The Kitchen at Nine on Christmas Eve

“That’s everything, then.”

The sentence of Christmas Eve afternoon, spoken across a counter into a nearly empty store. It is the sound the year makes when it is done buying.

The parking lot has emptied. Frost holds in the wheel wells where the shade has not lifted all day. A child sleeps in a shopping cart near the door, head tipped against the plastic, hat slipped over one eye, while a parent stands at the register with the small forgotten things — ribbon, batteries, the half-gallon that will not wait for morning. The clerk rings them up without hurry, a person who has been there since before the lights came on. The register prints its long tongue of tape. The receipt is folded once and put in a pocket, where it will be found in a week and thrown away. The cooler hums. The only voices are the register and the door.

Behind them, the store is down to its last minutes, and everything in it has the look of a thing that has done its work for the year: the poinsettias gone dull at the edges, the tins of popcorn by the door, the remains of the wrapping-paper display, picked over and put back crooked. The shelves are half-empty in the way that only happens on this day — the good things gone, the strange things left. A man comes in with his hands in his pockets, needing nothing, killing time, because nobody wants to be the one still out. The door opens for him and the cold comes in ahead of him, a gust that moves down the aisles and stirs the receipt tape. The child in the cart shifts and does not wake.

The bag goes on the passenger seat. The car fills with heat and the smell of the defroster. The roads are quiet for the hour, and the light is gone by half past four. The streets are the emptiest they have been all week and the houses the fullest. Every house on the way has its porch light on; the porches are empty, and the windows are lit. Here and there a tree shows through a front window, a string of lights pulling the dark around it. There is a particular feeling to driving home on Christmas Eve with nothing left to buy — the last errand run, the year’s buying finished, and only one place left to go, the one the road is already taking.

The Door Shut

The porch light has been on since four. The door opens into the warm, and the warm takes the cold off a coat in seconds. Coats go on the backs of chairs or the hook by the door; shoes are kicked off; the cold is shut out for good, the deadbolt turned. In the entry the boots stand in a row, dried mud flaking from the heels. A damp sleeve has left its shape on the doorframe. The street goes away. The house settles the way a room settles when the last guest has left, except the guest is the day, and it is gone.

The kitchen begins its long shift. The oven has been on since late afternoon, and the kitchen holds its heat the way the house holds its people. On the counter: flour dusted across the board, the ends of celery by the sink, a stick of butter softening under an upside-down dish. The good plates are stacked where someone decided they should go. The table is set, or nearly — someone is still deciding about the good glasses. A list of things to do is taped to a cabinet, crossed off one by one, every line done but one.

The children press at the window, watching for nothing. Nobody is coming; the night is the visitor. A carol has been on the radio since breakfast and nobody has changed the station. Behind a closed door, the sound of wrapping paper, which stops when someone walks past, and starts again. At the window the children have left the heat of their faces on the glass, two hazy ovals that will dry and disappear before anyone thinks to wipe them. The dog lies in the hall, guarding the quiet, and gets up when the kitchen does something, and lies down again.

Somewhere in the evening, the hour of bed arrives. Someone says the word, and the protest is loud and brief and as much a part of the ritual as the carol itself. The bath. The story, read in a voice that has been used all day and is down to its last pages. The door left open three inches, then closed, then opened once more for a glass of water, then closed again. Footsteps on the stairs, one last time, and then the house goes quiet in stages, the way a store goes dark, aisle by aisle.

The Kitchen at Nine

By nine, the kitchen is wrecked — the good kind of wrecked. A roasting pan soaks in the sink. A dish towel lies over the rolls like a blanket, keeping the heat in. The pie sits on the counter with the knife beside it, waiting for the hour it will be cut. A plate with a few crumbs and a fork waits by the sink, and nobody has moved it. The good glasses came down off the shelf and one of them is chipped, and nobody cares. The radio is off. The refrigerator hums, and the hum is the loudest thing in the house.

Somebody runs the water and washes the last of the measuring cups. Somebody else sits at the table with a cup gone cold, not drinking. Nobody talks much. The day has used up the sentences, and the ones left are small — hand me that, not yet — and they fall into the quiet and stay there.

The kitchen at nine on Christmas Eve is no longer a place to cook. It is a place to be, the last room of the day, the one with the light on. The floor is swept but not mopped. The window over the sink has fogged with the heat of the dishwater, so the night is a smear of porch light and dark. Frost is already working at the corners of the glass, a slow white that will be there in the morning. The clock on the stove says nine, and the night is most of the way over and mostly not started.

Nobody opens the refrigerator for a while. The mess waits. The stairs creak with the heat coming on. A car goes down the street at half past nine, headlights moving across the wall, and the sound of it is strange in the quiet. The house holds its people the way the oven holds its heat — closed, warmed, saving it for later. In the living room the tree does its slow work, lights on, lights off, with nobody watching, and the presents underneath are still in the bags they came in.

The Table at Midnight

The table has been cleared of dinner and now holds the year’s other work: the roll of paper, the tape dispenser, the scissors, the markers gone dry at the tips. One person cuts. One person folds. Christmas Eve has a work shift nobody is paid for, and it is done at this hour, in this light, at the kitchen table or on the living-room floor, with the dog asleep under the nearest piece of furniture and the tree doing its slow work in the corner.

The sounds are particular and small — tape tearing, paper creasing, scissors running the length of a roll. The scissors are the kitchen scissors and they stick halfway. The paper is measured by eye and cut long. Names get written in a hurry and rewritten, the marker a little dry, the letters a little big. A wrong fold wastes a good sheet, and nobody minds; there is always another sheet, and the time is the point. A roll of tape runs down to its last inch, and somebody says so, and somebody else says it will do. The presents are dealt out like cards, face down, and stacked by size. The stockings are hung. The tags are checked twice.

By midnight, one person is still up.

Not working, exactly. The paper is put away. The scissors are back in the drawer. The one who remains has gone through the house turning off lights, leaving only the tree, and sits on the floor in its light, or stands at the window looking at the street — the porch lights on everywhere, the dark held between them — with nothing left to do but be awake for it. The porch lights thin out, one by one. The stockings are full. The gifts are in their stacks, labeled and finished. The radio has been off for hours, the carols done, the day delivered. The tree stays lit, and the person awake in the quiet is the one part of the day that has not been wrapped up yet.