Behold: The Warm Glow of Christmas
WHEN I CAME HOME, I found a beautiful woman in a cheongsam waiting for me, as per tradition.
“Welcome home.”
“Whoa! Hey, I’m back. Ooooh!”
The blue fabric looked so radiant in the dim light, I forgot all about taking my shoes off. I just stood there in the entryway, admiring her from head to toe. She shrank away, tugging the hem of her slit skirt down, as if the attention embarrassed her.
“I thought you wanted me to see it.”’
“Yes, but…no!”
To this day, she could be a total mystery to me.
Several Christmases had come and gone since I first moved in with Adachi. Now one had arrived again, and as she did every year, Adachi had dressed in her cheongsam. Looking back, I still wasn’t sure why she’d worn it for that first Christmas we spent together, but now it was an essential part of our celebration. Perhaps that was how all traditions started.
As I stepped out of my shoes, the warm air thawed my frozen face into a smile. I walked straight to the dining room to find that the first course of our dinner was pumpkin soup.
“Oh ho. Very Christmassy.”
“Uh…yeah, I guess,” Adachi replied flatly. She had a point—maybe it was more of an overall winter staple. She carried the other side dishes from the fridge to the table one by one.
“Hmmm.” It seemed any trace of a holiday celebration started and ended with Adachi’s cheongsam. “Oh yeah, I bought us some cakes. Here.”
I handed her a carryout box of slightly overpriced desserts. When I got to the bakery, it had unsurprisingly been swarming with customers. The Christmas-themed mini roll cakes in the display case cost over three thousand yen apiece, but I’d pretended not to notice.
“Yaaay. Christ…maaas.” As usual, Adachi was completely inept when it came to performing excitement, but I liked that about her. The entire box didn’t fit inside our fridge, so she started to take the cakes out, but paused. “Why’d you get three?”
“Oh, don’t worry. The third will likely be gone by tomorrow.”
I was anticipating a holiday visitor who turned up every year on the twenty-sixth. She never came by on Christmas Day itself—not out of consideration for our privacy, but because she was generally too busy stuffing her face at my parents’ house.
Once she’d put the cakes away, Adachi bustled around the kitchen to finish getting dinner on the table while I simply sat there, waiting to be served. She was surely no less exhausted from her own work, yet she had it completely under control. Wow, I thought absently as I watched her. There was something to be said for having a pretty girl in a cheongsam serve you dinner in a toasty-warm condo late at night.
“Good taste.” Mine, I mean. “Yours, I mean.”
“What?”
The “waitress” sat down next to me rather than across the table; she preferred that, and I didn’t mind. Whenever we were face to face, we risked a head-on collision, and even then she wouldn’t budge.
“Does it still look good?” she asked.
“The food?”
From the direction of her gaze, I quickly realized she meant the cheongsam. To be fair, we were both in our twenties now. Nearly everything had changed from the first time I’d seen her in the garment—our bodies, our hearts, our attitudes, our relationship…
On second thought, no. Adachi’s heart was probably still the same. Change only took place if the circumstances necessitated it, and a lack of change was valid in its own right.
“However old we get, I’ll always want you to wear that dress.”
However many years passed, Adachi would always be Adachi, and Christmas would always be cheongsam season. It was impressive how one single holiday offered so much joy.
“Okay.” Nodding meekly, her lips defrosted into a smile. “I’ll keep wearing it as long as it makes you happy.”
“Yay!”
Having duly expressed my approval, I started eating my pumpkin soup.
Woohoo. Christmas!
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