Jim Halpert was not very much of a New Year’s Eve guy. Or a New Year’s Day guy. Or, really, a guy who believed in being sentient, awake, or otherwise responsive to human needs, wants, and demands during the period between the weekend before Christmas and the first weekend in January. As he had neither significant other (not for lack of desire, but for lack of opportunity with the one he desired) nor distant family (since his family, for their and his own sins, resided in Scranton and its environs the same as he did), nor a particular desire to travel very much (beyond his work as an itinerant salesman and his occasional trips to Philly for sports reasons), he rarely had cause to use his vacation days outside of this period, and therefore he had made a habit of taking that entire period off, however many days it might be, using the lump sum of his remaining vacation that he couldn’t roll over or didn’t need for random mental health days in June.

On Christmas, of course, he visited with his family. Even though none of them were particularly Christian, they were certainly American, and so there were certain religious-adjacent activities that were required of the day, from the stockings and tree to the surprisingly early dinner that left him plenty of time to come home and turn into a pumpkin (even if that was a fall decoration, rather than a winter one) for the rest of the year. But on New Year’s Eve, no one had expectations of him.

Once, a girlfriend had had such expectations; she had wanted to go out, and be out, and see and be seen, as if New Year’s Eve were not the perfect time for rolling up inside of a blanket and ignoring the outside world entirely. There were many reasons he was not with that girlfriend anymore, some of which were unrelated to anything as yet discussed, some of which were related to the desire to be dating someone else noted above, and more than was probably reasonable of which were precisely because she’d made him go out on New Year’s Eve against his will.

He did have one tradition on New Year’s Eve, however, which was not so much an obligation as an opportunity to indulge. Every year he baked a whole batch of his grandmother’s cookies—a recipe he had wheedled out of her as a college student pretending he was going to learn how to cook, and then actually started using as a broke twenty-something who wanted dessert that he didn’t have to pay for at a restaurant—a batch that he got to eat himself over however many days were left until his vacation ran out. It wasn’t his first batch of the year, of course, because his grandmother still brought it to Christmas, but those cookies had to be shared with everyone, including his parents and especially his little sister Larissa, who had an unfortunate tendency to be quicker on the draw to “help Gran in the kitchen” and get her hooks into the cookie dough and then the end result.

Unfortunately, this particular year, he had fallen asleep on the couch in front of a not particularly interesting college bowl game before mixing up the cookie batter and popping it in the oven. This in turn meant that when he woke up with a start to the screams of “Happy New Year” on the program that had transitioned from uninteresting football to less interesting new years programming, having slept through midnight, he could not simply move himself to the bedroom and resume his slumbers.

No, because Jim Halpert was a creature of routine, he had to go bake his cookies now.

And because he was a very unfortunate creature of habit, he was also out of butter, because he had used all of it making Chex Mix the day before—he absent-mindedly took a handful of said Chex Mix as he observed his empty fridge space reserved for butter—and forgotten to go out and get more.

Well, not so much forgotten, as opted not to, because as he opened the door to go out and get butter, he remembered that there was a rather substantial snowfall on December 30, one that was continuing as he looked out into what was technically the morning of January 1.

Well, there were two options here: voyage out into the snowy wastes in search of the one place he was fairly certain was still open even on New Year’s (the gas station about a half mile away, which he vaguely remembered having some form of butter or margarine available), or give up.

Well, Gran didn’t teach her cookie recipe to no quitter. Out into the wastes it was.

He shoved the snow off his car as best he could, thanked heaven that they had plowed recently but not recently enough to have created a giant snow barrier that he couldn’t get through, and started very slowly and deliberately down the road to the gas station.

The radio, much like the television, betrayed him. He was fairly certain that it had been some kind of rock music when he’d last driven the car, but evidently New Year’s Eve-to-Day was a time when regular music rotations went out the window, because all that was playing now were songs that made him think of Pam. And because he was a big sap, that meant it was sentimental schmaltz. He would have liked to change the channel, but the distraction of self-imposed heartbreak was less than the distraction of fumbling for the radio dial would have been, and he was already on the move.

Oh God, it was that Travis song he’d listened to with Pam on shared earbuds. That wasn’t even a holiday song! It was like they wanted him to crash the car and create confusion on his headstone about which year ought to be displayed because no one would know whether he died before or after midnight.

And after all that, the gas station was out of butter, too. Or rather, he appeared to have hallucinated the idea that they ever had butter, margarine, or anything more baking-adjacent than Coca-Cola, which he’d heard was sometimes put into cake or brownies. Well, unless you counted cookies and cream ice cream sandwiches, which he’d decided he didn’t.

He was standing at the door, considering whether it was possible that anywhere was both open and selling butter at…12:45am on January 1, when a second customer burst into the gas station and made a beeline for the freezer that contained said cookies and cream ice cream sandwiches and started shoveling them into a bag.

He turned to look at this frankly deranged and therefore fascinating behavior, only to do a double-take. He was seventy…no, eighty percent certain that was Pam’s sister, Penny.

That ticked up to one hundred percent when she answered her phone and started assuring a “Pam” on the other end that she was definitely getting ice cream, and she would definitely be back soon. She hung up, pushed past Jim, and paid for what appeared to be the entire contents of the freezer before shouldering her now-bulging bag and stepping back out towards the snowy scene outside.

