Page 50 of Winter Nights at the Bay Bookshop
LARS
A week later, Lily invited me over to Everdene straight from work for tea and to help put the Christmas tree up. As soon we stepped into the lounge, I could smell that rich pine aroma from a real tree.
‘We’ll be eating in about half an hour,’ Shelby told us, so Lily insisted we crack on straightaway with the lights.
‘Mum hates tinsel,’ Lily said after we’d wrapped some warm white and red lights round the tree.
She passed me a couple of lengths of gold-coloured beads and asked me to drape them in the same way I’d drape tinsel, leaving space between each pass for her to fill with red beads.
‘That looks really effective,’ I said, stepping back once we’d finished. ‘Tidier than tinsel.’
‘That’s one of the reasons Shelby likes the beads so much,’ Marcus said. ‘She likes things tidy and she thinks tinsel looks messy. You know that lametta stuff? She can’t bear that.’
I’d forgotten about lametta and had a sudden flashback to our childhood Christmas tree being covered in the long narrow shiny strips in varying colours courtesy of Pia.
‘My sister loved it. She used to smother the tree with it. I remember Pabbi lifting her up so she could drape it over the highest branches. She loved tinsel too and insisted on it being everywhere – on the tree, around picture frames, wrapped around lamps, even draped across the toilet cistern. We’d be picking up shreds of tinsel and lametta for months after Christmas was over. ’
‘Then we’ll have to get some lametta for the tree this year.’ I hadn’t noticed Shelby appearing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel.
‘You don’t have to do that for me, especially if you hate the stuff.’
‘Hate’s a strong word,’ she said, laughing. ‘And we want to. You’re part of the family now, Lars, and we like to do something to celebrate the Christmas traditions and decorations of each new member.’
I caught Lily’s eye, unsure as to whether Shelby was just being nice to me but Lily nodded.
‘We bought some houses that light up because Hendrix’s girlfriend – sorry, fiancée – Daisy said they were one of her fondest Christmas memories.
She’s not close to her parents but she was really close to her grandma who had a huge Christmas village. ’
‘What was Cory’s thing?’ Marcus asked, frowning.
‘How could you forget that?’ Shelby playfully whacked his arm with the towel. ‘It’s one of your favourite new traditions.’
‘Christmas Eve cookies!’ he exclaimed, smiling. ‘Of course! Cory gave us his mum’s recipe and they’re so delicious. We close the shop a little early on Christmas Eve and come home to a big family baking and decorating session.’
‘It’s a bit childish but we love it,’ Lily said.
I nodded in agreement. ‘If you can’t be a kid at Christmas, when can you?
Christmas is huge in Iceland and most Icelanders admit to being jólaborn which means Christmas children .
There’s a saying – ég er mikie jólabarn – which translates as I’m a total Christmas-child , meaning you still look forward to Christmas in the same way you did as a child.
Excitement, magic, loving all the sights and sounds that go into the season. ’
‘I love that,’ Lily said, her eyes sparkling. ‘We could do with more Christmas children in the UK.’
‘Cookies are a massive part of Christmas in Iceland too. They get baked and eaten throughout December.’
Lily and her family seemed really interested in Icelandic Christmas traditions so the conversation continued over our evening meal.
They asked about the cookie flavours and I explained that there were lots of popular choices and a good household would make at least seven or eight varieties across the season, especially if there was a member of the household not working and able to bake, but the most classic of Christmas cookies were piparkokur (gingerbread) and sorur , also known as Sarah Bernhardt cakes.
‘Sarah Bernhardt? Wasn’t she a French actress?’ Shelby asked, and I nodded. ‘Did she have a connection to Iceland?’
‘No. The cookies were actually created by a Danish patisserie in honour of her visiting Copenhagen in the early 1910s so nobody’s quite sure how they became such an intrinsic part of Icelandic traditions but there you go.
