Excuse me if there are any grammatical errors - it's a first draft. I saw two places to finish it - so this is the "extended" version. It should be fairly obvious where it could be edited down. Merry Christmas, Scooter style!
One Night Before ChristmasWhen I was little, just six, my brother told me a story. It was late, Christmas Eve, and both of us were wide awake, sitting upright in our beds and listening for the tinkling of sleigh bells on the roof, or the soft scraping of red velour and white-trimmed fur against chimney stones. It wasn’t one of those brotherly pacts to stay up together until Saint Nick arrived. We weren’t those kind of siblings. But we had been reading comic books together all day, and the potential of a big robot or two had us as awake as a pot of coffee.
After a while we ran out of comic book related stories to talk about, and it was quiet for so long that my eyes began to droop. I found myself snarfing awake each time my head bobbed forward. Determined to stay awake, I enlisted Mark’s help, asking him to explain why we never heard Santa – three years of Christmases seemed like as good a sampling as thirty at that age – and how he could get to everyone’s house, all over the world, in a single night.
Mark didn’t bother turning on his bedside light. He whispered to me in the darkness. “You see, Scott, it’s like this. Santa doesn’t deliver the presents himself. If he had to deliver them to Europe and Asia and England and Minneapolis all by himself, he’d never finish in just one night. Instead, he has millions and millions of elves that deliver the presents to children’s houses.”
“That’s nice, “ I hugged my blanket.
“Well, it would be...” Mark trailed off ominously.
I sat quietly in the darkness, waiting for him to continue.
“…but Santa is always worried that the elves will get away and not deliver the presents. So he hobbles them.”
After rolling the word around for a while, I bit, “What does hobble mean?”
“He chops off one of their feet.”
“Does not!” I blurted, quickly hushing myself at the end so I didn’t wake up Mom and Dad.
“I’m not making it up. I’m just telling you the facts that everyone else already knows. He hobbles them. Either chopping off a foot, or just mangling one so they can’t run very fast. You remember that night we snuck up and watched that movie about the lady who kept the writer in the bed and she broke his leg with a sledgehammer? Like that. But they can still deliver toys, which is what he needs them to do.”
“You’re lying,” I was almost crying.
“Well,” continued Mark. “Let me finish before you make up your mind. You see, Santa hobbles them. Sometimes he hobbles their left foot, sometimes their right foot. It depends on whether they’re right- or left-handed. And these elves, the lame ones, they deliver the presents. So if you hear a thump in the middle of the night, and you think it’s Santa, it’s really an elf hobbling around the Christmas tree on his bum leg, leaving presents for Santa.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” I could hear the smugness in his voice. “Believe the adults. They know. That’s why they put up stockings, so that the elves will know they feel sympathy for them and what Santa has done to them.”
“Santa chops the feet off of elfs and grown ups know about it and hang up stockings just so the elfs know we feel bad for them?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s dumb.” Even at six, I understood he was giving me a line.
“Say that when you hear one clumping around tonight, squirt.”
“It won’t be an elf. It will be Santa,” I fumed.
“Look at the evidence. You know he can’t do all the houses by himself. You know Mom and Dad hang stockings. You know the president said we’re fighting people who don’t like democracy.”
“He wasn’t talking about Santa!”
“He can’t do all the houses by himself…” Mark repeated, trailing off with a big yawn.
A long quiet settled on the room and I fumed quietly in the dark, slapping the side of my bed now and then in the hope that I could punish him by keeping him awake. It was working, because Mark spoke one last time, “Did you remember to hang your stocking?”
It was quiet again and I finally asked quietly, “Mark?” But his only response was a soft snore and a slight shuffling under his covers. The vigil was now mine alone.
The more I sat in my bed in the dark, dwelling on the things Mark had said, the more convinced I became that I had forgotten to hang my stocking. I didn’t believe his story, but no stocking still meant no candy and no peanuts, and plenty of available nutrition was essential for early morning toy opening. After thinking about it for far too long, and changing my mind a hundred times, I finally decided that the only thing to do was to check the fireplace and make sure. I crawled out from under the covers and slunk to the bedroom door, trailing my blanket behind me. As quietly as could be, I turned the knob, slipped the door open, and peered into the dark hallway. Sudden movement at the far end sent my heart leaping, and I jumped back into the room, my back to the wall, breathing heavily. My mind processed what I had seen, and after a few seconds of panic, I realized it had only been my parents tiptoeing back into their room. That made sense. They must have been trying to stay up to see Santa themselves, or had worried they had forgotten their own stockings and gone to check. The thought was soothing. If they believed in Santa and were excited to see him, then my brother was wrong about the elves, because they wouldn’t like someone who hurt elves. And if they were going to bed, I could check on my stocking unimpeded. To my young mind, it was almost as if I had planned it.
I made a stealthy dash across the empty hallway and cut left toward our living room. I could see the lights of the tree glowing through the doorway, beaconing me onward. When I reached the arch, the twinkling illumination made the room look like a Christmas fantasy land, the most perfect holiday imaginable, with little candy canes, the smell of pine that is almost a taste, dozens of brightly bowed boxes, their colors muted by the partial light, but threatening to explode in greens and blues and yellows, and the dying glow of coals in the fireplace. The fireplace. On the mantle were the socks, one labeled Mom, one labeled Dad, one labeled Mark, and one…damn. My first suspicion was that Mark had snuck out while I was worrying and removed it just to scare me. Or maybe he removed it before we went to bed, while I was brushing my teeth. But I also knew that at six, I had a very short attention span that sometimes meant I was just plain forgetful. The cause wasn’t all that important. What mattered was getting up a stocking before Santa came.
