I tend to be a holiday slacker, but this year I’m really sitting it out. No fingering handmade crafts at pop-up fairs, no high-calorie marathons with my oven, not even a sprig of holly on my door. I’m hibernating, waiting for spring, waiting for the ashes, in what used to be my town, to feed the bulbs and trees and produce a technicolor renewal in a few months.

There have been so many stories about the Paradise fire, each as detailed and individual as a snowflake. Each, you would think, impossible. But there are shared elements. The hurried round-up of animals and items; the tense gridlock of a night-dark town emptying on an otherwise sunny morning; surreal, snapshot images amid swirling smoke; and always, everywhere, the flames. Little flames scurrying along the ground in haphazard lines. Average flames gnawing at shrubs and dog houses. And great, towering demon flames, whirling and dancing and destroying.

Everyone who was there knows that story and can embellish it. Some can’t stop picturing it; some have extinguished it as thoroughly as the 5,000 fire fighters who fought the blaze.

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