The Swedish have their own version too and, I have to say, they’re delicious so whatever randomness brought them to Iceland, I’m glad it happened. ’
They wanted to know what was in them, which was a real test of my memory.
Nanna had kept the cookie-making tradition going for several years but I got too busy with My Study Hub to make them with her so that tradition ceased.
I couldn’t remember any of the quantities but the base was definitely marzipan, sugar and egg whites.
A ganache made from butter, sugar, vanilla and cappuccino powder was added to the flat side and then covered in melted chocolate.
My mouth watered as I finished and Shelby said she’d be online tomorrow searching for a recipe.
I told her I’d ask Nanna if she still had ours although she’d cleared out a lot of recipe books as part of her move so I wasn’t hopeful.
After we’d eaten, we returned to the lounge and it was time to put the decorations on the tree.
Every single one was gold, red or wooden and the designs varied massively from elaborately decorated glass baubles to simple wooden stars.
I’d loved Pia’s technicolour approach but the Appletons’ tree was beautiful and classy.
It didn’t so much shout at me as tease me with its elegance.
I thought we’d finished but Lily handed me an old ice-cream container, a mischievous grin on her face. ‘One more box of decorations to put up. These ones are extra special.’
I lifted the lid to examine the contents and started laughing. ‘Are these your primary-school decorations? Oh, wow! You weren’t exaggerating when you said special.’
I lifted out a set of people made from old-style wooden clothes pegs who, from the clothing, were clearly the cast of the nativity. I held up one dressed in blue. ‘Any particular reason for Mary having a beard?’
That tickled Marcus and Shelby and out came a story about how Lily came home from school in floods of tears because she’d spent every art session across the week creating her peg people, carefully dressing them, only to fall at the final hurdle when, after adding beards to the kings, wise men and Joseph, she’d accidentally done the same to Mary.
‘She’d been telling us all week how proud she was of them and how much praise the teacher had given her,’ Shelby said. ‘We couldn’t wait to see them and I’ll never forget her little face, all crumpled up, tears flowing.’
‘She tried to flush Mary down the toilet and managed to block it,’ Marcus added. ‘That was an expensive near-drowning.’
Lily hung her head but I could see she was smiling.
‘Mum managed to convince me that the rest of the peg people loved Mary, beard and all, so she needed to stay.’
‘Rummage a bit further,’ Shelby said. ‘There’s another peg person in there.’
I found a woman with long black hair, a purple dress and a beard but it looked more professionally made than the others.
‘It’s Lettie, the bearded lady from The Greatest Showman ,’ Lily explained . ‘When I saw the film, I couldn’t resist making a friend for Mary so Lettie’s also part of our nativity cast now.’
The tub contained various other decorations only a parent could love including a terrifying three-eyed snowman made by Hendrix and a robin Kadence had made which somehow managed to look more like a blood-soaked bat.
I was stunned to discover they all got added to the tree when everything else about it was so perfect.
‘Scary as some of them are, they represent the magic of Christmases past so they belong here,’ Marcus said.
I hung bearded Mary on the tree and added Lettie by her side, smiling at the handiwork of child Lily and adult Lily.
‘Huge plus points for creativity,’ I said, ‘even from a young age.’
When we finished the tree, Shelby helped us display various other items around the room including the light-up houses they’d mentioned earlier. There was a large house, a small cottage and a bookshop which captured their family perfectly.
‘Where’s the Paperback Pixie?’ Shelby asked.
My stomach lurched at the mention of my alter ego and I looked up from where I’d been plugging in the bookshop, expecting to find them all looking in my direction, my identity somehow rumbled, but they were preoccupied with looking through boxes.
‘In this one,’ Marcus said, removing something protected by bubble wrap from the box on the sofa beside him.
Lily took the item from him and showed it to me. ‘Look what we found a few years ago! Our very own Paperback Pixie. Okay, it’s an elf really but, seeing as we have no idea who the real Paperback Pixie is, we’ve got our own fake version.’