Something terrible has happened.
That is her first thought, scaling the stairs on her way back to the apartment. She has groceries balanced on her hip (mostly brown-colored bottles, if we’re being honest), a hangover banging in her skull, and the tail end of a cold stopping up her sinuses – and yet, even through this haze of careful balancing, pain and snot, she can smell catastrophe. It smells like a fire in a meth trailer.
Nevermind how she knows what that smells like.
She takes the remaining stairs two at a time, gripping the grocery bags with both arms and listing precariously back and forth as she bolts. The door is unlocked, by some miracle; the knob gives beneath her elbow and she half steps, half falls into the apartment sideways. Inside, the smell is even worse, and a thin haze of saccharine smoke blurs the scene within. For a moment, she just stands there with her mouth hanging slightly open. There is so much color, and sound, and smell – way more than usual, and “usual” is a lot, already.
Tovah blinks against the blinding, seizure-inducing assault of tiny lights.
She’s about to ask what the ever-living-#### is going on, when Kane greets her. She’d barely noticed him, at first, but now he’s the only thing she can focus on; her eyes go wide with confusion and shock. He literally has bells on. And…and that.
It’s like he’s raided the closet of an elf somewhere. Tovah doesn’t immediately know whether to laugh or be afraid.
”It’s…wow,” she offers, nodding and blinking, and slowly lowering the groceries to the floor (there wasn’t a spare inch of counterspace, anyway). Once her hands are free, he’s grabbed one and is practically dragging her into the holiday maelstrom, his green eyes positively glittering with excitement. It’s all very overwhelming, but Tovah doesn’t think she’s ever seen Kane so happy, and with his fingers threaded through hers, she finds herself unexpectedly willing to humor him as he leads her through his triumphant mess. But then he wants her to explain and that is…that is just…
She does laugh, then.
”Oh, Kane. Honey.” A stray chuckle before she can even continue. ”I am so Jewish.” At his blank look, she adds, ”There are a lot of Earth religions, and I didn’t grow up doing…this. But I’ll try!” She waves away his dashed hopes with a hand, shaking her head at the absurdity of this situation. ”I’ll do my best.”
The tree is…she’s not even going to touch the tree. Kane’s explanation sounds as good to her as any she could come up with on her own, without knowing a thing about Christian expansion, old pagan traditions, symbolism. But the commercial stuff she can do, and she points an accusatory finger at the Santa plushie as he presents it to her. ”I think he’s like Robin Hood but for Jesus? They say he watches kids all year long. To judge them.” She draws out the last words to emphasize how crazy this is, before turning to poke through the nearest pile for recognizable touchstones. ”There’s also this bizarre elf thing that parents do now where they stick a doll around the house and tell their…oh, ha, um…” her fingers close around something and immediately release it, as if it were hot. But it’s her cheeks that are hot, not her hands. ”That is something that can stay in a box somewhere.”
He’s very curious; she can’t just ignore his questioning look. ”It’s uh…it’s called “mistletoe.” They hang it around the house and, uh. Kiss under it, I guess if someone gets caught standing there? So we should probably just…yeah.” She tucks it back underneath the pile, feeling uncharacteristically embarrassed.