* * *
Wassail, Wassail!
Jeffrey C. Wells
* * *
Hearth's Warming is different in the country.
Heck, everything's different in the country. I'm different in the country. There are still times when I look in the mirror and expect to see the whip-thin braces-wearing vitamin-popping valedictorian geekfilly from Manehattan Prep, instead of...
...Well, instead of myself, a rounding young teacher in the flower of life, comfortably far from middle age and beginning the long, slow settle into adulthood accompanied by altogether too many books. I am round where I used to be angular. My vitamins come from food, these days, and this is, of course, ideal. The symphony has been replaced by jug bands and barn dances. A night at the ballet means school plays at the town auditorium. Things happen at a different pace here in Ponyville, on a different schedule.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at Hearth's Warming Tide.
Hearth's Warming back in Manehattan was spectacular, which is to say, a holiday of spectacle. Increasingly elaborate holiday windows at Neighcy's! Upscale ice skating at Rockefeller Canter! Miles and miles of lights covering the trees of Victoria Park! From Nightmare Night on forward Manehattanites are bombarded with the glitz and glamour of a holiday gone mad, and it gets to a point that you want to stuff cotton in your ears and hide your head under a pillow to drown out the caroling. The frenzy reaches its peak on Hearth's Warming Eve, we are permitted twenty-four hours of holiday afterglow in the form of Hearth's Warming Day, and then... nothing. The decorations come down. Trees are put to the curb, often the very next day. The once-ubiquitous carols fall silent in an instant. The cold, busy, bustling city gets back to work.
On my first Hearth's Warming as an adult in Ponyville, I barely recognized the holiday. Yes, the decorations go up, but never before Harvest; usually only a few days in advance. The traditional holiday glaciere dioramas are small and unassuming, often hoof-carved of wood (with a little tinfoil added for Princess Platinum's crown). And although there are some exceptions in richer families (including the Rich family), gifts tend toward the consumable and useful and are appreciated no less by the fillies and foals on the receiving end.
What a small town Hearth's Warming lacks in lead-up, it more than makes up for in execution. Gone is the notion that the most important festival of the year should be a one-day event. In Ponyville, we are treated to a long, warm, rolling surge of sustained partying lasting for twelve full days, from Hearth's Warming all the way through the Feast of the Emergence in early January. The cider flows like water, I put on about five pounds (most of it in delicious, delicious cookies), and for two days shy of a fortnight we feast and dance and make merry in an exhausting celebration of life ongoing in the darkest days of the year.
Stuffed, sauced and thoroughly happy, we tumble into Twelfth Night. The traditional Princess's Cake is served and carefully consumed by the whole town—carefully, because before baking, Mrs. Cake places into the batter a single, hard bean. Whomever is lucky enough to receive the slice with the bean is declared Princess of the Feast; until midnight, that pony's word is law, and we are jovially entreated to follow whatever wild commandments fall from his or her lips. (The town is still laughing about little Sweetie Belle's tyrannical reign.) It is a weird, foreign, thoroughly magical time of the year.
I'm going to miss it.
"I'm just sayin'," says the little yellow filly in front of my desk. "It ain't right changing the words to the song like that."
I bite back a sardonic retort and smile at her with my best sweet, kind, small-town schoolmarm smile. It is not a smile that ever comes naturally to me. I am a terrible pony.
This is what I want to say:
"Apple Bloom, I am by training a secondary school math and science instructor. I used to teach at Bright Lights Vocational in Manehattan, where post-cutie mark fillies and colts would enter my classroom, absorb knowledge from my areas of specific expertise, and then leave. I am not a music teacher. I never wanted to be a music teacher. The only reason I am thrust into the role of teaching you music is that I flew screaming from the city in the wake of the world's messiest breakup—and incidentally, it is all I can do not to snarl at you whenever you pester me about my nonexistent love life, thank you very much—and I may or may not have overstated my qualifications to the South Heartland Regional School Board in my desperation to get a job and find a new life, which meant slipping into the role of not your town's science teacher, but your town's teacher, full stop, responsible for all facets of your education, and since I am rather less good at Reading and 'Riting than I am at 'Rithmetic, there are going to be areas where your schooling is going to be a little lackluster, and one of those areas is music, okay?"
