It's Christmas. You bring the cookies. I'll bring the songs.

From Alfred’s journal

Snow since dawn, the thin kind that does not stick, and the Kesslers put their tree in the front window where I can see it from the gutter. For years I took the whole month as a human affair, loud and indoors and none of it mine, and I kept to the far hedge out of a kind of pride. Then this morning a boy left half a sugar cookie on the porch rail, not for me, just left it, and three sparrows and a jay arrived inside a minute and nobody fought. It's Christmas. You bring the cookies. I'll bring the songs. I sang through the afternoon and I doubt anyone inside heard a note of it over the radio. Switch says the trade is uneven. He has not counted what the singing costs me, which is nothing, which may be his point.