Christmas Eve — The Gifts We Remember 🎄✨
The Alchemy of Ivy Mae
Snow fell softly, muffling the broken world, as if the earth itself wanted a night of peace ❄️🌍.
Ivy Mae, Jas, and Roman gathered near the fire—not to celebrate abundance, but to honour survival.
No wrapping paper.
No excess.
Just gifts chosen with care.
Roman handed Ivy Mae a small bundle tied with twine 🎁.
Inside was a book—its pages brittle, its cover stamped with faded symbols.
“Found it in the ranger station,” he said.
“Thought you’d understand it better than I would.”
Ivy Mae’s breath caught as she opened it 📖✨.
Illustrations filled the margins:
reindeer, stars, red-capped mushrooms standing beneath pine trees, shamans climbing between worlds.
“It’s not a spell book,” she said softly.
“It’s history.”
The book spoke of northern peoples who watched reindeer migrate 🦌,
who noticed how certain mushrooms grew beneath evergreens 🍄🟫,
how colours—red, white, green—became symbols long before they became decorations.
Jas leaned closer.
“Is that… Santa?”
“Before Santa,” Ivy Mae replied.
“Before names.
Before tracking systems.”
Above them, an old satellite blinked faintly across the sky 🛰️.
Somewhere, NORAD’s Santa Tracker still traced a sleigh over borders that no longer mattered.
“Funny,” Roman muttered,
“we can track a myth… but not take care of the planet beneath our feet.”
They sat quietly with that.
Jas placed their gift beside the fire: a stone etched with a spiral 🪨.
“I copied it from a petroglyph we passed,” they said.
“It’s a reminder—
people were thinking about balance long before money.”
Ivy Mae smiled and offered her own gift:
a drawing of the three of them beneath an enormous pine 🌲,
reindeer moving through the snow,
stars falling like sparks.
“Stories are gifts,” she said.
“They survive even when everything else burns.”
The fire crackled 🔥.
The forest listened.
They didn’t eat the mushrooms.
They didn’t need to.
They understood now:
magic wasn’t consumption—
it was connection.
To land.
To memory.
To the quiet rule Scrooge learned too late and George Bailey learned just in time:
What you give matters more than what you keep.
Above them, the aurora shimmered faintly 🌌—
red, green, white—
not decorations, but signals.
And for one night, Christmas returned to what it had always been:
A gift.
A story.
A promise not to forget.
🎄✨
Merry Christmas from The Alchemy of Ivy Mae
May we remember what we were always meant to protect.