Holly Snolightly is a beautiful thirtysomething travel writer and the busy Manhattan CEO of an international Christmas tree conglomerate. She reserves a remote shepherd’s cabin in Montana to celebrate Christmas traditions and to focus on writing her novel. “I don’t need a plot for Christmas”, she thinks, “all I want for Christmas is ewes”. Inadvertently, the cabin is double-booked by handsome rogue smuggler Jan-Erik Leedingman, on the run from a large slug-like crime lord. He is recently widowed due to trash compactor incident, and accompanied by his precocious six-year-old daughter Anita Newmom.
When AT-ATs attack the remote cabin’s shield generator, Holly escapes in her unreliable car, but it breaks down, so the handsome rogue cuts open a reindeer and tucks her and his daughter into its hot steaming entrails to survive the night. Next morning they ate tiny reindeer. The beautiful travel writer CEO teaches the little girl to figure skate, and the handsome rogue smuggler crawls through the air ducts of Nakatomi Plaza to get a new carburetor for her car, which is unreliable.
The trauma-bonded trio decides to travel to Mordor to cast his old wedding ring into the fires of Mount Doom, but on their journey, they pass a corporate Christmas tree lot owned by the beautiful travel writer CEO’s corporation SantaSangre. The lot is filled with sentient trees known as Ents, so just as Leedingman is about to destroy the ring forever, he’s abducted by Ents and taken to an undisclosed second location.
Meanwhile, the beautiful lady CEO travel writer is visited by three ghosts that teach her that true meaning is found by forfeiting her hard-earned social and economic currency as a businessperson and self-actualized individual to take on the traditional wife-and-mother role offered by her new heteronormative trauma-bonded blended family. She gives up all her careers, Jan-Erik and the Ents strangle the slug-like crime lord with a reindeer colon, and the trio settles down in the remote cabin.
In the warmth of the remote Montana cabin, Holly overcomes her writer’s block, and completes her novel “Industrial Society and Its Future”. The book is a bestseller, and the new family considers buying their own family-run Christmas tree lot. The lush conifers are sticky with elevator pitch, but Holly knows that fir and spruce are not a good source of the cancer-fighting chemical Paclitaxel. “I don’t want a tree lot for Christmas”, she says, “all I want for Christmas is yew”.
The new family celebrates Christmas 365 days a year, the wedding ring gives them an unnaturally long life, they do not age, and the precocious little daughter is six years old in perpetuity. One ring to yule them all. Life in the wide world goes on much as it has this past age, full of its own comings and goings, scarcely aware of the existence of their heteronormative trauma-bonded blended family, for which I am very thankful.
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Derek DeLand has designed the architecture of tall towers, urban tech hubs, entertainment, hotels, art schools, theatres, residential, Passive Haus, seniors housing, master plans, skateplazas, skateparks, public art and competitions. • Vancouver-based, with built work in BC, Canada, Seattle, UK, Mexico and even Paris, Derek has collaborated with a wide range of clients, from municipalities to high-profile developers to BC Housing. • Educated at U of Calgary and UBC SALA, Derek has been featured in Migrating Landscapes for the Venice Biennale of Architecture, has an award from IOC IPC IAKS for sport architecture, awards for concrete design from BCRMCA and Ontario Concrete, and a Certificate of Recognition from the AIBC. • Also a writer, he’s been published in Architizer, Spacing, Canadian Architect, and international design books and magazines, and has done public speaking in Los Angeles and the UK. • Derek’s architecture is idea-driven, highly creative, sculptural, movement-oriented, tectonic and experiential.