And promptly slipping and nearly wiping herself out on the first, icy step.

It was only “nearly” because Jim had acted impulsively, as apparently he simply did around Beeslys, and reached out to catch her before she fell.

“Thank you…” Penny managed before going through what was evidently the same double-take that Jim had himself gone through earlier. “Jim?”

“That’s me.” Jim set her on her feet and resisted the urge to give a dorky little wave. “Penny, right?”

“Yeah.” Penny wiped herself down from the snow that was still actively falling, though more slowly now. “You work with Pam, right?” Jim had the sense this was a rhetorical question and didn’t bother to answer as she went on. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Failing to buy butter. You?” He gestured at the bag. “Besides buying out both Ben and Jerry at the same time?”

“Basically that.” She hefted the bag on her shoulder and seemed to come to a conclusion. “Well, I have butter, if you need it.” She looked at him in a way that looked disconcertingly like Pam, given that their facial features were actually quite different. “Why do you need it?”

He briefly explained the whole Gran’s-cookies thing and Penny nodded sagely. “Ah. Well, you’re welcome to come get a stick or two of butter from my place. I’m just down there.” She pointed at a blur in the snow that might have been the houselights of a house he had passed on his way in, or might just have been a trick of the light.

“You walked?”

“With my own two feet.” She started off into the snow and then half-turned to face him. “Coming?” She didn’t give him time to answer before continuing, once again. “I should probably mention, if you’re thinking about it, that my house not only has a few sticks of butter in it but also one very sad sister of mine, who demanded ice cream, which I did not have, and could really use a friendly face.”

Jim’s body was moving before his conscious mind was aware of it, which was probably good because he couldn’t actually see Penny’s face when he heard her say something that sounded a lot like “that’s what I thought” as he joined her on the sidewalk.

The walk to Penny’s house was much faster than the drive from his had been, even in the snow, and before Jim knew it Penny was throwing open the door and calling out into the house. “Hallooooooooo! I brought ice cream! And something even better than ice cream!”

“There is nothing better than ice cream right now,” a very familiar voice countered, followed by a very familiar face, though currently covered in tears and snot, and an equally familiar call of “Jim!”

“Hi, Pam.” He did do the dorky wave this time, and cringed inwardly.

“I found Jim here looking for butter at the gas station and failing to find it,” Penny interjected, while unloading her bag on the kitchen island that was apparently only a few steps from the door. “And now he’s going to make us all his Gran’s cookies while we eat this ice cream and talk about what an asshole Roy is.” She stopped and pointed a Magnum bar at Jim’s face. “I trust that that won’t be a problem?”

“Uh….” Jim didn’t know quite what to do with the picture that was rapidly forming in his mind of why this might be something demanded of him, and decided to take the safe route out by ignoring the second half of Penny’s request. “I told you I make those cookies just for me!”

“Different house, different rules, Jim,” Penny chided. “And besides, I bet Pam wants nothing more than to sample your cookies.”

“Penny!” Pam grabbed the Magnum out of her sister’s hand and threatened to smack her with it. “That is not appropriate.”

“Why not? It’s not like you’re engaged anymore.” And with that Jim was fairly certain that the entire world stopped breathing for a minute or two. Or maybe it was just him. “That’s the whole reason you sent me out for ice cream, remember? The asshole who broke up with you on New Year’s Eve and didn’t even bother to remember that you weren’t just boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Penny…” This time Pam did hit her sister with the Magnum. “Jim doesn’t need to know that.”

“Oh, I think he does.” Penny grabbed the Magnum back, unwrapped it, and started to eat it. “And I need him to too. I want those cookies, and I think he’s a lot more likely to share them with me than with you.”

“Well…” Jim wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but Penny bulldozed over it anyway.

“Besides, you deserve to have a nice guy who makes cookies for you. When was the last time Roy even made you popcorn?” She rolled her eyes. “And don’t tell me that Jim isn’t interested. This guy went from ‘enjoy your night, ma’am’ to following me home on just the bare mention that you were here and crying.” She pointed the Magnum at Jim again after taking another bite. “And by the way, Halpert…can I call you Halpert? She always does…I’m pretty sure that my sister here reciprocates your feelings, or she will once she gets over He-Who-I-Just-Named-But-Should-Not-Be.”

“Penny!” Pam tried to cover her sister’s mouth, which was difficult while being held off by a Magnum stick. “I told you when you yelled at Roy when you were picking me up, stop telling everyone my secrets!”

“That was your house. This is mine. Same goes for you as it does for Jim: different house, different rules.” Penny turned into the kitchen area and started putting the other ice cream away, apparently content with the chaos she had created. Pam turned back towards Jim and blushed, very heavily before shrugging.

“Well, in that case, Halpert, what do you say we make some cookies and see if shoving some of them into my blabbermouth sister’s mouth stops the embarrassing revelations?”

Jim wasn’t sure exactly what had happened in the last five minutes, but he was certain of one thing: even though he was going to have to share his cookies, this was going to be the best New Year’s Day he’d ever had.

And when he trudged through the snow to dig out his car the next morning holding hands with Pam (after a very chaste night spent on the couch, since Penny apparently drew the meddling line exactly there), he decided he might very well have an entirely new New Year’s tradition.