This is what I do say:
"Well, the words to songs sometimes change over time, don't they? Ponies these days don't even know what words like 'Yuletide' and 'Wassail' even mean. Sometimes it makes sense to switch them up to their more modern equivalents, right?"
"Yeah, but," Apple Bloom persists, tapping impatiently at the district-approved songbook on my desk with one hoof. She screws up her face. "'Here we come a' caroling, among the leaves so green'? It ain't even the same thing! Wassailing and caroling, I mean!"
Again, this is what I want to say: "Apple Bloom, it is now the end of the school day on Hearth's Warming Eve. All the other colts and fillies are going home to start in on their visions of sugar plums. I am personally looking forward to the commencement of the one time of year when I can drop this 'responsible adult' act and get drunk as a skunk on hard eggnog for the next twelve days, and I am really not in the mood to be debating semantics with a filly many years my junior who once literally poisoned me, so can you please run along home to the farm now? Please?"
This is what I do say: "That's... very interesting! What's the difference?"
Apple Bloom frowns at me suspiciously. "Don't y'all know what 'wassail' means, either?"
Here we go again. I am once more expected to know everything for everyone, a hole I admittedly dug for myself. I restrain myself from mentioning that—as I am the only one here—"y'all" is perhaps not the best address, and delve back into my education. "It's Old Equuish, right?" I say, trying desperately to maintain my thin shell of authority. "It comes from 'Waes hael!' or 'Be in good health!' Ponies used to sing it to their neighbors to wish them a happy, healthy year."
Apple Bloom fidgets. "Maybe that's what it turned into. But when it all started out, wassailing wasn't for ponies. It was for trees." The filly inclines her head at me. "Ain't you ever been wassailing before?"
"I... guess not? If it's really not the same thing as caroling, that is."
Apple Bloom frowns, ponderous thoughts bumping around in her head like logs being driven downriver. "Well'p," she says, eventually. "We just gotta fix that."
"'Fix' that?"
"Yup," she says. "Come Twelfth Night, you gotta come wassailin' with us."
"After the town festival?"
"Instead of the town festival. Just like every year."
I draw breath to speak, but the filly cuts me off. "Now, I know what you're gonna say. I'm a little sore about not goin' to Twelfth Night myself, 'specially since the other Crusaders always have fun there, and 'specially since it's gonna be in Twilight's brand new castle this year 'stead of the pavilion for the first time, but it can't be helped. It's an earth pony thing. It's a family thing."
That wasn't what I was going to say. What I was going to say was, "Really? Your family doesn't join in on Twelfth Night?" It seems hard to believe, but as I look back, while the fruits of their labors—the huge oaken casks of Apple Family Reserve—are on full display, had I ever seen a member of the clan at the pavilion on that specific night? Perhaps I hadn't...
Apple Bloom reaches up and pats my shoulder. "I can see this is all a lot for you to take in, Miz Cheerilee," she says. "Why don't we walk and talk on my way back to the Acres? I know my big brother always likes to see you come out."
The topic of Big Mac is always a remarkably awkward one, ever since last spring's infamous "love poison" incident, and I am about to politely decline Apple Bloom's invitation when she looks up at me and fixes me with a smile that is as open, honest and hopeful as the season itself.
"Please?"
For Celestia's sake, she bats her eyelashes and everything. Eggnog will just have to wait.
"Sounds... great!"
"Okay!" she says, slinging her belt-wrapped parcel of books onto her back. "All right, the first thing you gotta understand about wassailing is the Old Mare of the Orchard. Every year, Granny picks out the most significant tree in the whole orchard, and that tree is the Old Mare..."
* * *
"So, are y'well and truly schooled by Bloom now, Miz Cheerilee?" says the wizened green mare.
"Kind of," I say, with a smile that manages to be both heartfelt and uneasy. "Country customs are always going to sit a little strange to me. I still don't quite understand the time in harvest season where you dress up in rabbit costumes and leap over jam jars, for instance."
"All part of the magic, dear." Granny Smith, the Apple Family's matriarch, ladles me a mug of hot cocoa and tops it with a spoon of fresh-whipped cream from a cold steel bowl. I sip, and it is predictably delicious. We retire together to the parlor and settle into a pair of antique upholstered chairs, holding the hot mugs close and taking in their warmth from both inside and out. "Mark my words, twenty years from now all of this'll seem like second nature to y'all."
