Slightly belated, but I hope you enjoy…
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The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
By Jennifer Smyre
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Darwina knocked over her first Christmas display when she was six years old. It was November 1st, 1993, and she was with her mother in Macy’s. The store had just finished erecting the giant tree that each year occupied the empty space between the up and down escalators. Before her mother knew what was happening, she had reached, grabbed a branch, and jumped, swinging her weight out over the banister and pulling the whole tree down with her. It fell with a burst of shattered ornaments and flying pine needles into the midst of a group of middle-aged women clustered around the make-over counter.
Darwina’s mother rushed, screaming, down the ‘up’ escalator to her wounded baby. Said innocent was slightly scratched and bruised, but her fall had been mostly cushioned by a fortunately placed, well-padded woman with an overly rouged face. As the little girl was swept up into her mother’s arms, she grinned. There was a happy feeling in her stomach – something powerful, something in control, and most of all, something righteous.
Every year after that, she grew bolder, but then, so did the shops. The push of commercial greed kept bringing Christmas earlier and earlier, until it encroached on even the October holiday, and witches and spiders were on shelves next to Santas and candy canes. Worst of all, the “autumn” and “harvest” decorations went straight to the clearance bin at 12:00 AM, November 1, and were hardly to be found at all by the time the true highlight of the year came around.
Darwina couldn’t understand why other people didn’t see. How could they forget Thanksgiving? Now, there was a holiday that was about nothing less than the essence of life itself. What human being could live without eating? And what better way to celebrate one’s many blessings than by having a feast? Thanksgiving was humbling – it made you grateful – it was a beautiful time of year, pure in its purpose of mindfulness, of reminding humans of their common humanity and the joys in their lives.
“That’s a load of bullshit,” Roger Williams told her in fifth grade. “Everyone knows that Thanksgiving is about how the pilgrims stole from the Indians. Some great holiday.”
After she had wrestled him to the ground (some classmates called her fat, but she was truly big-boned and had the muscle mass and strength to match her stature), she held his collar twisted in one fist and hissed, “They were sharing the harvest.”
Not many kids liked talking to Darwina. But that was okay. She was used to being alone most of the time, anyway. Her father worked odd jobs all over the country, which meant he travelled a lot. Mother was a poet, and Darwina wasn’t allowed to interrupt her for anything when she was in her room with the door closed. It broke her concentration to be bothered with the humdrum of the mundane world, which was why she had been greatly relieved that Darwina learned to bandage her own boo-boos and to wash and cook at an early age. Of course she still had to drive Darwina to the hospital when she came home that one time with a deep gash in her thigh that wouldn’t stop bleeding (she had smashed a stained-glass manger scene in a church window and tripped and fell on a shard when making her escape). But Darwina had just turned 16 and she didn’t have to rely on anyone for rides anymore.
Aside from the fact that she had a license now, this November was actually shaping up to be the worst she could remember. Not only were the Christmas decorations out in force already, but this year her father’s usual December gig was beginning early, and he wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving. He was never home for any other holiday, but there had always been a lag in late November between jobs, a lag that meant that for one glorious day of feasting, Darwina’s family was whole.
Not this year, she thought glumly, and tramped down a little harder than was strictly necessary on the bent frame of her neighbor’s wire-and-lights lawn reindeer.
Later that night, November 24th, she was concentrating so hard on not missing a handhold as she climbed up the side of the Harris Teeter in her neighborhood shopping center that she didn’t see the person waiting for her on the roof. As she heaved herself over the edge, she saw the black outline of someone crouching by the supply of lighter fluid and matches that she had stashed here under a tarp a few days earlier. She came to a crouch herself and froze. There was a long moment of silence.
“You a cop?” she said at last.
“No,” the shadow replied, and it shifted closer, so that moonlight illuminated its face. It was a young man, in his twenties, with dark stubble and a hardened edge in his eye. “I am…an admirer.”
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the drop behind her. “Uh, right, well, I’m not really looking right now for a boyfriend…”
“No, not like that,” he said quickly, pulling back. “I mean, I’m part of a group that admires your work. We would like to offer you an affiliation.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “What group?”
