Part 2: My 86-Year-Old Grandmother Has Laid A Tiny Reindeer Pajama Set On The Armchair Next To Her Christmas Tree Every December 24th For Eight Years. It Was For A Dog Who Died In 2016. I Surprised Her With A Pit Bull Puppy On Her 86th Birthday. She Was Furious. Then The Puppy Climbed Into The Chair.

I’m going to tell this slow. The slow part is the whole story.

I want to tell you about Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house, because Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s house is its own world.

My grandmother is Catholic Polish-American. She came to America at 9 years old. She has spent the eighty-seven years of her life keeping a small kitchen, a small house, a small garden, and a small Christmas Eve tradition that has not meaningfully changed since 1958.

My family — me, my mother, my father, my younger brother Tomas Jr. — drives the four hours up from Madison to Hayward every December 24th. We arrive in the late afternoon. My grandmother greets us at her front door in her best dark green wool dress and her amber necklace that her own mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday in Krakow in 1954. She kisses each of us on both cheeks. She makes us take our shoes off in the entryway. She walks us into the small living room.

The Christmas tree is always in the southwest corner of the living room, in front of the picture window. It is always a small living Norway spruce, about six feet tall, that my grandmother orders the first week of December from a tree farm called Hjelmstad’s Norway Spruce outside Cable, Wisconsin. The tree is always decorated with the same ornaments — handmade Polish straw stars from Krakow that my grandmother’s mother sent her over the decades, small glass icicles that my grandfather bought her for their 25th anniversary in 1983, a single felt angel that my mother made in third grade in 1985 that has been on the tree every year since, and a careful arrangement of small white twinkle lights.

There are no plastic ornaments on the tree. There are no colored lights.

The tree is beautiful in a quiet, completely uncynical way that I do not think you can find in many living rooms in America anymore.

Next to the tree, on the southeast side, is an old armchair.

The armchair is a small upholstered wingback chair in a faded floral pattern — pale yellow background with small embroidered roses in dusty pink. The chair is at least sixty years old. My grandmother bought it secondhand in 1965 in Milwaukee when she was pregnant with my mother. She has kept it ever since. It is the chair my grandfather sat in every evening of his retirement, reading his newspaper. It is also the chair where she has, since 2016, laid out the small reindeer pajama set on every Christmas Eve.

I had been to my grandmother’s house for Christmas Eve every single year of my life — 16 years. I had never noticed the pajamas before December 24th, 2023.

I want to be honest with you. I had probably seen them every year. I had probably walked past them every December 24th since I was a small child. I had never registered them as anything unusual. They were a small fabric object on an old chair. They had blended into the rest of my grandmother’s house — full of small embroidered objects, small old photographs, small handmade quilts, and small careful decorations.

On December 24th, 2023, I was 16 years old. My phone was dead. I had finished helping my mother set the table for the Wigilia dinner. I had wandered into the living room. My brother Tomas Jr. was on the floor in front of the tree playing a Nintendo Switch he was not supposed to have brought. My parents were in the kitchen with my grandmother. The room was quiet.

I noticed the pajamas.

They were folded neatly in the seat of the wingback chair. Dark green flannel. Small embroidered reindeer across the chest in red harness. Size 2T — toddler size 2. There was a small piece of tissue paper folded under them. A small price tag, in faded green ink, was still attached to one of the legs. The tag said “Bouchard’s Linens — $14.95 — October 2016.”

I picked up the pajamas.

I looked at them.

I noticed they had never been worn.

The tag had never been removed.

I walked into the kitchen.

I said, “Babcia. What are these pajamas for?” I used the Polish word for grandmother because that is what I have called her my entire life.

My grandmother turned from the stove. She had been stirring red borscht. She looked at the pajamas in my hands.

Her face did something I had never seen it do before.

She set down her wooden spoon.

She wiped her hands on her apron.

She walked across the kitchen.

She took the pajamas from my hands very carefully.

She held them against her chest.

She said, in her thick Polish accent, “Brielle. Sit down at the table. I will tell you. But you do not interrupt me. You let me finish. Do you understand.”

I sat down at the kitchen table.

My mother stopped chopping mushrooms. My father stopped peeling potatoes. They both looked at us. They knew what was about to happen. I did not know yet.

My grandmother sat down at the table across from me.

She placed the pajamas on the table between us, folded the way she had folded them.

She told me about Tilly.

I want to tell you the story exactly the way my grandmother told it to me on the evening of December 24th, 2023, at her kitchen table, with my mother and father standing silently by the stove.

