A little girl in a nearby town built a giant purple spider for Halloween. Everything else came down. The spider stayed.

That got stuck in my head, so I wrote a short Christmas story about two prairie kids, a spider nobody wanted to like, and a town that is way too proud of its Pickle Festival.

It’s meant to be read out loud. If you’ve got kids, grandkids, or just need something gentler than the news cycle, it might land.