He leaned in close, looked left and right, and whispered behind one hand, “The Turkey Mafia.”
She blinked.
“We’re an anti-Yule organization specializing in the promotion of the One True Feast, the Harvest, the Banquet…you know.” His voice was soft and reverent. “Thanksgiving.”
Darwina took this in for a moment. “You mean…you know about me? About…what I do?”
His face was intense in the moonlight. “Yes. We’ve been watching you for a while, and we like what we see. You’ve managed to bring down more Christmas displays within the past three days than all of our agents combined in the past week.”
Three days, Darwina thought, That’s when Dad’s leave date solidified. I guess I have been going a little hard and heavy since then.
The stranger went on. “We’re planning something big, and we’re going to need your help. Will you join us?”
She looked into his face for a moment, then gave a wicked smile. “I’m in.”
The very next night, Thanksgiving Eve, Darwina sat shivering at the corner of East and Fifth, waiting for her contact to arrive. Eventually, a tall, thin man with a long, dark coat and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes strolled by her, then stopped a few feet away and cleared his throat.
“The turkey runs swiftly,” he said nonchalantly, facing the streetlamp pole nearby.
“My gun is swifter,” said Darwina.
“Then the feast is tonight,” he replied, and turned toward her. “Welcome, brother. We must hurry if we’re going to get to the checkpoint in time.”
She and the man in the dark coat rushed along the streets, Darwina almost at a run in her haste to follow his long-legged strides. Her blood was pounding in her ears, and her throat felt tight with excitement.
When they reached the contact at the checkpoint, she was barely even winded, there was so much adrenaline pumping through her system. The contact was a skinny boy who looked like he was about ten years old. He was sitting cross-legged in a small clearing among the bushes in the public park. Darwina and the dark coat man glanced quickly around them and crouched down behind the prickly leaves.
The boy told them the plan, and Darwina’s eyes grew round. For the first time, she felt a stab of trepidation. This was something bigger than anything she had ever attempted, something she would never have considered going after on her own. It was too well-guarded, too public. And it was 6pm, when lots of shoppers would still be around in the downtown shops.
Still, there were tingles of excitement running all through her, and before she knew it, she was following closely as she and the dark coat man made their way to the rendezvous with the team.
The meeting was in the squishy-chair section of the Barnes and Noble downtown. Darwina followed her companion to the biggest, squishiest chair of them all, where ensconced in the cushions was the young man she had met on the roof the night before. He had a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War spread across his lap. He looked up at their approach and took her in with a sweep of his steely eyes and a cool nod of acknowledgement. She noticed that his stubble had grown out a little and was beginning to resemble a scraggly beard.
The tall man clasped a fist to his chest and knelt down to whisper in his leader’s ear. While he was giving his report, Darwina looked around at the rest of the group gathered in the reading area. There were a few people who looked normal enough – maybe they weren’t part of the Mafia. Five or six members were obvious enough to pick out. Dressed in dark clothing, with shifty eyes, and reading odd things, like wall calendars. Darwina frowned at a plump middle-aged woman dressed head-to-toe in black, with a ski mask resting prominently on her knee. She was humming off-tune as she thumbed through a cookbook called “The Complete Feast: Holiday Meals for Twelve or More.” Every few pages, she tore out a recipe and scrunched it into a ball, which she dropped on the floor. Piles of crumpled red and green paper surrounded her.
“Agent Evolution,” she heard the scraggly-beard man say. Darwina felt a light kick on her shin and turned around.
“Oh, is that me?”
“Yes.” He gestured for her to lean down, and then he whispered, “Agent Evolution, thank you for joining our noble cause. Are you ready? I know this is a big mission to be your first…”
“I’m ready,” she whispered fiercely. “This isn’t my first mission, just the first time I’ve had help.”
He nodded and gave a grim smile. “Right. Okay, we’re going to go as soon as they finish setting up.” He looked out the big bank of windows next to the reading area and Darwina followed his gaze.