Perhaps in gratitude for the cocoa, I again elect not to mention that there is only one of me here. I take another sip. "I'm actually not thinking I'm going to be here for twenty years."
The old mare raises an eyebrow at me. "Whaaa'?" she says. "You ain't thinking of leavin' us?"
I sigh. This isn't a topic I can bring up with the children without causing fits. But, with just us adults, and Apple Bloom safely out of earshot, I can't see the harm in it. "I can't help it, Granny," I say, shrugging my shoulders and leaning back against the stiff velour padding of my chair. "I'm just a city filly, I guess. You know, lights and art and culture. I came to the country out of desperation, not love."
"But you used to live here!" Granny protests. "I remember you!"
"You remember me because I lived in Ponyville for about a year when I was a filly. We moved around a lot with my dad's work, which meant I was here just long enough to experience a legendary party or two before moving back to another city. Never long enough to make it feel like home."
"But you came back now, didn't you?"
"All it means is that I didn't pick this town at random when I went running. It's what I needed at the time, but I don't think it's me." A little smile. Almost apologetic. Why am I feeling sheepish? Possibly because Granny Smith isn't just a member of the founding family, she's literally one of the founders? She built this town, after all. Talking down about Ponyville to her is a bit like coming into someone's home and criticizing their hoof-made furniture or something.
"Once a Ponyvillian, always a Ponyvillian," Granny insists. "It's always in your blood."
"Yes, but," I say. "This town tries to make me into something I'm not. In the city, I'm just an angry, angsty, short-tempered science teacher, but in Ponyville, I'm the Young Schoolmistress, the sweet, kind, caring, polymath pillar of the community. I can't keep up this act."
"You're sellin' yourself short, Miz Cheerilee. Why, you're plenty good at math!"
I blink. "No, that's not—the word 'polymath' doesn't—"
"Fiddlefaddle," she says, levering herself off her chair and tottering over to me. "Ain't the important part, anyway. Take a look at them smiling flowers there on your rump." Granny gestures at my haunch with her cane.
This conversation has taken a... weird turn, but I gamely inspect my three-flower cutie mark all the same. "Yes?" I say; it feels distressingly as though I am addressing the little stylized faces on the floret disks.
"Them flowers," says Granny, gesturing with her cane. "Would you call them flowers 'angry, angsty, and short-tempered'?"
No. Of course they aren't. They're sunny, happy, carefree little gals. Sometimes I hate them so. My response to Granny is little more than a sigh, and at that, she grins at me like the cat who ate the canary.
"You see?" she says, working her way back to her chair with the same aching slowness. "This town ain't making you into something y'ain't. You're just a mite confused about who y'are. Still a little stunted. Don't know quite which way to grow. Gotta expect that of flowers you transplant over and over again."
"Excuse me?"
"You just said yourself you moved around a whole bunch as a filly. Never long enough to put down roots, I expect? Just as soon as you started to get settled in a new school, make some new friends, your pa up an' followed his job elsewhere? And you kept promising you'd write letters but after a while the list of letters got longer and longer?"
"Something like that," I say, shifting uncomfortably. Something exactly like that, I do not say.
"Mm hm. City's all concrete, ain't it? Not much luck putting down roots there. Sure, some scrappy folk thrive in the sidewalk cracks, happy as daisies, but most city ponies are just as rootless as you. You want to know what I think?"
"What's that?"
"I think you think you belong there because you're surrounded by herds of ponies just as confused as you are, and you think that means 'home.'"
I panic for a moment. A brief, bright flash. Sweet Celestia, the old biddy's right! I think, before I anchor myself in decisions already made. "Well, it's kind of a done thing," I say.
Granny narrows her eyes. "What's this, now?"
I haven't been looking forward to this interaction, but I suppose it's time to get started. I fish around in my flower-clasp saddlebags for a moment and come up with an envelope of creamy, heavy paper. I have started referring to it in my mind as "the Envelope," with a capital "E." I deliver it to Granny Smith, who reads its contents soundlessly, her lips moving with the words.
