Sorry for the short chapter today! Have had a loss of energy for the past two weeks 🥲 don't worry though there is a Christmas chapter coming and I'll try my best to get it out tomorrow!
♥️
Hope you all had a lovely Christmas today, and if Christmas was painful this year for sad reasons, i'm very sorry. The holidays can be a painful time for people and I just wanted to let you guys know that it's OK to be sad. Just because it's the holidays doesn't mean we stop grieving or stop being upset 🫶🏼 I love and appreciate you all and I'm so thankful to have this community x
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Holly's POV
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"Right, could you dice me up some celery and a whole onion, please?" Ella asks, reading the stuffing recipe off of her phone. Her carefully manicured nails look amazing - peachy pink glazed acrylics with snowflakes painted on them especially for Christmas.
I grab the celery from the fridge and grab an onion from the cupboard. I select a large knife and get to chopping, dicing the different sticks of celery finely along with the onion. I grab a few cloves of garlic and chop them up as well. Ella and I are preparing Christmas lunch for tomorrow as we've got some of the guys coming over with the girls. I can't believe it's Christmas tomorrow. Like, who allowed it to be this early? December just whizzed by almost as quickly as October. It feels like I barely had time to turn eighteen in November before shit hit the fan for December. My birthday was small and select, only containing a few of my friends from school, the girls, and the Sidemen of course but I didn't mind. We went ice skating and it was so lovely just being a small group having fun. I got the most amazing gifts and went to bed feeling like the luckiest girl in the world, but there was still a tinge of sadness knowing I didn't have my eighteenth with my biological family. I will always be grateful for the boys and JJ and Ella and everyone else I've met in the past three years, but it's still not the same. A part of me feels selfish for having thoughts like that, but another part of me feels it's justified. I feel the same tinge of sadness today when it dawns on me that this will yet again be a Christmas where I feel like I don't belong. My eyes follow Charlie as he trots into the living room and slumps down in front of the lit fireplace. He's been out in the rain with JJ as they went for a walk.
My eyes shift from Charlie and they rest on the stocking hanging above the fireplace. There's a capital H stitched into the fabric and it hangs between JJ's stocking and Ella's stocking, both of theirs stamped with capital J's and E's. Although my stocking is hanging up there, waiting to be filled with love, I can't help but feel like I don't belong here with them. I hate myself for feeling this way because I know JJ works so hard to make sure I feel included during the holidays. He knows I haven't had a proper Christmas growing up as a child, so he tries to make it up to me now, and I feel awful when I feel like I don't belong because it feels like I'm discrediting his hard work.
I chuck the diced veggies into a heated pan with olive oil and watch as they sizzle, stirring them around with a rubber spatula. I feel my eyes prick with unannounced tears and I turn away from Ella, gently brushing them away as they start to roll down my cheek. I really do like the feel of the holidays, but this year seems so much different for some reason. So much more difficult.
"Holls, I need some pecans from the cupboard too, when you have the chance..."
Ella and I spend the morning preparing food for tomorrow's Christmas lunch. Guests are arriving at one, but some won't be here until two, so we have time to cook more tomorrow morning if need be. Ella and I make stuffing, we season and marinate the turkey, we prepare the garlic herb roast potatoes, peel carrots and parsnips, take the pigs in blankets out of the freezer, decorate the dining room table with ivy and sprigs of holly, and we set the table at the end. Ella ends up tying red velvet bows around the candles in the centre of the table, and when she's done, the dining room looks like an absolute dream. I can't lie, it cheers me up a bit seeing how excited she is for tomorrow. Ella and I take a break around three pm and have some random snacky bits for lunch while popping on Gilmore Girls on Netflix in the living room. JJ spends the day running errands for Ella, running to the shops for special bits and bobs and picking up her dry cleaning. It's funny watching him popping in and out of the house for different things.
