Aspen Holiday

Chapter 5 - Sweet Treat

Seven days until Christmas

"Rockin' around the Christmas tree at the Christmas party hop. Mistletoe hung where you can see. Every couple tries to stop."

The lyrics played from overhead as my hips swayed back and forth with the beat. My hips were on beat, but the foot that was tapping along was most definitely not.

Caleb was also dancing around the kitchen, his hips moving as he attempted to put the apron on without compromising his brilliant dance moves. I scrunch my nose up, allowing my body to stop moving so I could just watch Cal and his little performance that he was putting on in his own world, Ace and I completely forgot.

Tonight my family and I are baking some cookies and are going to watch a Christmas movie. We all agreed that we should make some regular chocolate cookies because we don't have time to decorate them so we can't make classic sugar cookies. Then I proposed we do some gingerbread cookies as well since it is Christmas and we do have to be in the spirit of the holidays! Ace looked and saw that the Aspen House already has a gingerbread man shaped cookie cutter so our plan was underway!

Ace and I love gingerbread cookies and gingerbread houses — the ones we make, most definitely not the ones you get at the store, yuk! But Caleb absolutely hates them. He won't even try them and usually that boy will eat quite literally anything and everything!

So right now my family and I are in the kitchen, getting ready to make our cookies so that we can have a nice little movie night! I'm super excited because I have a plan to set up the living room all cute and comfortable and the blankets and pillows here are amazing to do that with! The only problem is that I'm not sure what movies were going to watch. I'll have to think about it during cookie making!

"Here you go, Buddy the Elf!" Caleb said in a cheerful voice, placing a green apron over my head. I didn't do anything at first, allowing him to set it around my neck and then tie it in the back before looking down. The design was pretty classic, being a sort of cross between a snowman with some buttons and an elf hat on the top.

Buddy the Elf has been my nickname around the holiday's for the past six-ish years. My brothers were always going back and forth between a bunch of names when I was a kid like 'Miss. Christmas', 'Jolly Jingle', or

'Xmas Xpert', and whatever else they could brilliantly come up with at the time they wanted to tease me. It was never one set name until one year.

It was the first Christmas in California and just like tonight we were settling down to watch a movie and I decided that I wanted to watch Elf. So I went on the tv and was going to pre-download it before Ace and Caleb finished making the popcorn — Ace had told me I could rent it earlier! So I went on and instead of renting it, I bought it and it cost something like 30 dollars — a crazy and abnormally high amount of a movie. So when Ace and Caleb came and sat down they saw that I had just bought it for a bunch of money and ever since then the name Buddy the Elf has stuck.

It's a little embarrassing since they even say it in front of my friends sometimes — it's become a habit. Or when Cal is making small talk with other parents he'll say something like "our resistant Buddy the Elf." But I don't completely mind it, there were some that were a lot worse!

"Here's for you, GingerbreadAce." Caleb also handed his best friend an apron.

"Ho-ho hilarious," My brother deadpanned, shooting Cal an unimpressed look and then rolling his eyes before his face went back to neutral.

It's a pretty common debate in our house about who does and doesn't like gingerbread and why. Caleb mainly nags Ace about it over and over because Ace doesn't really like a sweet treat. He won't eat any sort of gummy or sour candy — sometimes he'll eat some chocolate but that has to be like really good and expensive chocolate, never Reece's or Hershey's or anything like that.