"Canterlot Academy," I say. "They want me to teach for them! They say I've done an exemplary job with Ponyville's foals and they would be proud to have me on their faculty. They go on to say—"
"I got the letter right here!" barks Granny, waving it around in one hoof. "Y'cain't tell me you're gonna agree to this?"
"Well, I've always wanted to experience life in the big city again."
"Then go take the overnight express! Have a couple nights of carriage traffic, fancy-pantsy Pegasopolian coffee and girls doin' that high-kicking dance they do and come back!"
Granny Smith has an intriguing idea of what city life entails. "It's not as simple as that," I say. "I'm just trying to find a place where I feel like I belong."
"You belong here, Missy! I knew it from your first day on the job! The moment I saw you standing there up front of our little schoolhouse I knew you was the right one."
I bite my lip for a moment, but then go ahead with it. "With all due respect, Mrs. Smith—"
"'Granny Smith,' please! 'Mrs.' Smith was my dam!"
I smile, despite myself. "With all due respect, Granny Smith, the pony the children think I am belongs here. The pony I really am doesn't."
"And yet we jes' talked about how you ain't actually convinced of who you really are. You already write back to these city ponies?"
"I'm composing a letter to them right after the holiday."
The old mare sinks back into her chair, shaking her head. "You're gonna break a lot of little fillies' and colts' hearts, Miz Cheerilee."
"I've got the rest of the spring term to break it to them gently, and there'll be plenty of time for the School Board to find a replacement before the fall. I have to be happy myself, Granny. I can't just live for my students. It's not fair to either of us."
"Maybe so. But before you run off, make sure you really are doin' it to be happy and not just because you're itchin' for a change. If you ain't happy, the foals'll be unhappy, you'll be unhappy, and then you'll be living for nopony at all."
There is nothing to say in response to that.
"Come wassailing with us," says Granny, gently. "Give it one more go of being an honest-to-goodness earth pony afore runnin' off to the city and pretending to be a unicorn for the rest of your life."
I sip my cocoa.
"Okay," I say.
* * *
It is dark and I am cold and I have a headache.
Remember when I said it was really great to get pleasantly liquored up and party for twelve days? Little tip: getting pleasantly liquored up and partying for twelve days is the sort of thing that always seems better in retrospect than it does when you're on Day Eleven and have picked up a little bit of a head cold from all the face-to-face meeting on top of your unshakable hangover.
I am bundled up in a thick, fleecy saddle-cloth, and beneath that my own magenta coat is fluffed and shaggy against the cold. I trudge through snow beneath the dark and skeletal forms of apple trees in full dormancy, and I am coughing and sneezing and feeling like death. I look up and the word "catafalque" springs to mind. I do not dismiss it.
The pony next to me is not trudging. She is, in fact, pronking, leaping with all four hooves above the drifts over and over again, only to fall each time in a shower of snow that gets in my mane and face. This is Pinkie Pie, the town's permanent party organizer, another newcomer to this whole wassailing thing.
"It's my first Hearth's Warming as a full member of the Apple Family!" Pinkie had exclaimed, referring to some sort of genealogical road trip she had embarked upon with the Apples earlier this year. "I gotta holiday it up right! Country style!" And so she had, entrusting her beloved Twelfth Night party to the capable hooves of her friends and instructing them to not do anything she wouldn't do, thus putting no restrictions on them whatsoever. Pinkie carries toast on her back. Do not ask me why she is carrying toast. She is carrying toast for the same reason that the Apple Family paints their entire barn with pink polka-dots while singing the Alphabet Song (or whatever) during Zap Apple season. Either "tradition" or "magic" or "ridiculousness," depending on who you ask.
Further to my right is the family's eldest daughter Applejack, smiling beatifically and bearing her positively quivering little sister Apple Bloom upon her back. Applejack's expression is of a pony who passed through her own dark night of the soul a long time ago and now knows exactly who and where she wants to be. Her self-actualization is so complete that it has literally been weaponized and brought to bear against those who would threaten Equestria, along with the self-actualization of Pinkie Pie and all that whole inner circle of friends. I feel a brief stab of envy that ponies can exist that are that happy.
