The sugar on the star cookies at Bukovec has a sparkle that nobody added. It lies in a fine, even dusting over the frosting, faintly pink and gold in the lamplight, and when you taste it the first note is orange peel and the second is cold. Katya Vesely, who keeps the tea shop on the square, found it on the first of December and has found it every morning since, and she has stopped trying to scrape it off.
By eight she has the shutters up, the cocoa on and a jar candle lit in the window, which is the right thing to do, because Holiday Fairies come to a lit window. At about nine a spark no longer than her thumb tips off the top of the tree in the corner and hovers over the plate of cookies. She has a round, rosy face, big dark eyes, a tuft of frost-white curls and clear wings that glitter pink and gold when they beat. She wears a tunic of overlapping fir needles stitched with red holly berries, a candy-striped scarf and a red velvet cap with a white pompom. She laughs, a thin sweet sound like a spoon touched to a glass, and showers the cookies with frost-sugar from her palm. Katya's day goes on as December days do, with ovens, orders and a line out the door. She sees the fairy once more at dusk, hovering over the cocoa on the sill and laughing at nothing at all. In between, only the sugar marks her passing.
The people of Bukovec leave their windowsills unwashed from the first of December until Twelfth Night, and no one will wipe a sill, sell a jar of the frost, or say a fairy's name out loud within a candle's reach of her cookies. The first is the rule, and the other two are habits people learned were wise. Frost taken from a sill in a jar loses its sparkle by morning, and a name said aloud makes her giggle so hard the sugar goes everywhere. Visitors ask whether she is one fairy or many. Katya says one, and that she has a cousin in Pelinka, in the next valley, who is also one fairy. I counted three by their wings, and I can tell you no more than that.
Katya's instruction to visitors is short. Put the cocoa on the left sill and the cookies on the right, and draw the curtain halfway.
- Classification
- Frost-feeding winter fairy
- Habitat
- Windowsills, cut fir, warm chimney brick
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- Thumb-length, about 2 inches
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Yuletide hearths and tea shops
- Binomial
- Pruinella saccharina
- Diet
- Frost-sugar, candied peel, spilled cocoa
- Temperament
- Giggly, sparkling, fond of cookies