Day 30: 7 December 2025

 Short Story -- A Winter's Eve

The sky was an inky midnight blue and stars twinkled like hung crystals across it. Swirling through the air were the greens and pinks of the Northern Lights. Dark shadowy trees, rooted in a blanket of glistening white snow, reached up branches like fingers caressing the sky. The snow was still fresh, unbroken. There weren’t trails of paw prints or drops of mud. A lone owl hooted eerily, its cry carrying through the stillness of the night.

But one person bore witness to this peaceful tableau.

She was standing at a large table in her kitchen, flour on her hands, a few hairs escaping her high ponytail, tired but content eyes. On the table around her was a bowl of dough that had been chilling for hours, a series of metal cookie cutters that her grandmother had passed down to her — a star, a tree, a reindeer, a bell — a cup filled with flour and a rolling pin.

The table itself told a story. Her husband had made it for her as a wedding present when they’d gotten married twelve years ago. There were crayon marks from where their youngest child had been colouring earlier and her crayon had slipped off the page. There was a small scorch mark from their middle child’s birthday candle when it had fallen off of the cake a few years ago. There was a shaky ‘B’ scratched into the wood where their oldest had tried to mark his place after the birth of his sibling.

And looking at the table, with its chairs and benches, and the space around it filled her with memories of birthdays, Christmas and Easter meals, nightly dinners, homework and coffee with friends.

She took a quarter of the dough from the large ceramic bowl — one of the ones passed through the generations starting with her great grandmother — and after dusting the space on the table immediately in front of her she set the dough down and began to roll it out.

Usually her children would be helping her. Making Christmas cookies with them was one of her favourite traditions. And in truth, they’d been making an assortment of Christmas cookies together all day. But bed time had come for them one by one and they were now all tucked up under their covers dreaming sweet dreams, while she finished the last batch. They could decorate them as a family tomorrow morning before the first guests would arrive midday.

Methodically she rolled out the dough and cut out the different shapes until there was no dough left. In went the cookie dough and out came the cookies just a bit later a beautiful golden colour.

The house smelled delicious: of sugar and cinnamon and freshly baked treats. And it was quiet.

She loved the thoughtful questions of her eldest, the boisterous curiosity of her middle child and the incessant chattering of her youngest. But there was something special, too, in this feeling of stillness and peace and warmth, knowing they were safe and not too far away.

Taking the last batch out of the oven, she set the cookies on a wire rack to cool. She washed up the last dishes and hung the hand towel neatly on the oven door.

She took a final look out of the window at the winter night and admired its serenity.

She turned off the light as she walked out of the kitchen.

Stopping by each of her three children’s rooms on the way to her own, she adjusted a cover or smoothed a pillow, giving each one last kiss for the night on the forehead.

And finally — at the end of a full but beautiful day — she crawled into bed, nestling into the warmth of the heavy quilted duvet covers and went to sleep to the steady pulse of her husband's gentle snoring. Her dreams already propelling her into another chaotically wonderful day.