098/365 11/27/2025

You open a story on Christmas—warm light twinkling, kids nestled all snug in their beds, all that stuff? Someone’s gotta die by the end. That’s the way of it. The ups and down of stories. You open a story with someone dying? Maybe a baby gets born by the end of it. Or maybe the remaining folks get to have Christmas, slightly melancholy but somewhat hopeful. The memory of their dead grandmother swirling about the room on the scents from the Christmas candle, and that warm aroma—the cinnamon and pine and maple—breathed deep while kids tear through paper is somehow a comfort and blah blah blah.