She worked remotely for a small nonprofit, which made it far too easy to avoid human contact if she chose. The delicate truce she’d recently established with her depression unraveled overnight, and she woke on Christmas morning feeling low as hell. It cast unwelcome light into all the dark, carefully disregarded recesses of her life. Celebrating the holidays alone was like setting a bonfire in her living room. However, her spirits, like the tree, proved artificial. She even baked Gamma Jol’s fruitcake, which sat untouched on the kitchen counter but made the apartment smell like home back in Texas. But it put her in an uncharacteristically festive mood, and she piled into decorating. Other than being two feet tall, and purple, and not smelling a bit of pine, the little tree was virtually impossible to tell from the real thing. She took it up to her apartment and set it on a table where it twinkled at her hopefully. She couldn’t rightly say what made her rescue it, but it felt right playing Charlie Brown in her very own melancholy Christmas special. But then on the way home from the corner store, she noticed the tree in a box of junk left on the sidewalk outside her building. Con hadn’t celebrated Christmas in the three years she’d lived in Washington DC. The little purple Christmas tree had a lot to answer for.

Constance matthew fitzsimmons