She said, “Brielle. Your grandfather and I had a dog. Eight years ago. Right before he died. We had not had a dog for a long time. Our last dog Mishka had died in 2002 of old age. We were old. Henrik was 77 years old in autumn of 2016. I was 78. We had been saying for many years that we were too old for a new dog.”

She paused.

She said, “Brielle. In September of 2016, your grandfather and I went to the Sawyer County Humane Society on a Saturday afternoon because Henrik wanted to donate some old blankets. We were not looking for a dog. We had said many times we were too old. But we walked through the kennels. There was a small chihuahua mix puppy. Brielle — she was the smallest dog I had ever seen. She was seven months old. She weighed maybe four pounds. She had been brought in two days before by a young woman who could not keep her. She had one floppy ear and one upright ear. She had brown eyes the size of small grapes. She licked my hand through the chain-link.”

My grandmother smiled at the memory.

I had not seen her smile that way before.

She said, “Brielle. Henrik and I drove home that afternoon without the dog. We talked about her the whole way home. We talked about her at dinner. We talked about her before we went to sleep. At seven in the morning, your grandfather got out of bed and said to me, in his quiet voice — Eulalia. We are going to get the chihuahua. I do not care that we are old. He drove back to the shelter. He brought her home that afternoon. We named her Tilly.”

She paused.

She said, “Brielle. We had Tilly for ten weeks. Ten weeks. She was the happiest creature I have ever known. She slept on Henrik’s chest every night. She ate scrambled eggs with him every morning. She rode in the passenger seat of his truck to the hardware store. She wore a small pink coat that I had knitted her in three days at the kitchen table. Brielle — those ten weeks were among the happiest of our entire marriage. We had not laughed that much in years. We had not loved a small creature that much in a long time. Henrik had been a hard man for most of our marriage — kind, yes, always kind, but quiet, and reserved, and not a man who showed his affections easily. Tilly broke him open. Tilly turned my husband, at 77 years old, into a man who sang songs at the kitchen counter for the entertainment of a four-pound dog.”

She wiped her eyes with her apron.

She said, “Brielle. In October of 2016, we drove to Eau Claire together for a doctor’s appointment for Henrik. We stopped at Bouchard’s Linens — a small children’s clothing store. I had decided I wanted to buy Tilly a Christmas Eve outfit. I had been knitting her clothes — but I wanted something special for her first Christmas with us. I bought her these pajamas. Size 2T. They were a child’s pajamas but they were the smallest pajamas the store sold. I planned to alter them at the kitchen table the week before Christmas. Tilly was going to wear these on Christmas Eve. She was going to wear them sitting on Henrik’s lap in the living room while we ate Wigilia at the table.”

She paused.

She paused for almost a minute.

She said, “Brielle. On the morning of December 21st, 2016 — four days before Christmas — Tilly went out into the backyard at six in the morning to go to the bathroom. Henrik was making coffee. I was upstairs getting dressed. We had a six-foot wood fence. A coyote came over the fence. Henrik heard her scream. He ran outside in his slippers. The coyote was gone over the fence by the time he got there. Tilly was in the snow. She was — she was already gone, Brielle. She was very small. The coyote had been bigger than she was.”

I started crying at the kitchen table.

My mother started crying by the stove.

My grandmother kept talking.

She said, “Brielle. Your grandfather did not speak for almost two days. He buried her on December 22nd in the back corner of the yard. He planted a small white pine tree on top of her grave. He came back into the house. He took the pajamas I had bought her — they were still in the bag on top of the dresser — and he folded them very carefully. He put them in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed. He said, ‘Eulalia. We are not throwing these away. We are keeping them. She did not get to wear them. But we are keeping them.’ That was all he said. He did not speak about Tilly again for the rest of his life. He died eighty-three days later at this kitchen table.”

She placed her hand on the pajamas on the table.

She said, “Brielle. On the first Christmas Eve after Henrik died — on December 24th, 2017 — I took the pajamas out of the cedar chest. I did not know what to do with them. I folded them. I placed them in the seat of the wingback chair next to the Christmas tree, where Henrik used to sit. I did not know why I did it. I just did. Brielle — I have done it every Christmas Eve for the last eight years. I have not been able to stop. I do not know if I am laying them out for Tilly or for Henrik. I think — Brielle, I think I am laying them out for both. I think I am laying them out because not laying them out feels like admitting they are not coming back.”

She started crying.

I got up from the kitchen table.

I walked around to her side.

I knelt down next to her chair.