As I took an initial step into the room, a faint rattling, almost a ringing caught my ear. From above came a brief scuffling and a thump, and my young heart leapt for joy with the prospect of Santa landing his sleigh on the roof and flopping his large, red bag of presents onto our shingles while he examined the way in through the chimney.
It occurred to me that Santa might not like to see me standing there in the living room, given his history of sneaking around in the middle of the night, and I broke out of my reverie and made a beeline for the sofa, positioning myself where I could see both the tree and the fireplace. A little more scuffling ensued, followed by the soft tinkling of sleigh bells, and then a heavy whumpfing as if the fireplace were trying to pass along something that was just too big to fit between the bricks. And there he was! Santa! Not some old elf with a limp, but the jolly old fellow himself, large of belly, red outfit with white trim and matching hat, and bag bulging with toys for good girls and boys. Boys like me who believed in a good Santa, and not what a crumby older brother tried to scare me with in the dark of night. My heart soared and I almost ran out to hug him, I was so happy to see him. But something was tickling at me, keeping me from leaping out, and it slowly dawned on me that my initial picture of him was not complete.
It was Santa alright, but he wasn’t jolly. He had the beaten look of a prisoner or a coal miner, a man devoid of hope, yet touched with a glimmer of the cunning of a cornered animal. As a child, I couldn’t put these things in words, but I recognized the man your parents tell you to stay away from with their thousands of nonverbal clues at the mall and theater. There were chains and manacles. Around his neck was clasped a heavy, silver collar, so bright it reflected the lights off the Christmas tree in a thousand pinpricks of green, violet, red and blue. Around each ankle was a similar manacle. From the collar and both legs heavy, shiny chains of the same silver, their links interwoven with green and red tinsel garland, ran back across the hearth and up the chimney, like strings for some Christmas puppet.
Santa rapidly crossed the room and placed the presents in his bag under the tree. But his haste was apparently not fast enough and whomever controlled the silvery chains gave him a strong yank. Santa gave a gurgle as his head was pulled back, the bag of toys nearly throwing him off balance. He shook his head and picked up the pace, turning back to the fireplace and pulling a smaller toy bag from his black belt, which he used to dump candy canes and bric-a-brac into the stockings. But when he reached where my stocking should have been, he stopped, as though nailed to the spot. He looked around furtively, checking the number of presents he had left under the Christmas tree against the number of stockings, then consulting a small scrap of paper he pulled from his pocket, mouthing one, two, three….four, to himself. That cornered animal look touched his face as he looked up the chimney at the tugging chains, and he touched the empty space on the mantel. A large tear trickled down his rosy, apple cheek, the silvery reflection making it look like an icicle. With one more look around, he pulled an envelope from within his red coat, scribbled something on it, and pinned it to the mantle where my stocking should have been. In the twinkle of the lights and the glow from the snow outside, I could see my name.
As horrified as I was, I wanted to go to the old man, to comfort him. I started to crawl from behind the couch and Santa turned at the sound, when the chains tugged more urgently and the chimney gave two huffs. Someone else, two someone elses, were on their way down to my living room. Santa stared at the sofa, and I realized my blanket was sticking out beyond the back, in plain view. He turned back to the fireplace as a pair of feet appeared just below the flue. Two perfectly formed feet. Two perfectly formed left feet. Santa gave a last look at my blanket, and then stepped into the fireplace, stopping whatever was coming down the chimney from entering the room. With another whumpf, he violently disappeared upward, as though jerked up on his three chains.
I bolted. I don’t know how much noise I made. I was sure the noise of my breathing alone would wake up everyone in the house. But from beneath my covers, curled in a little ball, I could hear the house was silent except for the soft sliding of rails against snow-covered shingles as Santa’s sleigh departed. It wasn’t until later I would realize it was that quiet, for all I was doing was muttering to myself over and over, “I didn’t even have a sock.”
The next morning, my brother had to drag me out of our room and to the front room. “Come on. I was just kidding about the elves, Squirt.” He dropped to his knees and began ripping at the wrapping paper. From the doorway, my eyes were drawn to the three bulging stockings on the mantle and the envelope, “Scott” written on the outside in a loopy, festive font, with curlicues of red, silver and green, just like the garlanded chains.
Who knows how long I stood there staring at the envelope, but long enough that my brother had finished opening all of his presents and my parents entered at some point to lounge on the couch behind which I hidden the night before. My Dad’s arm was around my Mom, contented smiles on their faces. “It’s the one day the lunatics run the asylum,” he said to Mom, laughing as my brother pulled own his stocking and dumped handfuls of candy and peanuts on the hearth. Broken of my spell, I stepped forwards, pulled the envelope off the mantle and flipped it onto the coals, where it went up like a piece of wrapping paper or a handful of pine needles.
“What was that?” asked my brother.
“What was that, Scott?” asked my father.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Just some wrapping paper and a note that I should remember to hang a stocking next year.”
“Told you that you’d forget,” lectured Mark through a mouthful of candy. “The elves won’t like that much.”
My parents looked at each other with a hint of confusion, as if both meant to ask which one of them had left the note.
“It’s o.k.,” I whispered. “They don’t need our sympathy anymore.”
I really enjoyed the third book by Jasper Fforde in the Thursday Next series, 
Inbetween every few chapters of The Well of Lost Plots, I read bits of 
I discovered there's a fourth book in the Thursday Next series, so I'm going to finish off Jasper Fforde's whole series, just for the sake of completion. I'll consider it one 1600-page book rather than four 400-page books. I don't think I want to read his Nursery Crimes book(s), although he self-references within The Well of Lost Plots. Very Stephen King. I have to apologize to Mean Mr. Mustard, as I bought the first three books at Half Price and loaned (am loaning) them to him, but he'll have to library the final one. But before I dive into the last book, I found 
Posts
