When apocalypse warrioress-style Wendy offhandedly mentioned that her family didn't do Christmas in Weirdmageddon Part 1, right then and there I knew I had the seedlings for a story idea.

An enormous thanks goes out for ddp456 for providing a bounty of suggestions and for helping me take several disparate ideas and working them altogether into a cohesive plot. Also, big thanks to DeadSNESproject88 for the story's cover art!

Reviews, criticisms and whatnot are always welcome. You're also to politely point out any of the weird spelling or grammar issues that always seem to magically elude both my spell check and my proofreading. I hope you all enjoy chapter one of this multi-parter holiday fic! - SGA


Wendy had always done the holidays a little differently than all of her friends. To be more exact, she had never done them at all. Period.

Instead, at the end of every December Manly Dan would take his kids out for their annual apocalypse survival training, where they would spend several days out in the woods learning how to get by with the barest of basics, their wits, and good old fashioned Corduroy toughness. So while Christmas time for most other people meant gathering around a tree sharing presents, for Wendy Christmas time meant sitting out in a homemade dugout deep in the forests of Gravity Falls listening to her dad instruct her and her brothers how to properly skin a freshly killed deer or how to properly fashion a bow from a springy branch. Year after year, she and her siblings sacrificed the holiday for the sake of their father's paranoia. But because that's the way they had done things for as long as she could remember, she had long since accepted it as just the way things were.

This most recent summer however had brought quite a few major changes to the way things were, to say the very least. At one particularly dicey point when the town had been reduced to a depopulated wasteland, Wendy was surprised to find herself actually putting all the survival skills that her father had taught her over the years to very good use. But while using said skills to help her friends stop a potential apocalypse, she had briefly let slip about her family's rather unusual end-of-the-year tradition and how it had allowed her to remain one of the lucky survivors scraping by in the demon-ravaged ruins of Gravity Falls.

It had been revealed in nothing more than a quick one-line remark that her friend Dipper Pines had paid very little attention to at the time. After all, they had a couple things to focus on that were quite a bit more more important than this one odd detail about her family life. But after a certain triangular demon had been defeated and everyone could recover and finish the summer in happy peace, it wasn't very long until the ever-curious boy started to inquire more deeply about the Corduroys' peculiar holiday traditions. He simply couldn't help himself after having watched his friend in full apocalypse-warrioress action.

His twin sister soon caught wind of all this, and together the siblings decided that while undeniably cool, this was also an undeniable travesty. They literally couldn't comprehend the fact that the lumberjill had never celebrated a proper Christmas before (and that was saying a lot considering all they had experienced over past few months). In their minds, their friend's lifelong Christmas deprivation was something that had to be fixed as soon as seasonally possible.

And to make a long story short, such was how Wendy found herself seated in the back of a bus that December afternoon, tugging her earbuds out and gathering her things together as the vehicle lumbered into the depot.

"Oakland!" The driver announced. Thanks to the long drive down from Oregon, Wendy moved stiffly as a zombie as she wobbled her way down the aisle. She thanked the driver, staggered off, and only had to wait a grand total of one second before she was attacked.

"WENDYYYYYYY!" A brunette blur flew out of seemingly nowhere, latched onto the redhead's waist and immediately started squeezing as hard as she lovingly could. A near-identical little thirteen-year-old dodged around a pack of commuters as he caught up. Dipper was so excited that he fumbled over his own tongue for a few moments.

"Y-you're here." He finally managed to sputter lamely, to his own dismay. Less than a minute into their reunion and already he embarrassed himself. Dipper immediately went bright red in the face. Wendy burst out laughing as she grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him close. Soon she could feel his noodle arms wrap tightly around her, and she eagerly returned the favor by crushing both siblings back in a hug-of-war.

"Hey, doofuses." The lanky teen was already smiling so hard that it almost hurt. It felt so good to be back with her "other" family.

"Heeeey, Wen-Wen! Ooooh, I can't believe it! You're here! With us! You're here! You're here! You're finally, definitely one million percent heeeerrrreee!" Mabel let go so she could perform an ecstatic spin. "So! Are you ready to Christmas like you've never Christmassed before in your whole entire life?"