And we can't forget Mac, can we? A.J. and A.B.'s big brother, stallion of the family, off to my other side. Huge, warm, gentle, soft-spoken, unfailingly-polite just-my-age Mac. Heat radiates off him as he walks, steaming in the cold, and it makes me want to draw close to him for purely practical reasons. But, of course, there is that awkwardness thing. I don't want him to think that I think that he thinks things that I sometimes wish he would think without really thinking about it. (I hope that makes sense to you, because it doesn't to me.) Like I said, awkward. Suffice it to say I am carefully measuring the distance between us, trying not to get too close but, Celestia above, not too far, either. Mac carries on his back a cauldron of hot wassail, a strong and murky punch of hard cider and ale and fortified wine, mulled with a blistering blend of allspice and cinnamon and ginger. It is a testament to the strength of the brew that I can smell it even through my congestion.
On that topic, I give a little sneeze. Mac inclines his massive head in my direction, frowning in concern. "Y'sure y'all right there, Miz Cheerilee?"
"I'm fine," I say, fumbling in my saddlebags for a packet of tissues.
"All's we're saying's we could take you back," chimes in Applejack.
I force a smile again. "For the third time, Applejack, I do want to go through with this." Unsaid: it's my last Hearth's Warming in the country, after all. Also unsaid: I have to be here to have a go at being an honest-to-goodness earth pony, I guess? Also unsaid: I am miserable.
"Ain't long now!" Granny Smith declares, plowing ahead through the snow with sheer temerity. "We're in spittin' distance of the Old Mare of the Orchard!"
"I wish she weren't so far away!"
"Cain't be helped, young'un! Ain't my choice that the Old Mare of the Orchard is out in the west fields this year!"
"But it was," I want to say. "This isn't some ancestral tree; as one of the founders of this orchard, you're perforce older than every single tree here planted. And you're not picking the oldest tree and going back year after year; you're picking the most 'significant' tree, whatever that means, and what that boils down to is that you could help it if you wanted to, and since you don't, we're stuck trudging a mile through the bitter January cold, and to do what, exactly?"
I do not say any of this. The Cheerilee that Apple Bloom knows would never.
I am shaking all over by the time the six of us reach this year's Old Mare, a spreading, gnarled thing that grasps at the starlight above. It looks as lifeless as I feel. With dismaying levels of holiday cheer and gravitas, Mac sets down the cauldron of wassail and gently lifts a piece of toast from the stack on Pinkie Pie's back with his teeth, passing it to Apple Bloom. With equal fastidiousness, Apple Bloom dips the toast into the wicked punch and then clambers up on Applejack's back, skewering the toast on a single clawlike branch. The process is repeated, again and again.
"If she's not careful," I say, with a slightly forced chuckle, "she's going to get some of that in her mouth."
"Like she ain't gonna have a cup to herself in a few," says Applejack, grinning.
I cough spasmodically. "Well!" I say, the words coming out before I can think to stop them. "I'm surprised you're letting her drink that. It's interesting, I mean. Since it's practically making my eyes water, and I don't think it's just the mulling spices."
Apple Bloom looks down at me from her sister's back, with hurt eyes. "It's just a sip, Miz Cheerilee," she says.
"We all gotta drink a little down," Granny agrees, nodding. "Else the apples won't be any good next year. Same reason we hang all this toast: we gotta offer it to the robins who guard the orchard so's they'll help the harvest come in plentiful."
"Plus, it's fun to hang toast on things!" says Pinkie Pie. "Sometimes I like to hang toast on things anyway, just because, but it's great to have a reason for it too! And after this we get out the drums and tambourines and beat on them to scare away the eeevil spirits! Can we get out the drums now, A.J.? Huh huh huh can we? Have we hung enough toast?"
"I... guess?" says Applejack. "I mean, if you're really hankerin' for it."
"Whoopee!" From nowhere, Pinkie produces basically an entire percussion section and starts laying in. Apple Bloom immediately joins her, leaping down from her sister's back and banging with all her might on an overturned pot with her forehooves. Applejack shrugs and picks up a tambourine in her mouth, shaking it wildly around like you would an exercise ball.
