His eyes widened as he held up his phone, where the screen clearly reflected the image of an idyllic Main-Street-at-Christmas tableau straight out of a movie.

Because, okay, I’ll admit, it was straight out of a movie, as opposed to representing my actual hometown. And since it appeared on the town’s official website, this was a serious breach of protocol. Not that anyone in charge would care.

And, okay, fine. As a former city hall intern who still had the passwords, I was responsible for putting that photo there—along with several others that ran the spectrum from kinda misleading to blatant bullshit—but in my defense I never thought anyone would do what Arthur and his aunt did: actually believe it enough to fly all the way from Connecticut to Oklahoma in the hopes of experiencing a Christmas the likes of which, in reality, were an illusion manufactured by a relentless system of capitalism devised to churn nostalgia into profits and create expectations impossible to fulfill. Besides, there were Yelp reviews they could’ve consulted, and they weren’t pretty.

I wasn’t going to point out any of that to him. I bit my lower lip instead.

“Well?” he asked. “What have you to say?”

Nothing polite.

“Can you get a refund?”

“No. We cannot.”

I sighed, the condensation around my breath visible in the cold, and glanced around, more to avoid his attempted death stare than to orient myself.

As if I could ever not know exactly where I was at all times in the place where I grew up. It wasn’t that big, either in population or geography.

And where we were at the moment, the back courtyard of the Hoyden Inn, Grandma Jo’s pride and joy, was the one location I knew better than anywhere else. I’d spent countless hours here growing up, being babysat while Dad and Mom worked, and later as an unofficial assistant to Grandma Jo, which was what I was doing when Arthur cornered me about ten minutes ago to let me have it about the result of my truly unintentional misdeeds.

Now, you’re probably wondering how posting some fake photos on a tiny Oklahoma town’s website could lead to this particular egregious holiday snafu. Which would be fair. There’s one piece of information that will help shed some light on the situation:

My hometown’s name was Christmas.

That’s right—Christmas, Oklahoma.

More on the origins of that in a bit, but you could see how it might evoke a certain expectation among visitors whose excitement at coming here invariably faded once they saw the real thing. Usually that had meant folks got back in their cars and kept driving with little more than slight annoyance and kitschy pics.