Christmas

Christmas is a recurring point of emotional change in Brett Bohlinger’s story, bringing family rituals into sharp contact with loneliness, loss, and unexpected connection. A December reunion with Carrie Newsome recalls the warmth of childhood; on Christmas morning, Brett discovers that the pregnancy she had imagined is not real; and a call later that day reveals the name of her biological father. The holiday does not resolve her uncertainties so much as make them newly visible.

A holiday inside a deadline

The calendar that governs Brett’s year is set in motion when Brad Midar explains the terms of her mother’s life-list challenge. Brett must complete at least one goal by the end of that month, and the entire list by September thirteenth of the following year. Christmas therefore falls within a year measured not simply by seasons and family occasions, but by a deadline attached to Brett’s inheritance and the life her mother hoped she would build.

That pressure becomes personal as Brett considers what she has risked by remaining with Andrew. At thirty-four, she fears that leaving him could mean losing the security she has worked for and ending up with nothing. The anxiety helps explain why Christmas, with its emphasis on family and imagined futures, carries more than seasonal warmth: it arrives while Brett is trying to decide what kind of life she is willing to risk having.

By the following March, the approaching September deadline has become a source of panic. Brett has completed five of her ten goals and still sees falling in love, having a baby, buying a horse, and getting a beautiful house ahead of her. She regards most of those aims as outside her control. Christmas sits within that interval between the challenge’s announcement and this later reckoning, a holiday in which hopes about love and motherhood briefly seem close enough to touch before the story unsettles them.

December 11: reunion and remembered ritual

On the morning of December 11, Brett drives for two hours with a trunk full of gifts to attend the Newsomes’ annual Christmas brunch. She arrives exhausted and queasy beside a dozen other cars, at a yellow ranch whose partly obscured yard sign reads ANOTHER FAMILY FOR PEACE. The sign’s message offers a quiet counterpoint to the uncertainty of Brett’s own family life, while the familiar gathering gives her a way back into a relationship she has neglected.

Carrie Newsome hurries out to greet her, slips on the snowy walk, and is caught by Brett; the two laugh together. Before going inside, Brett apologizes for the way she treated Carrie and asks forgiveness. Carrie dismisses the apology and brings her in to meet everyone. The exchange turns the brunch into more than an annual stop: Brett has come not only with gifts, but with an effort to repair an old friendship.

Inside, coffee, laughter, and conversation call up memories of the Newsomes’ former bungalow on Arthur Street. Carrie’s three children sit around an oak table stringing popcorn and cranberries, and Brett remembers doing the same with Carrie and her grandparents during a trip to Egg Harbor. Carrie tells her that her parents now own the old log cabin and have been looking through family videos in anticipation of Brett’s visit. The present-day craft echoes a childhood Christmas ritual, making the gathering a bridge between the friends’ shared past and their renewed connection.

The Christmas Eve expectation

In the days immediately before Christmas, Brett and Brad Midar sit together on a sofa in stocking feet as the credits of White Christmas roll. Brad checks his watch and says he needs to leave early the next morning to help his parents decorate their tree. He expects to spend the holiday with them in Champaign, where they will all pretend not to notice that one family member is missing. Brett anticipates a similar absence in her own family.

Before Brad goes, Brett asks him to open her Christmas gift. The scene holds out the possibility of closeness while also marking its limits: Brett’s feelings have stirred, but she recognizes that Brad is not ready for a new relationship. After watching him leave from the concrete stoop, she returns inside to Rudy. Unlike the gloom she remembers from being alone at Andrew’s loft, she feels a glimmer of hope and interprets her response to Brad as evidence that she may be ready to love. She also imagines herself pregnant by the following year. Christmas thus finds Brett investing the near future with a happiness she has not yet secured.

Christmas morning: loss and disclosure

Christmas morning begins with Rudy nudging Brett awake. She greets him and thinks through the preparations for the family dinner she is meant to host. Then a wave of cramps makes her pause. When she sees a bright red stain on the crumpled sheet, the domestic plans and imagined pregnancy abruptly give way to grief. She drops to her knees, and Rudy barks and presses his nose into her arms. After a period of paralysis, Brett pulls off the sheets, weeping and wailing as she carries them to the laundry basket. The cheerful morning outside cannot reach her; she feels hollow and barren.

The day also brings a separate, consequential revelation. After Brett’s Christmas call has fallen silent long enough for her to wonder whether it has disconnected, the man on the line identifies himself as John Manson. Brett has found her biological father, and she learns that she has a half-sister, Zoë Manson. When she rejoins the people in the living room, she tells them that her father has called and names him. She describes him as kind and wonderful, yet the discovery does not simply relieve her: she wonders why, after finding him, she feels more rejected than ever. Christmas places a new family connection immediately beside the pain of the one she has long felt deprived of.

The holiday’s changing meaning

Across these scenes, Christmas is neither a single celebration nor a guaranteed reconciliation. The December 11 brunch lets Brett return to a childhood friendship through familiar food-making and remembered family footage. The days just before the holiday offer an imagined future with Brad, but his departure makes clear that desire is not the same as a relationship. Christmas morning then breaks the expectation of pregnancy while delivering news that reshapes Brett’s understanding of her family.

The sequence also cautions against treating Brett’s later care for a child as the fulfillment of the pregnancy she imagined. By May 6, Austin comes home from the hospital with Brett and Herbert, but Austin is Sanquita’s premature baby, whom Brett will raise; that later family change follows a different history and is not the outcome of Brett’s Christmas pregnancy hopes. In this way, Christmas helps distinguish between the future Brett initially pictures and the family she ultimately builds through other relationships and choices.