Last Christmas

I only noticed the small gift-wrapped box after they all left-- the cheerful Jane, always ready to make everyone laugh, Klara, who filled us all in about the newest gossip in town, Kate, who remembered everything and everyone the best and never tired of reminding us about our school years, and Lucy, who had became my best friend the moment we had first met, fifteen years ago.

Of course, life happened in between and we lost the close touch we once had, but now, as we met again to discuss the last details of our planned high school reunion trip in the mountains, it felt as if nothing much had changed.

As my eyes wandered across the sitting room, I placed the used cups I was about to carry into the kitchen back on the coffee table and walked to the Christmas tree. Taking the small box wrapped in a Christmas gift paper adorned with tiny snowmen in my hand, I shook it gently. It produced no sound, no clue hinting at what was hiding inside, or who put it there...

Lucy. It must have been her... I mused as I turned the box upside down. I noticed the small piece of paper attached to its bottom, stating, 'Do not open before Christmas', even as my phone rang. Lucy's picture smiled at me from the screen of the phone, confirming my suspicions.

"It was you!" I accused her without a preamble.

"Yes, fine, it was me," she admitted, and I could hear the other girls' giggles in the background.

Klara was driving them all back home-- a small town where we all grew up, two hundred and something kilometres away from the capital where I had lived for years now. I still could not believe that they came to convince me personally to come and spend the Holidays with them and some of our other ex-classmates in the mountains-- all those who were still free and childless, and could do as they pleased.

"It isn't from me, though, and you are not supposed to open it before Christmas," Lucy added now, disturbing my train of thought. "See you on Friday."

"Hmm... thanks? Bye," I said, knowing that there was no way to persuade her to tell me anything more once she resolved to keep something a mystery.

Friday-- a week from now. I agreed to meet the four of them in the small village in the mountains where all the roads finished, and from where we would have to walk to the chalet they had booked. Three kilometres long walk across a snow-covered forest... I shook my head as I put the present back under the tree and the phone on the table.

Finally gathering the cups and plates on a tray, I made my way into the kitchen. I didn't even know who would be coming apart from the four girls and myself. They had only said that the chalet had ten beds and plenty of sofas, and they still had a week to persuade some people who were not quite convinced.

I smiled, imagining the faces of my thirty-two ex-classmates as I remembered them, nearly dropping the cup I was washing when my mind produced a picture I had been trying to forget for years. No, he would not be there... even the girls had said when they first called me two weeks ago that he was among those whom they could not contact...

Either way, it seemed that I was in for the most adventurous Christmas in a while.

I spent every free moment of the week leading towards the trip by carefully choosing what to bring with me.

Spending ten days in the mountains in December meant a huge luggage, which I could not afford to take. All that I would bring, I would have to drag across the forest, on foot, for the last three kilometres of the journey. The four girls and I would be the first to arrive in the early afternoon of the twenty-fourth, a few more people were supposed to come in the evening of the same day, and the rest as early on the twenty-fifth as they could, in time for the Christmas dinner.