I put my head in her lap.

She put her hand on my head.

She said, in Polish, “Moje dziecko. Płacz nie zabija. Pamiętanie jest życiem.”

It means, “My child. Crying does not kill. Remembering is living.”

I cried in my grandmother’s lap for almost half an hour.

I drove back to Madison with my parents and my brother on December 26th, 2023.

I cried in my bedroom for three hours that night.

I did not tell my parents what I was planning.

I started researching Pit Bull breeders on the morning of December 27th.

I want to tell you why I picked a Pit Bull.

My grandmother had told me, on Christmas Day morning the day after our kitchen-table conversation, that Tilly had been the smallest dog they had ever owned, and that Henrik had said many times after her death that he wished he had picked a bigger dog because a bigger dog would have survived the coyote. My grandmother had also told me that the previous dogs my grandparents had owned in their marriage had all been mid-to-large breed mixes — a German Shepherd-Lab named Mishka, a Boxer-Husky named Bruno before that, a Lab named Whitey before that. Tilly had been the only small dog they had ever owned, and it had felt like a deviation in their dog-history, and it had ended badly.

I wanted to bring my grandmother a dog who would survive a coyote.

I researched coyote-resistant breeds for fourteen days.

I landed on Pit Bull. They are not too big (a small adult Pit Bull is 45-55 pounds — manageable for an 86-year-old woman). They are extraordinarily loyal. They are coyote-resistant. They live 12 to 16 years. They are emotionally intelligent in a way that suits elderly people.

I started looking at breeders in northern Wisconsin on January 5th, 2024.

I found Mr. Tomas Hartwell-Knutsen in Spooner, Wisconsin, about an hour east of my grandmother’s house. He was a 64-year-old retired Wisconsin DNR conservation officer. He had been breeding American Pit Bull Terriers as a small hobby operation since 2014 — just two litters a year, on his small farm. He was a member of the United Kennel Club. He vetted his adopters carefully. He kept puppies until they were 10 weeks old. He gave them their first round of shots, deworming, and microchipping.

I called him on January 11th, 2024, on my lunch break at East High School from the school library.

I told him I was 16.

He almost hung up.

I begged him to listen.

I told him the story of the pajamas.

I told him about my grandmother.

I told him about Tilly.

Mr. Hartwell-Knutsen was quiet on the phone for a long time.

He said, “Ms. Castellanos-Whitcombe. I have a litter being born next Saturday. I have one puppy already reserved. I will have six more. If you can drive up here four times between now and February 17th and meet me in person, and if your parents sign off on this in writing, and if you can convince me that your grandmother has the capacity and the support system to raise a Pit Bull puppy at 86 years old — I will hold a puppy for you. I will not ship a Pit Bull puppy to a household sight-unseen. I do not care that you are 16. I care about the puppy.”

I said, “Yes. I will drive up. I will bring my mother.”

He said, “Bring your mother.”

I told my parents that night.

My mother cried.

She was the one who had to talk me through what could go wrong. She told me my grandmother might refuse the puppy. She told me my grandmother might be angry. She told me that an 86-year-old woman who has been laying out a dead dog’s pajamas every Christmas Eve for eight years has been doing it because she has been protecting herself from the possibility of loving another small creature and losing it again, and that bringing a puppy into that house was potentially a violation of a grief-defense system she had built deliberately over almost a decade.

I cried with my mother for about an hour.

I told her I still wanted to do it.

She thought about it for three days.

On the evening of January 14th, 2024, she came into my bedroom. She sat down on the edge of my bed.

She said, “Brielle. I will help you. I will drive you to Spooner. I will sign whatever Mr. Hartwell-Knutsen needs. I will be there with you on February 17th. But I want you to understand. If your grandmother says no — if she tells you to take the puppy back — you cannot fight her. You will respect what she says. She has lost more in her life than you can imagine. She is allowed to make the choice. We will find the puppy a home together. We will not force her hand.”

I said, “Yes, Mom.”

She said, “Okay. Let’s call Mr. Hartwell-Knutsen and tell him we are coming.”

I made four trips to Mr. Hartwell-Knutsen’s farm in Spooner between January 20th and February 14th, 2024.

My mother drove me each time.

The puppy I picked was a small brindle male with a black mask and a white blaze down the middle of his face. He was the second smallest of the litter — not the runt, but close. He had pale amber eyes that did not stop watching me from the first time I walked into the whelping pen.

I named him in my head “Chris” before I had even told my mother I was committing to him.

