Even weeks before Snowtide celebration commenced, you’d noticed stores becoming cheerier in spirit and in stock. Decorations lining the aisle, you and Christian had taken fifteen minutes just going around the place to pick up, marvel at, then set down merchandise.
It turned out to be too overwhelming for your rival to take in (the colors, the new concepts, and the amount of people doing their shopping all were a perfect, terrible sensory storm), so you helped guide him outside of the place to catch some fresh air. Though he does it slowly to mask it from you, you can still hear Christian sigh in relief--then gasp!
What you had both assumed was an outside decoration suddenly moves.
Startled, Christian jumps in place. (You don’t). It’s an oddly-shaped stranger, sort of like you in the way its outline shifted blue, but you can... smell sugar very strongly coming from it. It did appear visually similar to some props you had seen inside the store, but... Snow Sugar Cookie was alive, you were sure of it.
“What--is that?” Christian asks, back hunched toward it in an aggressive posture. He sees the sugar cookie blink, and relaxes his shoulders by a fraction.