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Hotch found out about the Chinese food tradition the way he found out most things about Reid's private habits completely by accident, in an offhand comment that Reid clearly hadn't meant to be revealing.
"I already told the place on Fifth that I'd be ordering the usual again this year," Reid mentioned one evening in mid-December, half-distracted by a case file, the words slipping out with no more weight than a comment about the weather. "They know to expect it by now. It's honestly become sort of a tradition."
"For Christmas?" Hotch asked, something in his chest going carefully still.
"Mm. Most places are closed, but they stay open. General Tso's and a documentary. It's not bad actually. Quiet." Reid said it lightly, easily, the practiced ease of someone who had turned a small, sad fact about his life into something that sounded on the surface, like a preference rather than an absence.
Hotch didn't say anything right away. He'd learned by now, that pushing too hard too fast on something Reid had spent years building a comfortable story around usually just made him retreat further behind it. But he filed it away, the same way he'd filed away the tenth of October three years before he'd known what to do with it, and this time he didn't intend to wait nearly so long to act on it.
"You're spending Christmas with us this year," Hotch said, a week later, over dinner at his place, no preamble, stated the way he stated case assignments, a fact rather than an invitation, though the softness underneath it made clear it was an invitation all the same.
Reid looked up, startled. "You don't have to do that. I'm fine with my own plans. Really, it's okay."
"General Tso's and a documentary," Hotch said, gently. "I know. I'd like you to have something different this year, if you're willing to let me give it to you."
Something flickered across Reid's face, the same complicated mixture of longing and reflexive deflection Hotch had seen at his birthday, older and more practiced now. "It's a time for you and Jack to be together." He stopped himself, softened it. "It's a family holiday, Hotch. I don't want to intrude on that."
"You wouldn't be intruding," Hotch said. "You'd be part of it. That's a different thing entirely." He reached across the table, resting a hand over Reid's. "I've thought about this. Jack knows you're important to me and he's heard your name enough times to have opinions about it, mostly regarding whether you'll let him beat you at chess again. I'd like this Christmas to be the one where he gets to know why."
Reid was quiet for a long moment, turning it over the way he turned over everything that mattered. "What if I don't know how to do a family Christmas?" he admitted finally, voice small. "I haven't had one since I was really young. I don't remember most of it. I might not be good at it."
"There's no version of this where you're bad at it," Hotch said. "You just have to show up. I'll handle the rest."
"Okay," Reid said, after a long moment, something uncertain but hopeful settling into his voice. "Okay. I'd like that. Thank you."
Christmas morning arrived cold and bright and Hotch picked Reid up early, before the sky had fully lightened, both of them a little giddy in the particular, quiet way of people about to do something that mattered more than either of them wanted to say out loud.
Jack was already awake when they arrived back at Hotch’s, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in reindeer pyjamas, vibrating with the specific, barely contained energy of a nine-year-old five minutes from being allowed at the presents. He looked up when they came in, something curious and assessing crossed his face at the sight of Reid, not suspicious, just cataloguing in the way children did when a new adult entered a space that mattered to them.
"Hi Spencer," Jack said, matter-of-factly. "Dad talks about you a lot."
"All good things, I hope," Reid said, more than a little nervous, hovering near the doorway like he wasn't entirely sure of his footing yet.
"Mostly," Jack said, with the devastating honesty only a nine-year-old could deliver, "except when he complains you eat all the sunflower seeds in the car."
"That's accurate, actually," Reid admitted and Jack grinned, apparently satisfied by the honesty and went back to eyeing the presents with renewed, undisguised impatience.
The morning unfolded easily after that with Jack tearing through wrapping paper with the barely contained chaos of a child who had been waiting for this since November, Hotch presiding over the whole affair with the relaxed warmth Reid had rarely seen outside of the quietest moments between just the two of them, extended now, effortlessly, to include a third. Reid found himself drawn in without quite noticing the moment it happened, helping Jack assemble a model rocket kit with the kind of genuine, absorbed enthusiasm that had Jack looking at him with new and rapidly escalating approval, offering a running commentary on orbital mechanics that Jack only half-understood and clearly loved anyway.
"You know a lot of stuff," Jack said, somewhere around the third stage separation, delivered with the frank, uncomplicated admiration of someone deciding, in real time, that he liked this new person quite a lot.
"An unreasonable amount, some people would say," Reid said, glancing toward Hotch, who was watching the two of them with an expression so openly fond it made something in Reid's chest go warm and slightly overwhelmed.