I knew Chris was going to be a Christmas dog.

I knew that before I knew what I was going to name him officially.

Mr. Hartwell-Knutsen and his wife Mrs. Henrietta Hartwell-Knutsen — 61, retired elementary school teacher — interviewed me extensively about my grandmother. They wanted to know about her medical history. Her physical capacity. Her social support system. They wanted to know who would be the backup caregiver if my grandmother had a stroke or a heart attack or could no longer manage the puppy.

My mother committed in writing to being the lifetime backup caregiver for the dog. She signed an agreement that if my grandmother became unable to care for him, the dog would come live with us in Madison for the rest of his life. She was clear with the Hartwell-Knutsens that she had room for him.

The Hartwell-Knutsens approved the placement on February 14th, 2024.

The fee was $850.

I paid $500 of it from my babysitting savings. My mother paid the other $350 as a contribution to my grandmother’s birthday gift.

We picked the puppy up on the afternoon of Friday, February 16th, 2024 — the day before my grandmother’s birthday. We drove him back to Madison with us. He slept on my lap in the front seat for the entire two-hour drive home. My mother and I named him “Christopher” on the drive home — official name. We agreed we would let my grandmother choose his everyday name.

We had no idea what she was going to do.

We drove up to my grandmother’s house in Hayward on the morning of Saturday, February 17th, 2024 — her 86th birthday.

It was a clear cold winter morning in northwest Wisconsin. There was about eight inches of snow on the ground. The temperature was 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun was sharp and white off the snow.

We arrived at her house at 10:42 a.m.

I had the puppy in a small wicker basket lined with a soft red plaid flannel blanket. I had a small red ribbon tied to the handle.

My mother had been crying off and on for the entire drive up.

My father had stayed in Madison with my brother. He had said, very honestly, “Brielle. This is between you and your grandmother. I am going to stay home and pray it works.”

I knocked on my grandmother’s front door.

My grandmother opened the door in her dark green wool dress and her amber necklace.

She smiled when she saw us.

Then she looked down at the wicker basket in my hands.

Her face froze.

I want to tell you exactly what happened in the next eleven minutes, because the eleven minutes contains everything I will remember about my grandmother for the rest of my life.

My grandmother said, very quietly, “Brielle. What is that.”

I said, “Babcia. Happy birthday.”

I held up the basket.

The puppy was asleep. He was small. He was 10 weeks old. He weighed approximately seven pounds. His brindle fur and his white blaze were visible against the red plaid blanket.

My grandmother did not take the basket.

She stepped back from the door.

She walked into her kitchen.

She sat down at her kitchen table.

My mother and I followed her in.

I set the basket on the kitchen counter.

My grandmother put her hands flat on the kitchen table.

She did not look at the basket.

She did not look at me.

She said, in Polish, in a voice that was steady but not warm, “Brielle. You take the puppy back.”

I started crying.

I said, “Babcia. Please. Please look at him.”

She said, “No. I will not look. If I look, I will love. If I love, I will lose. I have lost enough. I have buried Henrik. I have buried Tilly. I have buried my brother Lazlo in Krakow in 2001. I have buried my mother in 1989. I have buried my son Jasper in 1988. Brielle — I have buried enough. I am 86 years old. I cannot bury anything else. Take him back. He is small. He is a baby. He will outlive me. I will not be here when he goes to a new home. I cannot do this. I am not angry with you. I love you. But I cannot.”

She was crying.

My mother was crying.

I was crying.

My mother walked over to me. She put her hand on my back. She said, very quietly, in English, “Brielle. We respect what she said. We will take him home. We will find him a home in Madison. It is okay.”

I picked up the basket.

I walked toward the door.

I had my hand on the doorknob.

Then the puppy woke up.

He stood up in the basket. He looked around. He saw my grandmother sitting at the kitchen table. His pale amber eyes locked on her face.

He let out a tiny high-pitched whimper.

It was the smallest possible sound a puppy can make.

My grandmother looked up.

She looked at him.

She had not looked at him before.

She looked.

Her face did something I had never seen.

She looked at me.

She looked at my mother.

She looked back at the puppy.

She said, “Eleanor. Put him on the floor for one moment. I want to look at him. That is all. One moment.”

My mother nodded at me.

I set the basket on the kitchen floor.

I lifted the puppy out of the basket.

I set him on the linoleum.

He stood there. He was seven pounds. His tail was tucked against his belly. He was scared. He looked around the unfamiliar kitchen. He looked at my mother. He looked at me. He looked at my grandmother.

