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Ryan was still hoping his son Mikol and his new mate, Kalen, would come for the holiday, like he’d promised, though if he did plan on making it, they were cutting it really close. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve, after all, which was Blake’s favorite day of the Christmas season.
In truth, only Ryan and Blake paid any real attention to the so-called holidays, let alone celebrated them. Still, the holidays were something they both enjoyed, and everyone in the close family circle knew it.
Today was December 23rd on the Earthan calendar, or nearly that, anyway—as close as Ryan and Blake could figure. Certain allowances had to be made, so the date was fairly arbitrary. Since Ryan had first arrived on Tygeria, he’d tried to keep up with the dates back on his home planet, a tradition that Blake had started long before Ryan had arrived, but time was difficult when it came to vastly varying interplanetary differences.
For one thing, there were so many habitable planets, each with their own calendars and different ways of reckoning time. Tygeria, as the dominant planet in this part of the galaxy, imposed its time on the others, and had the rest of the planets calculate their own calendar dates accordingly. Naturally, the problem—or one of them—was that the calendar from Tygeria didn’t apply to any other world. Earth, for example, took longer to make a full orbit around its sun than Tygeria did, as did two of the planets of Lycanus. Others took much longer, and the various axis tilts caused seasons like summer and winter on some planets, but not on others. Tygeria wasn’t affected by any tilt, so the idea of winter was meaningless there. Therefore, there was no such thing as a winter holiday. At any rate, it was difficult to keep up with what was happening on Earth and the other far-flung planets, which were so unimaginably far away, but Blake tried. As a fellow human far from home, Ryan tried to help him.
It was understandable, in other ways too, that the Tygerians wouldn’t celebrate Earthan holidays. They had a few of their own—inexplicable to Ryan when his husband Mikos had tried to explain them. Most of them, because Tygeria was a quarrelsome and war-like planet, involved military pageants and parades staged in one of their huge arenas. Prodigious drinking was often involved, with lots of marching and the traditionally strong, dangerously intoxicating Tygerian liquors being passed around freely. The drunken parades often degenerated into wild dancing in the streets, which Mikos had deemed far too dangerous for Ryan to attend. Not that he wanted to go anyway.
Tygerians weren’t Christians either, of course, nor did they espouse any of the other religions of Earth. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They had their own complicated religion and their own holy days, which were not at all similar or compatible with anything existing on Earth. Since Ryan had married Prince Mikos and come to live on the planet, he and Blake, joined in their isolation, had occasionally tried to celebrate the various Earthan holidays. They sometimes invited other human “refugees” as Blake insisted on calling the former love slaves who had become spouses during the war—Ryan preferred the term “expatriates,” which sounded much more dignified.
Not that Blake or Ryan had any regrets about their own choices. Mikos was the love of Ryan’s life, and Davos and Blake still acted for the most part like newlyweds. Neither Blake nor Ryan could imagine their lives without their husbands. Still, at this time of year, Blake got a little melancholy, and it was getting more and more noticeable with each passing year.
Despite Blake’s depression, there was still very little general interest in celebrating a Christmas holiday, though Davos and Mikos did try to help them pull together a family party each year on Christmas Eve. Or they tried to help a little.
Very damned little, Blake claimed.
One year during the Christmas season, trying to make Blake feel better—and perhaps trying to get a little break from the mood swings—King Davos had offered him a visit to Earth. Ryan too, if he wanted to go along. He told them he would send them on their way in his personal ship, and they could stay as long as they liked.
Blake gave his husband the look he usually reserved for new cooks who tried to slip Tygerian “delicacies” onto his dinner plate and said, in a chilly tone, “You actually expect me to leave the children and my husband at Christmas to go and spend it with strangers? You know I no longer have any close family left on Earth. Tell me—are you deliberately trying to be cruel or are you really just that indifferent and oblivious to my feelings? Or maybe you just want to be rid of me? Is that it, Davos?”
