I glanced over at the concession stand. “Maybe some popcorn.”

“Okay. Wait, it’s not popcorn, it’s kettle corn.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll like it,” he said. “It has sugar.”

“How do you know I like sugar?”

“You eat it on your salad,” he said.

We got a small box of kettle corn and climbed the stairs to the theater’s entrance. The theater was in the round, and, not surprisingly, we had good seats, though in a theater that small I’m not sure there were any bad ones.

After we had sat down I ate some kettle corn and said, “Picking up our tickets at Will Call reminded me of something dumb I did.”

“Tell me.”

“When I first started at ICE, Mark, he’s the owner, sent me over to Modern Display to pick up some plastic display holders for a convention we were doing. He said to get them from Will Call. When I got there I went up to the sales counter and asked for Mr. Call. There were two men there, and they both looked at me with funny expressions. One asked the other, ‘Do you know a Call here?’ He said, ‘No.’ Then he said to me, ‘I’m sorry, there’s no Mr. Call here. Do you know his first name?’ I said, ‘I think it’s William or Will. My boss just said to pick it up from Will Call.’ They laughed for about five minutes before someone told me why.”

Nicholas laughed. “I did that exact same thing once.”

“Really?”

“No, I’m not that dumb.”

I threw a piece of kettle corn at him.

“So here’s some trivia for you,” he said. “Did you know that the original name that Dickens gave his book was much longer? Its real title is A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. A carol is a song or a hymn, so the abbreviated title doesn’t really make sense.”

“I’ve never thought of that,” I said.

“It’s a much more influential book than most people realize. In a way, Dickens invented Christmas.”

“I’m pretty sure Christmas existed before Dickens was born.”

“True, but before A Christmas Carol, Easter was the biggest Christian celebration. December twenty-fifth was no more consequential than Memorial Day. In fact, the colony of Massachusetts had a law on the books prohibiting the celebration of the holiday. Christmas was considered a pagan celebration, and observing Christmas might cost you a night in the stocks.”

“Why is that?”