Mother had even incorporated our two dogs into the decorating scheme. The original plan was to put large red velvet bows on both dogs’ collars and to have them sleep on matching red velvet cushions on the hearth. I felt sorry for Horace, who’d been drafted to help with this part of the decorating. Tinkerbell, Rob’s enormous Irish Wolfhound, gave him no trouble—in fact, she actually seemed to like the red bow—but Horace had ended up making a trip to the ER after trying to decorate Spike, our nine-pound furball, whose personality resembled a cross between a saber-toothed tiger and a wolverine. By the time Horace got back, Spike had established ownership rights to the wolfhound-sized cushion. The cushion intended for his use was barely large enough to fit Tinkerbell’s enormous shaggy head, but she curled up on it anyway. Fortunately Mother found the resulting tableau cute, since any attempts to rearrange it would probably have resulted in more trips to the ER.

Mother had gone particularly overboard in the dining room, where she’d adopted an angel theme. Legions of angels marched up and down the dining room table, holding trumpets or songbooks or candles. More angels lolled on the sideboard and peeked out from behind the plates and pitchers in the built-in china cabinet. Angels rioted along the evergreen garlands that festooned all four walls, climbed and dangled from the chandelier. There wasn’t actually a lot of room left for serving food or seating people, which hadn’t been much of a problem so far—we’d just taken to eating a lot more often at our oversized kitchen table—but was definitely going to cause some tension when Michael’s mother arrived to carry out her plan of using our house to prepare and serve her entry in the two dueling Christmas Day meals we were expected to attend. Mother would be serving her own meal over at the cottage, as she’d taken to calling the rambling farmhouse she and Dad had bought to stay in during their increasingly frequent and lengthy visits to Caerphilly. Was I wrong in suspecting that the decor in her dining room would be equally over the top but far less impractical in which to serve a meal?

Looking around, I tried to imagine what Mother could possibly think was missing.

“Didn’t some famous interior designer say when you finished decorating you should take a look and remove at least one thing?” I asked.

“It was Coco Chanel,” Mother said. “And she was talking about a woman getting dressed—not interior decorating, and certainly not decorating for Christmas, where a certain feeling of luxurious excess is quite appropriate.”

She was shuffling through one of the Christmas card baskets, making sure that the top cards were all elegant ones that matched the red, gold, and green color scheme, and banishing any that did not meet her aesthetic standards to the bottom of the basket.