Her official job title was “Director of Festival Operations,” but everyone called her Miss Carolyn, and for good reason. With her eternally good-natured smile and cracked skin testifying to how long she’d been living here, everyone generally considered her the town matriarch. The silver-haired woman with narrowed brown eyes stood lower than five-foot-nothing, but her presence towered over Miller’s Point. Kate loved her almost as much as she feared her, which explained the slamming of her heart when she heard the worried accusation in Miss Carolyn’s voice.

“What are you doing up there?”

“This light is out!”

Kate stretched her fingers. She was so close, and if she could only just reach… She grabbed ahold of a tiny bulb and twisted it. Once, twice, three times. There. The light flickered on, joining the rest of its illuminated brethren on the thick, green cord. It was only one piece of a very, very large puzzle, but Kate felt that the little details made all the difference. Miss Carolyn, for her part, didn’t share Kate’s enthusiasm for tiny lightbulbs or women who put themselves in dangerous situations to fix them.

“You’ve got to be the most hardheaded girl in town! Get down here before you fall and break your neck! No, you know what? A fall might actually do you some good. Maybe it’d knock some sense into you!”

As she made her way down the ladder, Kate couldn’t help but survey the square surrounding her. She would never joke about something as important as Christmas, but she definitely wasn’t kidding about the grandeur of Miller’s Point. Every year, The Christmas Company—an event planning firm that was a subsidiary of Woodward Enterprises, the corporation that owned most of the ranching operations out here—transformed Miller’s Point from one of the countless flyover Texas towns into a Dickensian Christmas wonderland. The square received a makeover, with Hollywood-style facades and enough fake snow to make their humble streets look so much like Victorian London that even a time traveler couldn’t have told the difference.

From the day after Thanksgiving until New Year’s Eve, the town banded together to host the Miller’s Point Christmas Festival, where guests from all over the country flocked to join in the celebration. Everyone enjoyed the caroling and costumes, but the highlight of the festival—the real reason everyone went—was the immersive reenactment of A Christmas Carol. Every night, guests could follow Scrooge on his journey and watch him change from a bitter, hateful miser into a man with the spirit of the season coursing through his veins like an injection of sugarplum juice.