A Very Special Holiday

It had been snowing all week long and, already, there were two feet of the fluffy, white stuff covering every spot of ground in front of her tiny cottage. It was mid-December, and everyone was busy this time of the year, running off to the mall to buy the perfect gifts for their loved ones, gossiping at the office about who was invited to what party, and all of the house decorating that seemed to magically appear, as soon as the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers were packed up for some unsuspecting relative.


Melissa never quite seemed to be a part of any of that. Oh, she loved this time of the year, don’t get me wrong, but she lived by herself, and always felt sort of left out of all the celebrations. Party invitations, if they came, were always for Melissa and escort, or Melissa and guest, and she never knew anyone she could invite. She usually ended up staying at home, by herself.


The snow had stopped temporarily, and Melissa felt the need to get out into the fresh air for a while. The sun was peeking through the grey, puffy clouds, and she was in the mood to make a snowman. She had been making a snowman with every snowstorm, for as far back as she could remember. She hadn’t missed a single time – even that year she caught such a bad cold that she needed to bundle up, and she could barely see what she was doing. Now in her twenty-eighth year, she was going to build herself another snowman, and the soft snow looked perfect to do the job.


Melissa pulled the red chenille pom-pom hat down over her light brown curls, and zipped up her tan jacket to keep out the cold. Then she wrapped her warm blue scarf twice around her neck. She put on her gray wool gloves and covered them with the leather ones that would keep the snow from sticking to her hands. Opening the door to the outside, she squinted her blue eyes against the sparkling glare of the sun, as it reflected off the blanket of snow. Out she trudged down the pathway, not even bothering to shovel the snow aside, her feet kicking through the soft flakes like a kindergarten kid with a secret.


She got to her special snowman corner and gathered up a large pile of perfect flakes. Smoothing it out into a huge flattened ball, Melissa shaped the rounded base until it was almost three feet in diameter. Then she took her six-foot long tomato stake that she had used in her summer garden, and pushed it through the center of the base. This would give some strength to her finished creation. She packed a two foot round pile of snow into a chunky rectangle around the stake, smoothing out the crack between the two sections with extra snow, to connect them securely. Now it was almost as big as she was, she thought, smiling with satisfaction. Melissa rolled a smaller ball of soft snow, and placed it on what remained of the center stick. This would be his head. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a couple of large paw-paw seeds she had saved from October’s harvest, and fastened them with toothpicks where she thought the eyes ought to be. The smooth brown seeds almost seemed to look back at her as she centered them.

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Spice is the wonder and excitement in your world.