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By the time Jaina was ten or twelve, she had outgrown the magic and wonder of the family Christmas tree farm completely. The fun had been stripped out by the exhausting and deeply resented grind of spending all the weekends leading up to it and most of Christmas break working. By the time she left for college, she had done everything there was to do around the farm, from planting and tending the trees to ordering bulk cocoa for the steaming paper cups they handed out to customers, arranging the visits from Santa and reindeer, and, in one memorable incident, having to deal with a drunk Santa passed out in the ornamental sleigh in front of the Christmas tree shop.
Coming back to help out on break from college, however, gave her the strange feeling of coming into it as the customers did. Most years, she was involved with every aspect of the setup. She helped untangle the dusty strings of lights and wobbled on a ladder as they strung them around the shop and the larger, older pines gracing the parking lot. She checked the batteries in all Mom's colored LED lanterns, helped set up the display trees, and ordered inventory. She walked what felt like miles making sure the trees were neat and orderly and ready for customers to pick them out, and in the last couple of years before college, she even had wielded the chain saw that cut them down.
But this year she walked onto the tree lot with the lights and the trees fully decked, the cocoa machine going full blast, and most of this year's trees already cut. By the time her Christmas break had started, the Christmas tree season was all but over, and it was winding down to the last stragglers—they always got a last-minute rush a day or two before the holiday—and shoppers picking out ornaments and gifts in the family shop.
To enhance the effect, it was snowing. She'd stepped onto a flight early that morning in Georgian warmth and stepped out into winter, and she still had a dazed, unreal feeling about it all. Since customers were sparse and one of her cousins was staffing the register, there was little for her to do. She found herself wandering around the grounds as blue winter dusk closed over everything, with snowflakes dusting her hair. The big parking lot floodlights didn't reach too far back into the ranked rows of pines and firs that made up the farm itself. Mom's lanterns seemed very bright out here, dangling on the trees and casting sparkling, fairy-like light on the falling snow. As Jaina wandered deeper into the grove of small and uniform pines, she found herself thinking about some of her childhood fantasies involving the tree farm.
Back when she was very young, running around after her parents and older cousins rather than helping out in any meaningful way, it used to feel to her like the tree farm was a portal to Narnia or some other such magical place. It had seemed like the forest primeval to her then, the conifers much taller than her childhood self, clustered together densely. The light spilling through the trees had cast long, dark shadows that seemed dense enough to swallow her tiny child self whole.
And now that she thought about it—
She hadn't dwelled on those memories in many years, but she remembered a couple instances of her parents finding her among the pines after hours of searching, usually napping happily under a tree. She had been dreaming (for dreams they had to be?) of pushing through the pines until she found her way to a forest beyond them. Those memories were very hazy now. Mainly she remembered crying because, in the way of small children, she used to insist that her dreams were real, and cried because her parents wouldn't believe her.
Now, as she walked deeper into the dark reaches of the Christmas tree farm, it did seem the trees were getting bigger. The snow was falling more heavily now, covering the trees with a picture-postcard powdering that seemed luminous in the near-dark.
Clearly being gone had affected her more than she had realized, because she thought she'd easily been walking long enough to have reached the fence bordering Old Man Robinson's property. Had her parents added a new section of field? No, it couldn't be; the trees were much too large to be new. In fact, they were too big to be harvested. Baffled, she gazed up at the stately trunks and snow-covered branches. Surely it must be the twilight making them seem so tall. The branches had grown out so wide that they covered the aisle, so she had to push through them to make any progress.
How could part of the farm have gotten this overgrown? She wondered now if she had completely lost her way and rambled into the actual woods behind the property. But she had spent enough time tramping around in those woods to know that they weren't like this. They were thick with dense underbrush and blackberry brambles, crisscrossed with deer trails, with few pines at all.
Becoming slightly alarmed, Jaina was relieved to see light shining through the trees up ahead, highlighting the thickly falling snow. It looked like the colored light from one of Mom's lanterns. Okay, that's what happened. I got turned around and I'm headed back to the parking lot. It wouldn't explain the huge trees, but right now the glimpse of normalcy was welcome. She hurried ahead, pushing through heavy pine branches, until she reached the edge of the trees—and stopped.
This was, to say the least, not the parking lot.
She was looking out onto what looked like some sort of market or fair, wound down for the night. Everything looked temporary, tents and wagons, some dark and others with light gleaming out of half-closed curtains or shining forth from half-open tent flaps. Lanterns glowing on poles, illuminated the aisles between the tent plots and the wagons' parking spaces.
I guess there's some kind of Christmas fair up the hill ... ?
Jaina jumped a little when she noticed the horses. There were dozens of them, not penned up but tied on short ropes so they could eat the hay strewn in front of them and scrape at the snow to get to the grass. Most of them were small and shaggy and wild-looking.
The sight of the horses made her realize that nowhere at all did she see anything electrical, modern, or even all that familiar. There were no cars or motorbikes, no power lines strung overhead or extension cords snaking to the tents. One of the lanterns was hanging near her at the edge of the woods, in a halo of falling snow, and Jaina approached it to get a better look. It had to be battery operated, she thought; it gave a clear bright light that shone out through colored glass panels, just like the ones that Mom liked to hang up on the trees and the shop doorway. But the light flickered, and when she peered more closely through the colored glass shades, she saw a candle melting down to a stump inside.
"What are you doing here?" said a voice behind her.