Always one for showmanship, the quirky little thirteen-year-old unzipped her windbreaker and revealed one of her most spectacular sweaters yet. It had a sleigh and eight little reindeer, a snowboarding snowman, snowflakes of all shapes and sizes, and to top it all off, it glowed and blinked with actual Christmas lights of all colors that dotted it everywhere. The girl had managed to make herself into a living yard decoration.

"What if I said no?" Wendy playfully asked.

"Trick question! You have no choice!" Mabel revealed.

"Sweet." She approved with a double thumbs up. It was then that she noticed her other friend was still squeezing her side. "Uh, Dipper?"

Dipper yanked himself away as if she was on fire. "Oh! Sorry, I uh….I just kind of….uh, zoned out back there, thinking about….uh, the stuff with….um….things…."

"Relax." Wendy grabbed her former trapper hat from where it sat atop his head and playfully tugged it down over his eyes. After he righted it back in place she leaned in and flashed him a toothy grin. "I missed you too dude."

Dipper smiled back sheepishly. "Glad you could make it."

"That makes two of us." She slung her bags over her shoulders and cast a long look around. "Man, I can't believe I'm actually down here."

"I can't believe getting your dad to go along with this was the easy part." Dipper exclaimed with genuine disbelief. He felt like Manly Dan wasn't the kind of fellow who gave in easily to anything. Wendy just smirked back proudly.

"He felt like I definitely earned it." She then let out a sigh. "Your folks though….seriously, it took them for-ev-ver to give me the green light to come down."

"I know, I know." Dipper rolled his eyes as he recalled back-and-forth emails, phone calls, video chats and general uncertainty that lasted all the way until the end of November.

"Ooopsies! Hold one a sec!" Mabel's sweater had gone out. As she rewired everything back to the car battery she had been carrying in her sparkly backpack, she rejoined the conversation with a grateful squeak. "Lucky for us, Stan came in for the save!"

"I heard. Sounded like you had an interesting Thanksgiving with both the geezers over." Wendy joking understated, having heard all the stories from the twins already.

Although she was clearly happy to be there, what wasn't so obvious to her friends was the small wad of anxiety sticking in the back of her brain. If this holiday trip took that much work to get the official OK , how much could the Pines parents really want to deal with the likes of her? She had been doing some thinking, and she hadn't liked what she came up with. Even the most flattering description of her would probably make her out to be….something of a character at best, at least in a place like this. She didn't know that much about where her friends lived, but she knew it was definitely no Gravity Falls.

She didn't have very much time to stew with her thoughts. The twins led her out of the bus depot where a car awaited them.

"We found herrrrrr!" Mabel sang triumphantly.

"Great!" A trim bearded man waved them all over. He bore the trademark milk chocolate hair and eyes, making his identity pretty obvious on first glance alone. The closer Wendy got, the family resemblance grew even stronger. He managed to remind her of both the young twins and Stan and Ford back up in Oregon.

"Hey…..uh, Mr. Pines?" She safely assumed.

"Hey there! Welcome!" As he took one of her bags and popped it into the back he asked, "Sorry, but we had to make a stop on the way over, so space is a little tight right now. You don't mind riding back in the trunk, do you?"

A goofy grin had already spread across his face before he even finished talking, and he then proceeded to crack up at his own dumb joke. Dipper let out a sigh, and while Mabel giggled even she couldn't but help roll her eyes just a little bit. Wendy however decided she liked him immediately.

"I'm the dad, just in case it's not clear yet." He laughed as he gave her a warm handshake.

"Wendy. I think we talked on the phone like, once or twice?"

"Uh-huh! Glad you could join us down here." As far as she could tell he was being completely sincere, much to her relief. "How was the trip?"

"Not bad." She shrugged. "Slept a lot of the way, read through a few magazines, listened to some music."

"Good for you. Sounds like you handled it better than my guys here." He affectionately ribbed his own brood.

"Oohhhh, we were fine!" Mabel brushed it off. "A long trip just meant lots of time to play Bus-Seat Treasure Hunt! Isn't that right bro-bro?"

"Twenty times in a row was at least fifteen times too many." Dipper immediately protested as he recalled their epic bus trip at the start of the summer.

"Says you! Every expedition found whole new discoveries! Remember that piece of gum that looked like Grover Cleveland?"

"Yes. You made me take a picture of you with it. And for the record, it looked like John Adams." He corrected.

"Pfffft! Oh yeah it did, in Cuckoo Backwards Crazy Land!" She scoffed.