The noise of the Apple Family getting to the business of exorcising their malicious apple-fouling spirits is absolutely unbearable. My eyes begin to water as my fake smile wavers more and more, barely staying in place. I suddenly want them to go back to hanging toast on their tree because the noise of driving off imaginary spirits is making me want to lose my lunch into the snow. I say this even despite the fact that it's ridiculous to lay out offerings for robins who probably won't even show up until spring, and good thing too, because you've soaked the bread in enough booze to make them drunk as lords, but oh wait, you don't care about that because you're all set on dosing your school-age filly with the same stuff in a few minutes, and here I thought you ponies were supposed to be the model of tight family bonds and responsible parenting, what's with letting sweet little Apple Bloom hit the sauce at her age, and I should probably report the lot of you to—
With one last heroic effort I nail my smile into a frankly horrifying grimace. "Pinkie Pie," I say, with erratic sweetness, "I'm just going to step away—"
"WHAT'S THAT, CHEERILEE?!" Pinkie shouts, more or less directly into my ear.
"I said, I'm going to step away—"
"HUH?! SPEAK UP! I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE ABSOLUTELY CRAZY AMOUNT OF NOISE I'M MAKING!"
"I'm going to go somewhere else!" I shout, finally losing it. "Somewhere! Anywhere! I don't care so long as it's not here!"
The sound of percussion falters. The four Apples and one Pie lower their instruments and look at me, all wide-eyed and blinking, showing nothing but compassion and concern for poor Miz Cheerilee. I can't take it. I turn tail, kick up my hocks and gallop off into the snowy dark.
So much for being an honest-to-goodness earth pony.
* * *
Mac finds me a minute or two later. It is not hard. I am sitting forlornly on a fallen log in the middle of a little clearing near the edge of the orchard, looking down over the farm's stubbly and sleeping corn fields. Impossibly fine snow drifts down from the trees above, catching the light of the breathtaking moon above and transmuting itself to a gentle shower of tiny diamonds.
"Miz Cheerilee?" Mac rumbles.
I sniffle and compose myself, feeling more ridiculous than ever for having stormed off. "Sorry," I say. "I'm sick and I've got a headache and—"
"Y'don't need to explain yourself," says Mac, settling down on the log next to me. "You're in a bad way. We ought should take you home. Get you warm."
Perhaps without even realizing he's doing it, Mac positions himself a little closer to me. I am about to lean in a little when I pull back. "Sick," I say. "I'm already sick. I don't want any of you to get it."
Mac gives a heavy chuckle. "Apple Family picked up what you've got weeks ago, Miz Cheerilee. We already fought it off. And I don't reckon that Pinkie Pie even gets sick."
"Except for comedic purposes?"
"Ayup," Mac says, and then laughs fully. It is deep and booming and it practically vibrates my stomach too, and in that moment I cannot stop myself from leaning my aching body against the huge warm fact of him. He does not shy away.
"Sorry," I say, resting my ear against his chest, hearing the steady bass beat of his powerful heart.
"Now, like I said, ain't no call for that. I 'spect we had our fill of drumming away spirits, so if you want to join us again at the Old Mare, you're welcome. Else I can walk you back home, or—"
"That's not what I was apologizing for," I say. I take a deep breath and look out over the moon-drenched field. "I was apologizing for not being... more like you, I guess."
"Now ain't that a thing," says Mac, resting his chin on my head. "Who says we want you to be more like us? You gotta be what you are."
"I'm not who I look like on the outside, Mac. I'm... a rude, inconsiderate pony, never patient, always analyzing. I'm always on the verge of snapping, of saying something I shouldn't."
"We all think things we don't say, Miz Cheerilee."
"Even you?"
Mac gives a big, goofy grin. "'Specially me," he says. "Most every day, in fact. You got me talkin' more than I have this whole month."
I smile a little, but it quickly loses to a pout. "Well, you're one vote in favor of me being me. But your Granny said—"
"—you should be more like an earth pony?"
"Yes," I say, bashfully.
Mac clucks his tongue. "I ain't gonna speak against my Granny," he says. "But sometimes she phrases things a mite blunt. You was looking for a reason to stay, I reckon?"
I pull back. "She told you? About my Envelope?"
