First Day 'til Christmas:

12 Days ‘til Christmas

On the first day ‘til Christmas, my lovebirds gave to me: 1 thing they’d save if the house was on fire…

Aaron—his grandfather’s baseball cap.

Aaron’s grandfather was a huge Red Sox fan and he took Aaron to see his first game when Aaron was seven. For his grandfather’s next birthday after that, Aaron picked out a Red Sox hat for his gift, intensely proud of himself for choosing it all on his own. Aaron’s grandfather wore that hat everywhere except church after that; Aaron’s grandmother joking that he slept and showered in it too. The hat eventually became so worn and faded the logo was barely visible. In Aaron’s mind, that hat is synonymous with his mental picture of his grandfather. After his grandfather passed away, his grandmother gave Aaron the hat. He never wears it, but it sits in a place of pride on his mantle next to a framed picture of the two of them from that first ballgame, and he carts it lovingly back and forth from his apartment in LA, to his condo in Toronto for filming, to his parents’ house for holidays. He never travels without it.

Liam—his cell phone

As an actor, Liam’s cell phone is his lifeline. He’s got hundreds of industry contacts stored there that he wouldn’t even know where to begin gathering again should he lose them. But more importantly, he’s still got the two hundred thirty-seven pictures from his family’s vacation to Greece stored there. Right after Liam’s first role in a movie, as soon as the check had cleared, he’d taken his family to Greece. His mother’s parents had emigrated from there only a year before his mother was born, and since she was the youngest, she was the only one of her siblings to be born on US soil. She’d talked since she was a little girl about visiting the place where her parents grew up and her siblings were born, and Liam had known since he was little that a trip to Greece was the first thing he’d spend his money on once he was famous. Only, he’d been so caught up in surprising his family, ambushing them only hours before the flight and harassing them into packing without knowing where they were going and hurrying them through the airport to make it on time that no one had thought to bring a camera. The only pictures from that trip, the only time he can ever remember truly feeling free before he met Aaron, are saved on his phone.