At the end of Fir Lane, where the trees stood so close that snow fell only in flakes and never in blankets, stood the winter house. It was red with white edges, had a porch with a green railing and a round window in the gable behind which nobody lived in summer. In winter everybody lived there.
Everybody meant Mille, her parents, her little sister Tove, Grandfather Aske with his walking stick and the cat Molly, who did not belong to the family and came along every winter anyway. They moved in on the first evening of December, when the people's hallway grew too loud with Christmas preparations and an elf needed peace.
Grandfather Aske hung the wreath on the door. That had been his task since the house existed. He needed three attempts and a stool, and every year he said: “The nail has wandered higher.” Mother carried the kettle up the porch steps, Father the lantern, and one by one a light came on in every window until the house looked like an oven baking stories.
Mille and Tove stayed outside. They built a snow lantern the way Grandfather had shown them: snowballs in a circle, row upon row, narrower towards the top, until a dome appeared. A tea light went into the middle, lit by Father, because elf children do not touch matches. When the flame burned, the whole dome glowed from inside, as if someone had set the moon down in the snow.
“Why do we do this every year?” asked Tove, who was five and wanted to know everything. Grandfather Aske sat down on the step, which took a while. “Because it is dark,” he said. “And because a light you built yourself is warmer than one you buy.”
Tove thought about it. “Even when it is colder?” “Especially then,” said Grandfather.
At that moment something happened above the fir trees that none of them had ordered. The sky grew a green hem, then a curtain that moved like water. Molly arched her back. Mille forgot to breathe. Grandfather Aske took off his hat, which he never otherwise did.
“Northern lights,” he said quietly. “They only come when every window is lit.” Whether that was true, Mille did not know. But she saw that every window of the winter house was lit, and that the snow lantern was lit, and that Tove's face was lit, and she decided to believe it.
Later, when everyone was inside and the kettle whistled, Mille wrote a short letter to the children in the people's hallway. She described the house, the lantern and the sky. At the end she wrote: “Build one too. All you need is snow and a light. And someone to light it.” Then she sealed the letter and gave it to Birk, who was passing anyway.
