The Christmas after my little sister was murdered was…strange. Kait had been eighteen that July when she died. I was already in my thirties, living in a different state with a husband and two small children. Over the months that followed each of us struggled with how to deal with our shock and grief. I suffered from survivor’s paranoia, gasping at the sound of the doorbell, panicking if a car seemed to be following me too closely, and insisting that every window in our home be reinforced with new locks. I couldn’t imagine traveling back to New Mexico for Christmas—I could barely leave my house. And yet, when Mother decreed that we would all meet as usual at the family home in Albuquerque to observe the holiday, I bought airline tickets.

Like actors, we all tried to mimic our roles in Christmas’s past. Of course, this was a choice. We could have ripped our clothes and torn at our hair, but by some unspoken agreement, we invested in trying to make the holiday what it had always been. And we did a pretty good job of it until Christmas morning when, sitting around the tree for the handing-out-of-gifts ritual, it was impossible not to note the empty spot Kait had assumed from the time she could sit up unassisted. Immediately in front of the tree. So close, she was a part of the decorations, like an over-sized angel that had fallen from a branch. Her absence was testimony to the fact that, for us, Christmas was a ghost of a past we’d never recover. Not just Kait, but Christmas as we’d known it, had died.