The twins continued the debate as they got into the car, and Wendy laughed like a loon as she followed them in. It was so, so good to have the crew back together.

"Leaving the station! Next stops, Walla Walla, Cucamonga, and Piedmont!" The twins' cornball of a father announced like a train conductor as he pulled away from the curb. Wendy sat in the middle of the back with a sibling on either side of her. The sizable drive to their nearby hometown seemed to take no time, even with the small patch of traffic they hit. She was too distracted chatting up with her friends. Even though it had only been a week and a half since their last video call (she always tried to in touch with at least Dipper once a week), Mabel still had a lot of exploits to catch her up on.

"...And so then we head into lunch the next day, and what do I see? Two, I counted them, two people dunking their fries in their chocolate pudding!" She boasted while braiding Wendy's long scarlet locks. "Mabel Pines, Trendsetter Extraordinaire, does it again!"

"I'll be sure to tell everyone all about it when I get back home." Wendy noted.

"Be sure you do! Making new combos really goes a long way in improving cafeteria food!" The brunette spoke as an expert, getting yet another chuckle out of the teen. At this rate Wendy felt like her sides were going to burst within the hour.

"Anyway," she clapped her hands on her thighs. "So now that I'm here, what do you dudes got in store for me?"

"A lot." Dipper hinted simply with a smile. She punched him in the side.

"You gotta give me more than that. I'm pretty new at this stuff, remember? What's it gonna be to get me all holiday-dayed up, or whatever? Carols? Roasting chestnuts on an open fire? Putting…..putting a partridge in a pear tree?" She playfully guessed, recalling what little bits she already knew. "That's a Christmas thing, isn't it?"

"Yup, and then we'll need to go find two turtle doves and a couple French hens." He sassed her. "Preferably three."

"And then we'll have a Nutcracker ballet later, right?" She kept it up. "Go and help the toys fight off the gopher king and his army?"

"Oh yeah, that's definitely on the itinerary." He joked, then corrected her, "But it's actually the rat king-"

"HA!" She sprung her trap. "We saw that when I was in middle school."

"Ooooohhhhhh!" Mabel high-fived the crafty fifteen-year-old.

Dipper was beet-red again as he let his head slump against the seat. "Definitely walked right into that one."

"Yeah you did, dork." Wendy grinned affectionately.

"Okay, home sweet home!" Mr. Pines announced as he pulled into the driveway. It was only then that Wendy realized they had exited the core of the city and were now in a spiffy-looking neighborhood.

"Whoa." She couldn't help but marvel a little at the two-story house before them. It just looked so clean and well-kept and….well, she knew that for the area it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Still, even for a nondescript place like this, she couldn't help let the word "fancy" spring to mind. At least that's what it was compared to what she was used to.

"Nice, huh? That's why I got into teaching high school physics. It's where the big bucks are at!" Mr. Pines joked with a wink. "Though the missus helps pay some of the bills with her dental practice."

"It's….yeah, nice." Wendy didn't get a chance to take in the sight for much longer. Dipper suddenly appeared beside her, thoughtfully albeit ungracefully carrying all of her bags at once. Before she could offer to help, Mabel nabbed her by the wrists and yanked her along.

"C'mon! Let's go! Let's goooo-ooooooooo!" She sang. "There's a little chubby gentleman who can't wait to see yooooou!"

"Okay, okay!" It was then that she noticed that the house actually looked a little bare compared to its neighbors. "Yo, no decorations yet? Thought you'd be all about that."

"We're here!" Mabel announced as she opened the door, then rejoined their conversation without missing a beat. "Oooohh, you bet I am! We're decorating the living bazoogas out of this place!"

"We were saving that for when you got here." Dipper gasped as he put the bags down.

"And that's just one of the activities planned for your holiday-extravaganza! Because this isn't going to just be your first Christmas!" Mabel shook her head furiously. "Nope! This is also going to be your best Christmas-"

They were interrupted by an appalled cry that sounded straight out of a horror movie. A slender woman with short, shoulder-length black locks was currently gawking with indescribable dismay at something behind the arrivals. Wendy quickly followed the woman's bugging stare stare to the incredibly thick trail of muck that she tracked in, courtesy of her boots.

Oops.

"...Uh..." Mabel cleared her throat and finished, "Your...um...best Christmas ever."