By midday, Jessica arrived to collect Jack for the afternoon with her side of the family, an arrangement made months in advance, nothing unusual about it and the house quieted considerably once the car pulled away, leaving Hotch and Reid alone in the aftermath of torn wrapping paper and the particular, comfortable stillness that followed a morning full of noise.
"He liked you," Hotch said, settling onto the couch, his arm easily finding its way around Reid's shoulders as Reid curled into his side.
"I liked him," Reid said, something quietly amazed in his voice. "I didn't expect it to feel so easy. I thought I'd be nervous the whole time."
"You were wonderful with him," Hotch said, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. "I could tell within the first ten minutes he'd already decided you were staying."
Reid huffed a soft, pleased laugh, tucking further into Hotch's side. "I'd like that. Staying, I mean. If that's… if that's something we're actually doing now."
"It's exactly what we're doing," Hotch said, certain and unhurried. "I don't do anything by half measures, Spencer. You should know that about me by now."
The afternoon passed slow and warm with Hotch starting a fire in the fireplace, an ordinary movie neither of them paid full attention to, the smell of the dinner Hotch had started that morning filling the house with something that felt, to Reid, disarmingly like the childhood memories he mostly didn't let himself reach for anymore. He helped where he could, mostly by being underfoot in the kitchen and reciting the chemical process behind caramelization while Hotch worked, which earned him an affectionate, exasperated look and a wooden spoon pointed at him in mock warning that made them both laugh.
"I got you something," Reid said, once dinner was cleared away and the two of them had settled back onto the couch, evening properly setting in outside the windows. He produced a small, carefully wrapped box from his bag, a little nervous in the way he always was about gifts, like he wasn't entirely sure he'd gotten it right.
Hotch opened it carefully, and inside found a heavy, old-fashioned pocket watch, engraved on the inside cover with a short line Reid had chosen with obvious, careful deliberation ‘For every time you came back.’
Hotch was quiet for a long moment, running his thumb over the engraving, something visibly moved crossing his usually composed features. "Spencer."
"It's not much," Reid said quickly, suddenly uncertain. "I know it's a strange gift, I just, I wanted something that would last. Something to mark all of it. The showing up, I mean. Every time."
"It's perfect," Hotch said, voice rough as he pulled him into a hug that Reid sank into immediately, face tucked against his shoulder, the fire crackling low and warm beside them.
"I have something for you too," Hotch said, once he'd somewhat recovered himself, reaching for a second, smaller package tucked beneath the tree. Reid opened it to find a simple silver key and beneath it, folded neatly, a spare house key already labelled in Hotch's careful handwriting.
"I want you to have this," Hotch said. "Not as a symbol. An actual key. I want you to be able to come here whenever you need to, day or night, without waiting for an invitation. This is your home too, if you want it to be."
Reid stared at the key for a long moment, something enormous and overwhelmed rising in his chest and when he looked up his eyes were wet, though he was smiling through it. "I want that," he said, voice thick. "I want that so much."
"Then it's done," Hotch said simply, closing Reid's hand around the key, holding it there. "No more General Tso's alone on Christmas. Not this year, not any year after it, if I have anything to say about it."
Reid let out a breath that was half laugh, half something closer to tears and leaned into him fully, the key held tight in one hand, the other coming up to grip the front of Hotch's sweater the way it had a hundred times before, in a hundred smaller, harder moments except tonight there was no crisis behind it at all, nothing but the plain, overwhelming fact of being wanted, being included, being given a place to belong without having to earn it through anything except simply existing.
"Thank you," Reid whispered, "for not letting this be a day like all the others. For all of it. Jack and dinner and the key, and just... being here. Thank you, daddy."
Hotch simply held him close, pressing a kiss into his hair, feeling something settle deep and permanent in his chest. "You're welcome," he said. "Merry Christmas, Spencer. I mean that in every sense of the word."
They stayed curled together on the couch long after the fire had burned down to embers, the tree lights the only illumination left in the room, the new key resting on the coffee table beside the pocket watch, both of them quiet and in no rush at all to let the day end.
"I don't think I've ever had a Christmas like this," Reid admitted eventually, voice soft with the contentment of someone who had spent the whole day being handed things he'd stopped letting himself want long ago.
"Good," Hotch said. "Then we'll just have to keep making new ones, every year, until this becomes the only kind of Christmas you remember."
Reid smiled against his shoulder, eyes drifting closed as Hotch smiled in the low light of the room. The past year had had its moments but gaining Spencer as his second son had definitely been the highlight of it all.