Jaina jumped and whirled around. There was a woman riding one of the small, shaggy horses, and looking down at her. The woman wore a fur coat, a thick felt hat with ear flaps, and a long, heavy-looking, embroidered skirt, split up the front so that it hung down to cover her legs, which reached nearly to the ground due to the horse's small size. The entire ensemble looked very warm.
She was also carrying a short spear. Jaina eyed it nervously.
"I, uh, I'm from the tree farm," Jaina said. She pointed back the way she'd come, but when she looked back, what she saw was a wall of enormous pine trees. Lit up in the lantern light, they were snow-covered giants. They looked like they had been growing for hundreds of years, not the eight to ten of a marketable Norway pine.
"Oh, you're one of those," the woman said, not in an unfriendly way. "Sorry, I should have guessed. I'll get you a guide."
"Wait—" Jaina began, but the woman had already wheeled her horse and trotted in the direction of the tents.
Left alone, Jaina left the woods and crossed the trampled snow to a pair of nearby horses. They were tied to stakes pounded into the frozen ground, and seemed friendly enough, pushing at her with their soft noses. She rubbed their ears, which was how she discovered that one of them had short, stubby antlers half buried in its shaggy mane.
Jaina looked at the horses with newly curious eyes. The colored light streaming from the lanterns made it hard to tell, but she thought that the other one, which she had taken for black or dark brown, was actually a deep shade of indigo with pink socks.
Before she could react to this, a hand tugged at her coat. There was a boy of about twelve or so looking at her with a round, cheerful face. He was dressed a lot like the woman had been, but in a more lightweight version, more suited to walking than riding—wool trousers, a jacket made of short fur like rabbit, and a felt cap with curly dandelion-fluff hair emerging from underneath, so blond it looked white. He carried a lantern in one hand.
"Hi, miss," he said cheerfully. "I'm here to take you back."
"Oh, but couldn't I stay for a while?" Jaina asked hopefully. She wished she could look around some more.
"No," the boy said firmly. He gestured her toward the woods. "First of all, it's the middle of the night and everyone is in bed. Second, the curtain doesn't stay open very long, and you want to make sure you get home before it closes, or you could be here for years."
He had strange eyes, but it wasn't until they started walking back to the woods that Jaina realized what was odd about them. His pupils were vertical, like a goat's.
Still, she wasn't scared. Nothing about this place seemed frightening or dangerous. It was just strange, and she yearned to find out more about it.
"Where am I?" she asked. "What is this place called?"
"We're in the Brennerwood," the boy said. He pushed aside some branches, and she followed him between the snowy trees. The colored lantern light danced across the trees and through the falling snow with beautiful prismatic effects. "This camping place is called Liefsgarden. We often spend some of the winter here, until the snows become too heavy and we have to move south."
"I'm not still in my world, am I?"
"No," the boy said, seeming not at all confused by the question.
"How is it that I can understand you? You can't be speaking English."
He shrugged. "I don't know. Coming through the curtain does that to people, I've heard."
"Does this happen a lot? What is this curtain?"
"It's a thin place between your world and mine. And we're here." He pointed straight ahead. "Just go that way, and you'll be back home soon."
Jaina hesitated, desperately wanting to prolong the experience. She was getting cold, her light coat not at all suited to this place's deep winter. And she knew that there was no place for her here; she couldn't just show up at a caravan of nomadic people and insist on staying. "Can I ever come back?" she asked.
"When the curtain thins again, you could. If you keep trying, you probably will someday. But we might not be here to show you the way home."
"Good point," Jaina admitted. She took a couple of steps forward, squinting. "Where exactly is the—"
Her voice faded as she turned around. Although it seemed impossible for the boy to have moved away so quickly, there was no sign of him now. She was completely alone in the woods.
But the colored light still danced across the trees; it just seemed to have no source. Jaina pushed on, and shortly she could see that the light was now from the dangling LED lanterns, as well as the gleam of the floodlights shining through the trees. A moment later, she stepped out into the edge of the parking lot.
The shock of familiarity rocked her down to her core. She looked back and discovered that from here, she could easily see down the tree aisles to Old Man Robinson's farmhouse lights, a quarter mile or so distant.
"Janie!"
Her dad crossed the parking lot, and she realized that most of the lights were out. It didn't seem that she had been gone that long, but the blue winter dusk had turned to full darkness, and the CLOSED sign hung on the door of the shop.
"There you are! We're just closing up, and I was about to come looking. Didn't want to leave you out here."
"No, of course not," she said dazedly.
Someone at the shop must have flipped a switch just then, because abruptly the other Christmas lights went out, leaving just the colored lanterns that her mom always specially dusted off and lit at the start of every season. They were usually left up all night.
"Dad ..." she said. "Why does Mom put up those lanterns?"
"What? Oh ... just part of the decorations, I guess? Come on and help me cover the display tree."
Jaina trotted alongside, but she kept glancing back at the lanterns. "But what gave her the idea?"
"I don't know, hon. She started doing it the first couple of years after we bought the tree farm from the Robinsons, back when you were a baby. You should ask her."
I think I will, Jaina thought as she helped him go through the familiar closing-up ritual. All of a sudden she had a lot of questions about the tree farm she had once thought of as the boring family business.
She definitely wanted to walk around the tree farm some more. Maybe after the end of the commercial season, when they closed down and put things away for the next season ... perhaps she would come back with a warmer coat and a flashlight, and do a little walking around after dark.
And she thought that she might leave the lanterns burning, to find her way home.
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