"Don't know anything about any envelope," says Mac. "I only knew you was feelin' a little hoofloose lately 'cause it's written all over you. I hoped it didn't mean you were pullin' up stakes, though." Mac joins me in gazing out over the field.
"Got a teaching job lined up in another town, then?" he asks, his voice heartrendingly controlled.
"Yes," I say. "Maybe. I don't know. I've been thinking about how much I miss living in the city, but every time I think about moving there something else reminds me of how much I like it out here. I'm all over the map, Mac." I sigh heavily, throwing up my hooves. "I guess maybe that's what your granny was saying? That I should try being a better earth pony by wassailing and everything and that way I would feel more like a member of the community?"
"Maybe," says Mac, equanimously.
"Maybe?"
"Maybe."
"You have a different viewpoint?" I prod.
Mac frowns in thought. He is quiet for a full minute.
When he finally speaks, his voice is as deep and low and placid as bedrock.
"Hearth's Warming's old," he says, his eyes going distant. "But only old as the Settlement. Back in the old land, long before we celebrated Hearth's Warming, long before we celebrated the Emergence, long before the Settlement itself, there was Yule, when we feasted for the Apple Mother at the close of the year. And we drank and sang and beat our drums and wished health to our neighbors and health to our orchards, w'out either of which none of us lived 'til spring. And we do it now just like we did then, just like generation after generation of little ponies afore us. So if you ever feel alone and like you don't have a home, little pony, just remember that wherever you go in this world you always got a home. Your home is your tribe. Your home is the thousands on thousands of hundreds of thousands of earth ponies who lived, worked and then returned to the earth before you. It's always there for you, just a breath away, whenever you want to feel it. Whenever you honor what they did by joining in, too. That's what it is to have tradition. That's what it is to be an earth pony."
The air between us is heavy with the stillness that is the midwinter.
"A'course," he says, "all that said, even if you got all the world as your home so long as you remember your roots, I'd prefer it if you found whatever it was you were looking for 'round these parts, so I can continue to make your acquaintance. Miz Cheerilee."
I cry a little at this point, shamelessly and without analysis. The headache, the cold, the noise, the sentiment; it's all too much. Mac nickers deep in his chest and suddenly we are holding each other in our hooves and there is no more winter. For a moment, there is only him.
We break. I snuffle.
"I think I need a drink," I say.
"It so happens," says Mac, tossing his head, "we got a damn' big pot of liquor back by the Old Mare. 'Less my Granny and Pinkie Pie have drunk it all already."
"Better hurry, knowing them," I say. And we pick our way through the snow back to the Old Mare of the Orchard.
The wassail is pure elixir. The ginger clears my sinuses and the cider burns through my headache like sun through clouds. "Be in good health," indeed! Call it magic, tradition, or just some good ol' hair o' the diamond dog. And yes, we all drink. Even the little one. Just a sip, as promised. And when we are all warm inside, we stand side-by-side and raise our voices to the Old Mare, and the words we use are the same ancient chant raised by millions of earth ponies who have raised their voices before us:
Old apple tree, we'll wassail thee
And hoping thou wilt bear.
We do not know where we shall be
To be merry another year.
To blow well and to bear well
And so merry let us be.
Let every mare drink up her cup
And health to the old apple tree.
In the fullness of time, we return to the Apple Family homestead, where awaits a feast of our very own: roast butternut squash with brown sugar and marshmallow, curly endive salad with hot chili dressing, buttered carrots, rosemary bread, and, of course, apples, in every conceivable preparation. And while I'm sure everypony else is having just as great of a time in the Friendship Rainbow Kingdom, I would not trade this moment for anything. Our bellies full, we relax by a roaring fire, telling tales of Apples now living and Apples now lost to time, and as the night wears on, I pull closer and closer to Mac, who is less awkward to me now that...
...now that we feel a little more like family, I guess? Together in spirit, at least. Together in tribe.
Midway through the night, without a word of explanation, I go to my saddlebags and flip a cream-colored Envelope into the fireplace, adding its warmth and light to that which drives the cold winter away here at the turning of the age. I do this because I now realize that, wherever I am, I belong. And I want to belong here.
Granny Smith winks at me. I smile back.
We enter another year, together.
Author's Note
Many thanks to my lovely spouse Feech for the beta this time around.
