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up the front porch, with the good smell of roast beef, biscuits, and apple pie helping us along.
    She stops at the flag by the front door, like she has every day since Dad left for Iraq, to give it a stroke and whisper a prayer for him. The rest of the brothers pile into the kitchen while I lurk in the front hall and watch her. There are lumps of ice all along the edge of the flag. She slips off her gloves and cups her hands around the frozen edge, blowing to melt it. My mind zooms to Dad out in the gritty ghettos of Baghdad, where Christmas is just another day and nobody will touch him gentle like Grandma would. I can't think about him alone on Christmas. I won't. He wouldn't even want me to. Grandma lets the melted flag go, and I duck into the kitchen so she won't know I watched.
    The brothers are all stomping around, giving each other directions on how to set the table, like this is somehow tricky and needs a four-man consultation. The house seems small with all of them in it, and I feel like the little kid I used to be when they all lived at home.
    Once dinner is ready, Grandma gets the Baby Jesus figure. We all follow her as she carries it to the Nativity scene on the mantel, and we sing “O Come,All Ye Faithful.” Then we stand around the table and sing some more carols. I love it when we sing together, but the brothers can't carry a tune in a bucket. Grandpa has a great voice, but he just doesn't sing out the Hosannas with the same gusto Dad does. Musically, we are in deep trouble without him. Nobody even complains when we cut the singing short and get down to the business of eating.
    Usually Grandma runs the conversation at dinner, but she's quiet today, and the brothers work through the beef, potatoes, gravy, biscuits, and cranberry sauce with silent devotion. Grandpa's hand shakes a little, like it does sometimes at the end of the day, and he hardly eats, which is nuts, because he works harder than me, and I'm starving!
    Once the boys move into seconds, Grandpa gets news out of them: the weather and the soldiers in Pete's platoon in Texas, Jim and John's final exams at Boise State, and the dorm pranks Frank is in on at the high school. Nobody asks me about my news because everything I'm doing, they've already done. Finally, Pete asks about the lambs, and I mumble that I lost one because we're all being very careful not to say anything about death.
    And then Pete says, “Well, how many have you saved?”
    “Seven,” I admit, because after Frodo, Bilbo, and Merry, there were four more.
    “Seven—well, that's a good start. You'll get eight or ten pounds of wool from each one starting in the spring, and if you take good care of them, they should double in a year. You'll have a good-sized flock pretty soon.”
    “Now, that's a solid start to your college,” Grandpa says. “You build yourself a good flock to sell and you won't have to worry about getting one of those army scholarships.”
    “I guess one of us better plan on staying with the land,” Pete says. “If we all go on active duty, who will run the place?”
    He sounds so much like Dad when he says this that I'm just itching to kick him under the table. It's bad enough that no one thinks I'm much of a rancher; since when am I not good enough to be in the army? I'm not going to be this short forever.
    “What do you want to study?” Grandma says, passing around third helpings.
    I just shrug and rearrange the potatoes on my plate.
    “Dude, don't go for engineering. No girls,” John says. “And don't become a teacher either, because those classes are just packed with bossy girls.”
    “The army likes engineering grads,” Jim says. “They pretty much get their pick of which branch they want to sign up with.”
    And then we are onto the topic of what branch of the army Jim will go into when he graduates next year, and I get to thinking about the long line of soldiers that have marched away from this table, which is great if you're the patriotic type.