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As the nights grow dark earlier and earlier and the temperature drops, the library gets busier and busier each day, especially in the children’s department, which is constantly swarming with families. It’s too chilly for parents to take their kids to play at the local park, so they come play at the library instead, toddlers wobbling around the train table and fighting over plastic trucks while their older siblings participate in craft hour or book clubs.
The all-too-familiar chaos finally calms down around dinnertime, and during your Tuesday evening shift on a night in mid-November, you finally have time to decorate the library for the holidays.
You have to dig around for a bit before you find the tiny tree that goes next to the children’s circulation desk, but you drag it out to its spot and smack at the branches a few times to dislodge the dust that’s accumulated from its ten-month hiatus in the maintenance closet. It’s pre-lit, so all you have to do is plug it in, and you smile when the rainbow lights shine through the branches.
“Is it that time already?”
You look up at the familiar sound of Clark’s teasing voice, beaming. It’s your first Christmas with him, but you’ve already talked about how much you love the holiday.
“It’s that time,” you confirm, standing on your tiptoes to allow him to press a kiss to your cheek.
“No ornaments,” he notes. “You’re slacking.”
“I just put it out!” you laugh. “And actually, we don’t put ornaments on it. It’s an angel tree.”
“An angel tree?”
“Yeah. We work in conjunction with a social worker every year to help support underprivileged families at Christmas,” you explain, picking up the paper tags off the desk that you were about to hang on the tree. “Patrons can come ‘adopt’ a child off the tree, and fulfill some of the wishes on their Christmas list, on behalf of those who can’t afford it.”
Clark takes the tags from you and starts shuffling through them, brow furrowed. He looks—absolutely distraught.“All these families…they can’t afford Christmas gifts?” he asks softly. He sniffles, and it tugs at your heartstrings.
“No, honey,” you say, running a hand up and down his arm. “But that’s why we do this. The community comes together to help them.”
“Can we take one?” he asks, eyes a little wet as he looks down at you.
“We can take as many as you want,” you tell him. “Well. As many as we can reasonably afford.” He certainly makes more than you do, so you’ll leave it up to him.
“Well, I’ve actually been returning all my books on time these days,” he jokes. “No overdue fines owed here. So I’ve got a little bit more disposable income.” You grin. Now that he drops in to visit you all the time, he actually does return his books before the due date.
“Let’s do two,” you suggest. “A boy and a girl. And I’ll keep an eye on the tree over the next couple weeks, and if there are any that don’t get taken by the deadline, then we can do those too.”
“This one,” Clark says, holding up a tag for a little girl. “Five years old. She likes princesses and…what’s K-Pop Demon Hunters?”
You laugh. “I’ll make you watch the movie later. The kids are loving it.”
“You pick the boy,” he says, holding up the tags for you.
“Hm…let’s do an older one. The teens get overlooked, you know? Here. Twelve years old. Likes Lego. We can definitely work with that.”
Clark tucks the tags carefully into his pocket and writes his name on the clipboard to make it official while you put the rest of the tags out on the tree. He looks wistfully at it once you’re done.
“I wish I could take them all,” he says.
“Leave some acts of goodwill for the rest of the city,” you tease, but you wrap your arms around his waist in a hug, because his heart is too big for his own good, and you love him for it. He presses a kiss to the top of your head. “We’ll go shopping this weekend, okay?”
“Is there any other decorating you need to do?” Clark asks. “I can help you reach the ceiling.”
“Clark, there are security cameras. You can’t just fly up to the ceiling.”
“I’m tall, is all I meant!”
The next day, you work on your next big holiday program—a new idea you’d suggested for this year: installing a mailbox for Santa letters in the children’s department. All the children who visit the library can stop at the craft table and use the crayons and construction paper to write out their wish lists and messages to the North Pole, then drop their letter in the box and receive a personalized response from Santa Claus himself.
Really, it will be you writing them back, but it will be fun to put your creative writing minor to good use.
You make the mailbox from scratch, DIYed out of some stacked cardboard boxes, finished off with some red acrylic paint and some silver tinsel hot-glued on to hide all of the seams. You’re quite proud of the final product, which you wrap with some fairy lights and stick right next to the door.
In the first week, you get more than a dozen letters, and between your usual work tasks and weekly programming, you don’t find time to write the response letters during the day. So you bring them home with you. You have everything laid out on the kitchen table—special cardstock stationary, stamps that say “From the Desk of Santa Claus,” Christmassy stickers, and sparkly red and green pens.
You’re so deeply absorbed in your task that you don’t even hear Clark come home, and his hand on your shoulder startles you.
“Jesus!”
“Sorry honey!” Clark says, running a soothing hand down your arm. “Didn’t mean to scare you. You’re concentrating real hard, what on earth are you doing?”
“Pretending to be Santa,” you tell him.
“Your beard needs some work,” he comments, patting your cheeks playfully, and you smile up at him. “Your car might be able to work as a sleigh, if you painted it red, but unless you’re hiding a reindeer somewhere—”
“I was gonna borrow Krypto,” you smirk, and Clark’s face drains of color.
“Don’t even joke about that,” he mutters with wide eyes, picturing the absolute mayhem that would ensue with Krypto dragging you around the world and superspeed. You giggle.
“I’m writing response letters to all the kids that dropped their Santa letters in the library mailbox,” you explain, holding up the stack. You hold up the most recent one, from a child named Amara. “Look how cute. She wrote it herself.” Almost every word is misspelled. “Der Santa, I wont a bycikul for ckresmes I hev been nis.”
