pick a good table!” she said as she ran ahead.
Buck let out a long breath he didn’t know he had been keeping in his chest. “Thank you so much,” he said as he looked at Tommy.
Tommy ducked his head. “Don’t mention it.”
“Come on!” Jee’s voice yelled down at them as she was halfway up the stairs. “They’ll take our table!”
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An hour into the actual construction and decoration stage of the competition, Tommy looked up from where he was decorating the gingerbread man in the princess colors Jee had demanded, and had to smile at what he saw.
Both Buck and Jee were concentrating intensely on getting the walls of the house to stand up and stay together, and each had a little bit of their tongue sticking out the corner of their mouths.
‘That must be a Buckley trait,’ Tommy thought. He couldn’t help but think it was adorable, and would love to see it on more kids.
Which was a weird thought. He had never thought of anything like that before. But now that the thought was in his mind, he realized that it wasn’t just leaving his mind.
It didn’t exactly terrify him, the thought of him and Buck raising kids themselves.
“So, what do we have here?” Chimney’s voice sounded from behind Tommy.
Jee’s head looked away from the walls, which were finally all standing up, to her father. “We’re making a princess gingerbread house!” she said, a bright smile back on her face.
“A princess gingerbread house?” Chimney asked, repeating her. “What makes it a princess gingerbread house?”
“The pink icing!” She pointed to the icing lining the walls and holding the house together. “And Uncle Tommy is making princess gingerbread men!”
🎁 🎁 🎁 🎁 🎁
“What do you mean we’re third place?” Buck asked when Hen was finished reading the results after the end of the judging phase. He turned towards Chimney and whispered harshly to him, “You’re giving your daughter third place?”
Chimney held his arms in the air in a ‘what can I do?’ motion.
“There was hardly any ‘Christmas’ on the thing, Buck,” Hen said, crossing her arms and giving him a look daring him to question her further.
“But that was Jee’s idea,” Buck tried.
Hen pointed at little Jack, who was the same age as Jee and on the team that won first place. “And Jack there wanted to make a dinosaur lair but chose to do Christmas instead.”
Buck fell back as Jee took his place, running up to accept the third place ribbon.
“Look at it this way,” Tommy said as he wrapped his arm around Buck’s shoulder. “At least we can now eat that delicious gingerbread you baked?”
Buck’s head dropped. “They didn’t even want to taste it,” he whined, utterly depressed.