You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Read Online Free PDF

and put some Band-Aids on your fingers.”
    “But I don’t want to stop. I can keep going. We need more.”
    “Augusten, you are going to get blood all over the house. You have just pricked your fingers to death with that sewing needle. And see? Look at that; your entire rope of popcorn is bloody. You don’t want to hang bloody popcorn on the tree, do you?”
    “Mine can go in the back!” I said, protectively clutching the needle and thread and bloody popcorn rope to my chest.
    She shook her head, no. “Go wash your hands. And use some Bactine before you put on the Band-Aids.”
     

     
    The stores had begun filling their shelves with Christmas decorations way back in October, so along with jack-o’-lanterns and paper turkeys, you could buy a can of spray snow.
    By this point, I had burned through numerous cans, even though my father paid good money to have the real stuff removed from our driveway and front steps.
    I had sprayed it on my bedroom windows, adding a string of wildly blinking lights. Tinsel, my favorite product, was draped from anything in my room that protruded even slightly: the needle arm of my record player, curtain rods, the switch to my desk lamp. My room was a festering, glittering shrine in honor of my favorite day of the year. But there were only so many times I could move my own small artificial Christmas tree from one side of the room to the other. At a certain point during that last painful week, I simply ran out of preholiday amusements.
    So I would wander into the living room to at least be in the same room with the real tree. As it had for weeks, my scratchy copy of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
continued to moan away on the record player.
    Because all the magazines that had arrived featured Christmas trees and stockings and other holiday paraphernalia on their covers, I would thumb through these, searching only for the colorful ads.
    This was what I was doing the Saturday morning before Christmas, while my parents were downstairs sleeping. On Saturdays, it was rare for them to come upstairs before ten or even noon. That gave me a good five to seven hours alone.
    Upstairs.
    With complete, unsupervised access to a fully equipped kitchen.
     

     
    The photograph on the cover of my mother’s
Woman’s Day
magazine appealed to me enormously. A gumdrop-bejeweled gingerbread house from a spun-sugar fantasy world.
    The tall, peaked roof was swirled with mounds of frosting snow. Glittering, crystal-sugar icicles hung from the eaves. And the walls, smooth sheets of pure gingerbread had been pressed into raw sugar, giving them the appearance of stucco.
    Hansel and Gretel had been fools to abandon such a house after they cooked the witch alive in her own oven. I absolutely would have claimed the house as my own and used the witch’s skull as a soup tureen. When I thought about it, Hansel and Gretel deserved to die for their lack of imagination and poor real estate choices. But that was just a stupid fantasy; a story for babies.
    This gingerbread house was real. There was a recipe. GINGERBREAD DREAMS: BUILD THIS FOOLPROOF FANTASY HOUSE! directed the headline.
    I would make it as a surprise for my mother. I would bake the gingerbread house and I wouldn’t get any blood on it and it would be the center of our Christmas table.
Won’t she be surprised
, I thought,
when she comes upstairs in six hours and sees my glorious gingerbread house resting on a plate, two candy cane trees beside the front door!
    The word
foolproof
spoke to me because my older brother often said, “I believe you may be a complete fool, quite nearly retarded. I’m going to have to find out what kind of pesticides were in use when our mother was carrying you.” If even a fool could make the house on the cover of this magazine, I should be able to make it, too. Then again, I knew that merely boiling water was not
foolproof
. Not when you got sidetracked by
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
and forgot about the water, which then