“God, that’s adorable,” Clark gasps, taking the letter from you and immediately pulling up a chair beside you. “Oh, please, let me read the rest, please.”
You pass him the letters and watch his eyes light up as he reads, smile growing with each adorable request.
“This boy asked for a pretzel,” Clark laughs. “That’s it. Just a pretzel.”
“Easy to please.”
“Do you think the elves bake pretzels in the North Pole?” he wonders aloud, and you laugh.
“For the purposes of my response letter, they absolutely do,” you say, ready to uncap your sparkly gel pen and get back to work.
“Do you need help?” Clark asks, looking around at the overwhelming chaos spread out on the table in front of you. “My handwriting is not nearly as nice as yours. But I could address the envelopes, if you want? Put the stamps on?”
“Thanks, baby,” you say. “That would be really helpful. And if you really want to get in the spirit…” You pass him a sheet of sparkly Christmas stickers. “You can decorate them too.”
He grins, peels off a shiny green star, and sticks it right on your forehead.
With all the extra work you’ve been doing around the library for the holiday season, you haven’t had time to put your own damn tree up yet, and you express your frustration to Clark one weekend as you’re writing even more Santa letters. You’ve gotten way more than you could have anticipated for the first year of launching this program. Next year, you’ll definitely need to recruit some volunteers.
So you’re feeling a bit grumpy when December 1st rolls around and you walk home from work through the beautifully decorated streets of Metropolis. Everything looks so lovely, lit up with sparkling lights and wrapped in red ribbon, and you’re going home to an apartment that’s still dull and not at all festive.
When you walk in the door and shuck your coat off, sticking it on a peg, you notice that Clark’s is already hanging there. He’s home early, at least, and that lifts your spirits a bit.
Then you walk down the hall, turn the corner, and gasp.
Your windowsills are decorated with strands of evergreen garland, and there are sparkling snowflakes and mistletoe sprigs hanging from the ceiling. The furniture has been shifted around to make room for your massive faux Christmas tree, which Clark has already taken out of the box and assembled. He’s in the middle of stringing lights on it when he looks up at you.
“You’re home!” he says cheerfully, and you feel like you might cry. “What do you think, that’s a good spot for it, right honey?”
“You decorated,” you say, feeling touched, because—he listened. He heard you. And he did all of this, for you.
“You’ve been working so hard to make Christmas magical for all the kids,” he says. “It’s my job to make sure that your Christmas is magical too.”
You throw yourself at him, flinging your arms around his neck, and he scoops you up effortlessly with a laugh. You press kisses to everywhere you can reach—his lips, his cheeks, his forehead.
“I love you,” you tell him. “So, so much.”
“I love you too,” he says. “And I have a surprise for you!”
“This isn’t the surprise?” you ask, looking around at the beautifully decorated apartment.
“I haven’t put ornaments on the tree yet,” Clark says. “I wanted to show them to you, first.”
He set you down and reaches for a box he’d set on the couch, opening it up and holding it out to you. In it are a bunch of tiny book ornaments, and you recognize all of the titles.
“Are these…all the books we read for book club this year?” you ask, disbelieving.
“Yeah,” he says, almost shy. “And the others that you read this year, too. I went on your Goodreads. I made them. Well—Lois and Cat helped. A lot. I’m not the best at…what did they call it? DIY? I was more of the idea guy. All of the ones that look like a teenager made them are probably the ones that I did—”
You grab him by the collar and yank him down for another kiss.
“You spoil me too much,” you whisper against his lips.
“You deserve to be spoiled,” he says. “And I’m not done.”
“Wait! Wait! I have one too!” you interrupt, running back toward the front door to dig through your purse, hung on its usual peg in the foyer. You pull out the surprise you’d made for Clark earlier that day, wrapped in a bundle of brown napkins, and he raises an eyebrow as you rush back to hand it over to him, giddy. “I was going to wrap it up for Christmas. But you can have it now!”
The napkins unravel to reveal a saltdough Christmas ornament, decorated with acrylic paint and adorned with red ribbon. You’d painstakingly used a toothpick to carve out the symbol from his Superman suit. It looks tiny and fragile in his massive hands, and he holds it like something precious, his face softening.
“We made ornaments with the kids at craft club this week,” you say softly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s perfect,” he says. He immediately turns to the tree to find an empty branch for it, right in the middle. Then he steps back and takes your hand, squeezing tight as you both admire the tree.
“Beautiful,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says, but when you glance his way, he’s not looking at the tree. He’s looking at you. His hands come up to cradle your face, and he presses a soft kiss to your lips, sending your heart fluttering.
Then he leans back, smiling wide at you.
“I have one more surprise,” he says, and he turns you toward your bookshelf. He points to the top shelf.
“Forgive me for reorganizing things a bit to make some room,” he says. “But I made you a—”
“Shut up,” you gasp. “You did not.”
On the top shelf are a row of gift-wrapped books, numbered 1-25.
“Is that an advent calendar? Of books?” you ask, jumping up and down. Clark smiles down at you.
“It is,” he says. “I picked them all out for you, special.”
“I can’t believe you’re real,” you say, suddenly feeling emotional. “You are—you—”
“I just love you,” he says, simply, and you close your eyes and tuck yourself into his side, feeling so, so grateful and finally ready for Christmas.
“What do you say,” Clark says, “we change into our coziest pajamas, and we order takeout, and you open up your first book and read under the light of the Christmas tree?”
“I think that sounds like the most wonderful night ever, honey.”