The ConnoisseurThe holidays were delightful. Reinholdt had completely disappeared, and Fredericksburg, a mere three months past the near apocalypse, pulled no punches in preparing for the season. The street lights on Caroline were bedecked with crystalline snowflakes that glowed in the night. Banners of red, gold, and green adorned shop fronts and awnings. It snowed twenty-five inches in mid-December, and some intrepid farmer broke out an old ten-man sleigh, harnessed it to a team of work horses, and took residents for gleeful rides through the snow covered city streets. It took the plows three days to even begin to clear it all away, all the better, as the snow tended to muffle the screams and cries, the gun shots and axe-thuds of citizens defending themselves against those who died and r
