Bellini Day

In a home on another planet, a boy wants to skip the family’s Bellini Day meal and get straight to his gifts. His parents insist on observing the holiday’s rituals, from silent prayer to trout and buttermilk. To explain their importance, his father reads a pop-up book about the towel-wearing Bellini, whose unhurried appreciation of an empty parking lot ended when a falling rock killed him. The story transforms the child’s impatience into reverence, and the family closes its celebration by gathering around a hologram of Bellini and poking it with sticks.