The turkey’s on and Dad and Geoff are peeling potatoes downstairs. I should be setting the table, but I’d rather be up in my room with the avatar I made of you, Mom. In SIMS™-world, the table is set for you, Dad, and us kids—a red setting with matching pet food dish for Fido. The rest of the place is not looking that festive, so I swap out the TV wall with a real log fire and the grey three-seater with a white three-seater. Then I stick giant SIMS™ letters spelling “Family Time” over the fireplace and hang up four red stockings. Dad lights the fire and sweeps the hearth. His main personality trait is neatness and his other personality traits are gatherer, unstable, nurturing, handy, and insane. He wants to fix things and that’s what he’s good at, but he has these random mood swings where he runs after you wielding a garden gnome or pruning shears. If Dad manages to kill you with the gnome, he runs after us kids next, then Fido, and is forced to stage your funeral alone. Maybe you get lucky and flee the neighbourhood in a luxury yacht or hot air balloon, always finding a way to leave. Your traits are green thumb, bookworm, melancholy, perceptive, avant-garde, and—of course—ghostly. When you’re feeling sad, I make transparent afterlife-you water the flowers that spell “MOM” in front of your headstone or use the lathe in your little workshop. You’ve been sad a lot lately, so I had you do a bit of workshop time and now you’ve gone overboard on the lathe and the house is a death-dealing labyrinth of Scandinavian reindeer sculptures. Dad tidies the dustpan and brush away and coaxes the fire, then gets stuck between two of your decorative deer and bangs into the patio doors over and over until you roll on the floor laughing so much you pee yourself, which makes Dad desperate for a shower. Only this morning, I added bathrooms to all the floors so everyone could pee or shower at the same time and no one would wet themselves and get sad. As usual, my brother Geoff needs to pee the most and, as usual, he doesn’t seem to care because he’s playing his electric guitar at top volume while you clap and jump in the air, knocking over a Scandinavian decorative deer candle that sets fire to Geoff and the Christmas tree and your decorative reindeer and Dad, still backing in and out of the patio doors. Dad catches you on fire despite your growing lake of pee, and you switch from laughing to running around and around the coffee table screaming and clutching your burning hair. I herd us through the patio doors into the infinity pool and watch the steam rise and all our moods go straight in the toilet, which makes me lose hope and take the ladder out of the pool, but after our family has drowned, I feel bad and go back to when we were all more-or-less fine and Geoff was only just starting to need to pee, rolling everything way back, as if I could reach the day before you died IRL. Someone on the SIMS™ forum told me grief feels worse at this time of year, when everyone has to be happy. Maybe that’s why my eyes sting when Geoff calls up the stairs that it’s time to unwrap presents and I hear Dad laughing too loudly at Leave it to Beaver reruns to cover his sadness, and the loudest sound of all is you not whispering Merry Christmas through my door. Once I told you the trick of this game is to keep everyone happy at all times and you laughed. Like being a mom, you said. See, I said, I can get the ball rolling on your happiness by dressing you in this cozy sweater and sitting you in your favourite armchair and toggling Ctrl + Shift + C + Cheat Code > Make Mom Smile.