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“Salmonella!”

“Carpe diem!” he counters and steals a lump in spite of my best efforts.

We roll the remaining dough into balls and I top them with little squares.

“Ornaments,” I explain happily.

“Yeah, we don’t have those.”

“We will,” I say firmly. “We have stuff. That’s all we need.”

When the first batch is cooling and the second batch is in the oven, Beau and Emmett walk in looking proud of themselves.

“We got it to stand up,” Beau tells me. “Don’t ask how, you’ll have a fit.”

“I’ve got no room for fits. I’m too full of Christmas.”

“Me, too,” Hunter says around a mouthful of dough.

I roll my eyes with a smile. “Good job, guys. Now we have to decorate it.”

I swear I watch the wind go out of Beau’s sails in real time. “We don’t have any⁠—”

“Hunter already told me,” I reassure him. “We’ll make some. Colored paper? Lights? Popcorn and thread?”

They shake their heads at every suggestion. No paper, no lights, and popcorn garland would take a literal lifetime. There’s a long beat of silence while we all think hard. I can tell they’re doing it for me, and where I once would have felt guilty over that, now I’m just feeling frustrated. How have they survived for so long up here without any kind of Christmas spirit?

“Tin cans?” Hunter asks.

Beau snaps his fingers. “Fishing lures!”

“Wood shavings for tinsel,” Emmett grumbles. “Or something.”

I smile at them all, feeling a little choked up. The oven timer saves me from trying to speak through the emotion in my throat. I hurry to get the cookies out of the oven, then turn around.

“Those are all fantastic ideas,” I tell them genuinely. “You two start collecting shiny things, Hunter and I need to finish up these cookies.”

They look relieved as they rush off to do my bidding. That powerful feeling is back, the one that makes me feel like I can part seas with a word. I ride the high while Hunter and I beat up a batch of frosting for the cookies. There’s no food coloring, but white is a Christmas color anyway, so I don’t really mind.

Once we’ve finished, we head out to the living room. Beau is using a hammer and nail to poke holes in the bottoms of tin cans. Emmett is wrapping wire around bits of discarded wood. He catches my eye and shrugs.

“Wood shavings don’t make good tinsel,” he says. “Had to come up with something else.”

“I love it,” I tell him honestly. My eyes widen as an idea strikes. “Do you have a printer?”

“In the office,” Hunter says.

“I’ll be right back.” I grab my laptop from the coffee table where I left it last night and head into the office. There’s plenty of paper in the printer, but it’s not photo paper. That’s okay. I quickly and carefully choose a collection of photos and start them printing. The printer is low on cyan and it makes the pictures come out stripy, but there’s nothing wrong with striped ornaments, is there?

Once the photos are printed, I grab a pair of scissors off the desk and carry the stack of papers back out into the living room. I sit cross-legged on the floor in between the fishing lures and wire and wood bits and tin cans and start cutting the photos into circles. The paper immediately starts to curl. The wrong way.

“Here,” Beau says. He takes one of the photos and presses it onto a tin can, warping it the right way out. “Glue?”

“Glue,” Emmett answers. He heads into the workshop for a moment and returns quickly with wood glue. Overkill for a bit of paper on tin, but it works all the same.

A few hours later, we all stand back and look at our handiwork. Tin cans, pasted with stripy photos, strung together with fishing line. Fishing lures, furry and shiny and fishy, glittering like deadly tinsel. Wood blocks, balls, and irregular blobs, wrapped in wire and hung up like ornaments. It’s ugly, it’s makeshift, and it’s perfect. Every one of us contributed something of ourselves to it, and that’s what makes it perfect.

“I love it.” I mean each word with every fiber of my being. Hunter puts his arm around me and squeezes.