Jily oneshots

Did You Mince Me?, or, an untitled holiday fic

by elanev91

It wasn't even December yet and Lily was already stressed to her limit about the bloody holidays.

She was in the middle of checking her list against the packages she had out for order when her computer chimed with another notification to let her know that her email inbox had, once again, refreshed itself. She glanced over at her desktop and checked the number overtop her email icon — a bright red fifty-nine (that was just from this morning and didn't even count the mass of "read" but unread emails sitting in her inbox) that she was refusing to let herself think about — before she closed her eyes, took a single, steadying breath, and resumed checking her list one final time before she packed up her bag.

There was nothing that she could do about her inbox right now. And anyway, Christmas time always meant a mass of orders — she knew this, but, somehow, she only vaguely remembered the chaos of it all from year to year.

It was probably best that she forgot, honestly, because she was likely to halt production altogether and close up shop if she remembered just how busy she was from about early November up until Christmas.

The bloody John Lewis ad was enough to give her mild heart palpitations at this point.

But, no matter how stressed she was for those six weeks, Lily couldn't deny that she did, really, love the holidays. She loved the Christmas jumpers — the madder the better — she loved how everything smelled vaguely like cinnamon and clove and that you could eat mince pies for every meal and no one in their right mind was going to tell you off for it.

And she was eating a lot of mince pies. Especially because she needed them to fuel her during the exhausting, overwhelming Christmas shopping period. She did nothing but pack envelopes and drag enormous bags of parcels down to the post office, and she was sure that the postal workers were tired of seeing her by the second week of December.

Though last year, Thom, the guy who usually staffed the desk, had memorised her name and started shunting other customers out of the way when he saw her struggling through the door with yet another bag packed full of notebooks, keyrings, enamel pins, and whatever else it was that she'd sold that week. So he, at least, hadn't tired of her.

And she shouldn't be complaining — and she wasn't, she knew how grateful she was, having a shop that was this successful — but it didn't detract from the fact that she sometimes felt so stressed that she honestly forgot how to do anything other than brew tea. Still, chronic exhaustion and over-caffenation aside, this little shop was something that she'd spent most of her life dreaming about.

Not consciously, not really. It hadn't seemed real enough to be any sort of conscious dream of hers growing up, but when she'd finally graduated from uni and hadn't landed any job more serious than the one she was working at the boutique on Hackney Road….

Well, when nothing else had materialised, it suddenly seemed a little less mad to think that she could take the designs she'd been putting together on the side and sell them on the internet. She'd been working up a few things anyway for uni — like a cohesive print series and a small zine — and she was already creating her own greeting cards and things….

It wasn't a stretch, once she started thinking about it, to think that this might be something she could do quite easily.

There had been other influential factors where that decision was concerned, but it was too painful to think of them. Even still, years later, it was hard to think about them.

But anyway, this shop had rapidly become the focus of her entire life. It took a long time and a load of mistakes and a lot of hard work, but, after figuring out Shopify's sometimes-difficult platform, and, perhaps just as importantly, teaching herself how to use Instagram Stories, she soon found herself the proud owner of a small internet shop that managed to support her well enough that she only needed to pick up freelance gigs if she found she just wasn't busy enough.