He walked across the kitchen floor toward her.

He walked slowly. His small paws clicked against the linoleum. He walked the eight feet between the basket and my grandmother’s chair.

He sat down at her feet.

He looked up at her.

He thumped his tail once.

My grandmother sat in her kitchen chair for almost two minutes without speaking.

She watched the puppy.

The puppy watched her.

He thumped his tail two more times.

My grandmother said, very quietly, “Eleanor. Brielle. I want to take him into the living room. I want to see something.”

We followed her.

She did not pick him up.

He walked behind her.

He followed her across the kitchen and into the living room — eight tiny brindle steps. His tail was no longer tucked.

My grandmother stopped in the living room.

She looked at the wingback chair next to the Christmas tree.

The Christmas tree was still up. My grandmother kept it up until the first week of March — a Polish tradition she had kept since she was a child. The lights were on. The Polish straw stars were still there. The felt angel from 1985 was still there.

The reindeer pajamas were still folded in the seat of the wingback chair.

It was February 17th.

She had not put them away after Christmas Eve.

She had been leaving them out for eight weeks past Christmas. For the first time in eight years, she had not put them back in the cedar chest yet. I do not know why.

She looked at the pajamas.

She looked at the puppy at her feet.

She walked over to the chair.

She knelt down — slowly — and she picked up the pajamas.

She unfolded them.

She held them open.

She looked at the puppy.

She said, in a voice I had never heard her use before, “Christopher. Come here, little one. Come here.”

The puppy walked across the rug toward her.

She lifted him up.

He weighed seven pounds. She could lift him easily.

She held him in her arms.

She looked at the pajamas in her hands.

She looked at the puppy.

She slipped his small front legs through the sleeves of the reindeer pajamas.

She buttoned the snaps down the front.

The pajamas fit him.

They fit him almost perfectly.

She held him out at arm’s length.

She looked at him.

She looked at me.

She looked at my mother.

Then she laughed.

It was the first time I had heard my grandmother laugh in eight years.

It was a small laugh. It was a quiet laugh. It was a laugh that had been waiting in her body for a long time.

Then it became a bigger laugh.

She laughed for almost thirty seconds.

She laughed so hard she sat down in the wingback chair with the puppy in her lap.

The puppy in his reindeer pajamas climbed up her chest and licked her chin.

She laughed harder.

She said, in Polish, “O Boże. O Boże, Brielle. Spójrz na niego. Spójrz na niego.”

It means: “Oh God. Oh God, Brielle. Look at him. Look at him.”

She held him in the wingback chair where her husband used to sit.

She laughed and cried at the same time for almost five minutes.

My mother and I sat down on the rug at her feet.

We cried with her.

The puppy in his reindeer pajamas curled up in her lap.

He fell asleep.

My grandmother named him Christmas.

Not Christopher.

Not Chris.

Christmas.

She told me, on the phone, two days after I went back to Madison: “Brielle. The pajamas have been waiting for Christmas for eight years. He is Christmas. That is his name. He has come home.”

I want to write down a few things before I finish.

The first thing. Christmas is now 22 months old. He weighs 53 pounds. He has grown into the big brindle Pit Bull I had hoped he would become — sturdy, calm, gentle, completely devoted to my grandmother. He sleeps on the foot of her bed every single night. He eats his breakfast with her at the kitchen table every morning. He rides shotgun in her old Subaru Forester to the post office and the grocery store and the hardware store. He has not been outside in the backyard alone since the day he came home. My grandmother walks him on a leash in the backyard. The pine tree where Tilly is buried is fenced off with its own small wrought-iron fence that my uncle Lazlo flew up from Phoenix to install in May of 2024. The fence has a small brass plaque that says: “Tilly Whitcombe — October 2016 — December 2016 — We knit her a coat in three days. — Eulalia & Henrik.”

Christmas walks past Tilly’s grave every morning on his way to do his business in the corner of the yard.

He never lifts his leg there.

He has never done so.

He pees in the other corner.

My grandmother says he was taught this in three days.

I believe her.

The second thing. My grandfather Henrik’s wingback chair has become Christmas’s chair. He sleeps in it during the day. He naps in it after lunch. He waits in it for my grandmother when she goes to the bathroom. The reindeer pajamas no longer fit him — he outgrew them by six months. My grandmother has folded the pajamas and placed them in the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, next to the small wooden box that holds my grandfather’s funeral programme and a lock of Tilly’s brindle-and-white fur. She told me, on the phone, that the pajamas are no longer needed on the chair. The waiting is over. Christmas is here.

