Christmases with them were like a dream within which I could suspend myself, where time and reality would pause, and the air itself moved in a kinder, gentler way. They had annual routines that fascinated me: searching for and cutting down the perfect pine tree at their favorite local nursery; decorating it in a particular order (lights, then tinsel, then homemade ornaments that held significance, then the more elegant but less meaningful icicles and colored balls); shopping for sensible gifts with what seemed like endless money; Geannie taking a whole afternoon to make six kinds of cookies and two types of brownies. Each year when I first arrived she would invite me in, flushed and smiling, and I’d find the kitchen floured and happily shimmering, the air full of hot sugar and cinnamon. Elvis crooned in the background, keeping at bay the cold, fading December outside the window. The scene almost makes me cringe now, the sentimental perfection of it.

Perhaps the most fantastical thing was the snow village. Every December, Jim would drag out five long wooden pallets and set the miniature, lit-from-within ceramic buildings up in front of the Christmas tree. He arranged them in a way that mimicked hills and valleys, or perhaps suggested different neighborhoods, and covered them with rolls of wispy white batting. First he laid the small, figure-eight train track, making sure the train ran smoothly before he did anything else, in true methodical Jim form, and then began building the town around it.

The buildings were nothing like anything I had ever seen, and the town they formed was out of a Hollywood fever dream of no particular century or style, a hodgepodge of architecture and economic status, from a small fishing shack to a set of city row houses to a grand mansion or courthouse (I could never tell which), to a gothic stone castle that always sat near the back, as if it were bashful about its foreboding aura. Each small building would be placed on the fake snow in a similar pattern to the year before, though something always had to shift to make room for a new addition; the final Christmas I spent with them, the newest piece had been an ice pond. A mechanized magnet moved a small skater across the clear acrylic sheet of ice in figure eights, but it never traveled the same path twice. I found it utterly mesmerizing.

Somehow Jim would always make the buildings fit together in a pleasing way, and when he finished he would turn all the lights off in the living room and kitchen except for the Christmas tree, and call us in—Geannie, me, Krystal, Hernan, any of their other relatives who were in town, and the summer part-timers at the market were invited, too—and without much flourish but with much pride he would flip a switch, and they’d all light up, all at once, and the skater went round the pond, and the train went round its track, and the Scheele living room was turned into a place of surreal wonder and comfort, the glowing ideal of Christmas.