The tree cleaned up good, with a fresh set of neutral white LED twinkle icicle lights and a few boxes of classy vintage-inspired glass balls in tastefully complimentary shades of chocolate brown and robin’s egg blue. A bowl of fancy potpourri might even cover up its natural stench. This is probably the most valuable thing I learned from my life in Toronto, from Dave, from the gaggle of tony bitches who pretended I was one of them: how to take something sad and wretched and ugly and make it smile and shine enough to pass for almost pretty.

“Most boring tree I ever saw,” Mama grunts every time she walks by it.

“You said I could buy new decorations.”

“I know, but I didn’t know you’d be so friggin’ boring about it. Nanny’s bubble lights would have been fine. And you didn’t leave a branch for Dough Baby.”

Right. Dough Baby.

When I was seven, Peggy gave me a lump of bread dough so I’d shut up and leave her alone while she babysat me one day. I made a wildly deformed “gingerbread girl” that Peggy baked, and tried to shame me into eating. Because there were children starving in Africa who would give their left foot for a bite of that dough blob. I told her to send it to Africa, because I wasn’t eating it. But Peggy had a better idea. Paint it and give it to Mama as a Christmas present. So I did. It was ugly as sin. Weighed a ton. A coat of lacquer so thick it would be off-gassing for a decade. Every year, as I’d watch Mama wrestle it onto the thickest branch of the tree, I’d find myself wishing I’d just eaten the damn thing instead.

“You said you just wanted the tree to look good. Those colours are straight out of a magazine,” I say. “And you always hated Dough Baby.”

“Why would you say that?” Mama says.

“Because all you ever did was make fun of it and bitch about how it dragged all the branches down. It’s an old glob of nasty bread dough soaked in shellac. It’s no big deal.” I shrug.

“Maybe not to you it isn’t,” Mama says, not even almost cheerfully.

The Fortune Family Christmas Eve festivities that we are hosting this year are a lot less complicated because Uncle Gord’s off the wagon in a bad way, Aunt Audrey found Jesus, and neither of them is speaking to Peggy. Wacky uncle Cecil is hunkered down in his makeshift Armageddon camp behind the Pizza Hut with a new sleeping bag and a case of canned beans. And Uncle Ernie’s in the clink again for shoplifting the new can opener he was going to give Cecil for Christmas, to go with the sleeping bag and case of beans he stole for his birthday. Instead of a house full of our chaotic relations, and a big spread of food and booze, we’re down to a small family turkey dinner.