The third thing. My grandmother has, since February of 2024, stopped asking my mother and my aunt to leave her alone in Hayward. She has — for the first time since 2016 — started talking about possibly moving closer to Madison if her health declines. She has asked my mother to start researching senior-friendly apartments in Madison that allow large dogs. She has said she will not move yet, but that she wants to know she has options. This is the largest change in her position in eight years. My mother has cried about it twice on the phone with my aunt.

The fourth thing. Mr. Tomas Hartwell-Knutsen, the breeder, has stayed in touch with us. He drove down to Hayward for my grandmother’s 87th birthday on February 17th, 2025. He brought her a small handmade leather collar that he had ordered specifically for Christmas from a leatherworker in Bemidji, Minnesota. **The collar has a brass tag engraved with the words: “CHRISTMAS WHITCOMBE — THE PAJAMAS FIT. — Hartwell-Knutsen Kennels.” My grandmother cried when she put it on Christmas. She still cries when she looks at the tag.

The fifth thing. The small framed photograph on my grandmother’s mantelpiece — the one I took with my mother’s iPhone on February 17th, 2024, at 3:47 p.m. — shows my grandmother sitting in the wingback chair with Christmas in his too-big reindeer pajamas curled in her lap, and my grandmother is mid-laugh. Her head is thrown back. Her amber necklace is catching the light from the Christmas tree. Her face is so unguarded that I almost did not recognize her when I first saw the photograph on my mother’s phone.

I have a copy of that photograph framed in my bedroom in Madison.

The photograph is the most important object I have ever owned.

I want to end with one more thing.

I came back to my grandmother’s house for Christmas Eve 2024 — exactly one year after the kitchen-table conversation that changed everything.

Christmas was 10 months old by then. He had grown into a 38-pound adolescent Pit Bull. He met us at the front door with a wagging tail and a small jingle bell on his collar. He had been waiting for us all day according to my grandmother.

I walked into the living room.

The Christmas tree was up. The Polish straw stars from Krakow were on it. The glass icicles from 1983 were on it. The felt angel from 1985 was on it.

The wingback chair was next to the tree.

There were no reindeer pajamas on the seat.

There was Christmas.

He was curled up in the wingback chair. He was wearing a small Christmas Eve sweater that my grandmother had knitted him over the previous six weeks — dark green wool with small embroidered reindeer in red harness across the chest. It was a scaled-up reproduction of the original pajamas. My grandmother had knitted it from scratch at her kitchen table because the original pajamas no longer fit. She had used the same pattern. The same colors. The same reindeer placement.

She had been knitting it since November.

She had not told us.

She wanted it to be a surprise.

Christmas was wearing it in the wingback chair under the Christmas tree on the evening of December 24th, 2024, when I walked into my grandmother’s living room.

He thumped his tail.

He looked at me.

He yawned.

My grandmother walked into the living room behind me.

She was wearing her dark green wool dress and her amber necklace.

She looked at Christmas in the chair.

She looked at me.

She smiled.

She said, in English, quietly: “Brielle. He fits. He fits perfectly.”

I cried for a long time on her living room rug.

She sat down in the chair next to Christmas.

She put her arm around him.

Christmas laid his head on her thigh.

He fell asleep.

The Christmas tree lights twinkled in the living room of a small ranch house on the edge of Hayward, Wisconsin, on the evening of December 24th, 2024 — eight years and three days after a 7-month-old chihuahua mix named Tilly had been killed by a coyote in the backyard.

The waiting was over.

The reindeer pajamas had waited eight Christmas Eves for a dog who could wear them.

They had found him.

His name was Christmas.

And he is asleep on my grandmother’s lap, in her husband’s chair, under the same tree where the pajamas had waited for him every December 24th for eight years.

If you have a grandmother in your life, please ask her about the small objects she keeps in her living room. The small fabric thing on the chair next to the Christmas tree might not be decor. It might be a thing she has been waiting to use for years. It might be a small thing she has been laying out every year as a small private act of waiting. It might be a thing she needs you to notice.

If you have lost a small creature you loved, please know that your waiting is not pathological. Your waiting is love. Your waiting is the proof of love. Your waiting is not a thing that needs to be cured. It is a thing that might one day be answered — by a different creature, in a different size, at a different time of year — and you will know him when he climbs into the chair and the small Christmas sweater fits.

The pajamas have waited for someone.

So have you.

If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Tilly and Christmas and Babcia I haven’t told yet.