Since there wasn’t really a good answer to any of those questions, Davos had wisely stayed silent and made quickly for the exit, making an excuse about having to attend a meeting somewhere else. Somewhere far away. And after that occasion and on every year around this time, Davos pulled a similar disappearing act. This year, he’d been gone for almost two weeks to one of the Lycan planets where some sort of urgent council meeting had just come up. Or so he’d claimed. When questioned about it later, Mikos had been unaware of any such meeting.
As the Christmas season back home approached, the usual tension surrounding the holidays, or the lack thereof, reared its ugly head. Ryan just hoped all of it would all soon be over, because to tell the truth, he was subject to the same nostalgia for the Christmas season as Blake, and every year it made him feel homesick for Earth. Usually, his life was far too busy with his family and his duties to even notice what might be happening so far away, but sometimes, he remembered Christmas and old memories of the season almost overwhelmed him.
It wasn’t so much that he missed his family. Things had been strained for years with them, and his father, who was gone now, had never gotten over Ryan refusing to forgive his sister for the attempt on his life. She had died six years ago, and their father had tried to make Ryan feel guilty, but Ryan still felt he had been justified in turning his back on her after all she’d done. His father had never been happy that Ryan hadn’t ended his marriage to Mikos and come back home after Mikol was born. He hated the treaty that placed Earth and its allies under martial law, and he blamed Mikos for that, too, instead of placing the blame on the politicians at home on Earth, where it belonged. Besides, Ryan knew it had been King Davos who had made those decisions and had only loosened up in recent years because of pressure from Mikos.
Ryan’s other relatives still rarely spoke to him, but Ryan had never regretted making the decision to stay with his husband and child in this strange world, despite any occasional twinge of an old memory.
As for Blake, there hadn’t been any real choice. Back in those first, bad old days of the war between the Alliance and the Axis, Davos had captured Blake when he’d been a young lieutenant and would never have agreed to let him go. Later, after they fell so deeply in love and the children came, Davos had offered visits back home, but Blake wouldn’t leave Davos. Their love story was pretty epic, though not as much as his and Mikos’s. In Ryan’s opinion anyway.
To tell the truth, both of them had made huge sacrifices to stay on Tygeria.
It was as the servants were bringing in dessert that Blake cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention and then stood up to make an announcement.
“I try never to be a bother to anyone, but you all might have noticed that I’ve been a bit depressed the last few days.”
Everyone quickly made the appropriate noises. “Not at all,” Ryan said.
Mikos said, “I hadn’t really noticed anything, omak.”
Rakkur agreed and backed him up. “Me neither, omak. You’ve been as great as ever.”
“Couldn’t be nicer!” Tilar said with a bit too much enthusiasm, though Blake didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, you’re all sweet to say so, but I know I’ve been a little hard to live with lately.” He raised a hand to stop another round of prevarication.
“I’ve been sitting here tonight thinking about the holidays, and I’ve made a decision. I think the problem all these years –the reason Christmas never really caught on—is that I’ve never properly exposed you children to it. You’ve never experienced a real Christmas dinner, for example, or how much fun it is to decorate the tree and open gifts on Christmas morning. I’m going to change all that. I’m going to make everyone a real Christmas dinner on Christmas day—with a ham and a turkey and all the trimmings. We’ll have a dinner like my grandmother used to make. Some cornbread dressing and sweet potato casserole and mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans, just like we always used to have. Macaroni and cheese, naturally, and maybe some fried okra. We’ll drink Christmas punch and hot apple cider, and for dessert, we’ll have pecan pie and a red velvet cake, because all those are my favorites, and I want to share them with you. I think you’ll love them too. We’ll put up a tree and decorate it, and we’ll open our presents by the fire early on Christmas morning.”
Silence greeted this announcement as everyone around the table simply stared at him and then at each other.
Tilar spoke up first. “Uh. What kind of key did you say? A turn-key? Never heard of it. What does it open?”
“Yeah, and what is a cornbread dressing? What is a cornbread for that matter?” Rakkur asked. “What does it wear?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said it was dressing itself. I thought it must be wearing some clothing.”