The windows framed a view of the downtown market square, in the middle of which was the town Christmas tree, erected each year, with infuriating regularity, at 7:00 AM, November 1st. It was thirty feet tall and covered with lights and ornaments on every branch. There were a few shoppers milling around with bags on their arms, and in the middle of the square, right by the tree, there was a news van parked on the cobblestone. The cameramen were unloading the equipment and the reporter was brushing her hair with one hand and talking animatedly into a cell phone in the other.
Darwina looked back at the stubbly leader and wrinkled her brow at him. “But there’s no way we can get past them without getting caught.”
He smiled and his eyes glinted like pieces of flint. “That’s the point.”
While she was staring at him with her mouth open, he picked up his book and slammed it closed – the signal. The team started to move out, and Darwina was being left behind. She looked wildly out the window, and saw that the reporter had hung up her cell phone and was being handed a microphone. They were ready to go.
She hesitated for about a millisecond more, but after all, this was a huge blow against the hated holiday. How could she miss it?
The members of the Mafia were moving quickly out into the square, fanning out with purposeful strides in random directions. Darwina jogged a little to catch up with the stubbly leader, wanting to be close to the center of the action. As they passed by the news team, Darwina caught a little of the broadcast, something about predictions for the holiday shopping season this year. Disgusting, this rampant consumerism. She felt swelled with purpose again, sure in their righteous cause.
Everyone was in position, and she looked to the young man with his scraggly facial hair. His eyes were gleaming manically. He looked back at her, grinned like a wolf about to make a kill, and cried out, “Down with the Yuletime!”
There were answering war cries all around the square as the Mafia descended upon the center. With yells of “Down with the corporate Christmas monopoly,” “November is for giving thanks,” and “The Turkey Mafia lives!” they began to climb the tree, pulling off ornaments and garland, stripping needles and breaking branches.
Darwina had to stop before she reached the top, because the tiny branches wouldn’t hold her bulk anymore, but as she clung breathless to her perch, she saw that she had climbed faster than any of them, even the stubbly one. Exhilarated, she looked down at the gathering crowd below, and saw that the news cameras were pointed upwards now. “Long live the one true feast!” she cried.
The police came more quickly than she would have thought possible. They surrounded the square with flashing blue lights and police cars, and they cleared the crowd that had gathered around the tree, but then they could do little more than stand around with their bullhorns and try to talk the Mafia into coming down. In answer, the skinny boy who had been at the checkpoint in the park climbed to the very top of the tree, pulled down the star, and threw it at a police cruiser. The windshield cracked and the police seemed to swarm then, coming from nowhere to surround the tree. Darwina saw one with a bullhorn talking furiously to the man beside him and then that man hurried off to a radio. She wasn’t sure how she felt about cracking a cop’s windshield. After all, the Mafia was about destruction of all things Yule, and the cop didn’t have much to do with Christmas. But then, they were standing in the way of the mission.
Once the SWAT team got there, the revolutionaries had to come down out of the tree. It was hard to resist when you were being seized and dragged down by someone in body armor. It seemed that it was all over, and the Turkey Mafia would end in disgrace, but at the last moment, the stubbly leader broke away long enough to make a dash for the lighter fluid under the tree. He must have stored it there days ago, in the lower branches of the tree, hidden behind the thick bunches of ornaments and garland…Darwina was stunned by the genius of this bold move. Flame jumped into life at the base of the tree just as the leader was brought down, his cry of “Victory!” muffled under a pile of SWAT bodies. More SWAT tried to put the fire out, but it was too late. The tree was dry and covered in flammable liquid—it caught quickly.
The Turkey Mafia was taken into custody, handcuffed and cheering, against a backdrop of roaring flame and the wail of approaching fire engines.
As Darwina was about to be put in the back of a cruiser, the reporter lady rushed up to her, microphone out, her hair ruffled and face sweaty in the heat of the flames.
“Excuse me, excuse me, young lady—what do have to say for yourself?”
Darwina looked deep into the camera lens, out at the nation, the world, the vast landscape of multitudinous faces that would be watching her on their televisions tonight, watching her and thinking of what she had done, thinking of the meaning.
She grinned and opened her mouth to deliver, in clear, ringing tones, her message.
