The Christmas Chronicles (11 page)

The Straight Road shone in front of Klaus and the Eight, a beacon in the Black Forest. All were eager to race up it at once and away home, but something caught Klaus’s
eye: the final discovery of the night. A piece of paper folded twice was lodged in the left-hand holly bush standing at the entrance. Klaus stooped to pluck it from the branches. He read it once, and then he read it through carefully again. “Oh my,” he said. He tucked it into his pocket as the sleigh sped up the Road.

“Time start!” he shouted as Castle Noël came into sight. Everything burst into life. By the time they glided to a stop in the courtyard, the sun was up. A door opened and Anna ran out to greet Klaus. “Welcome home!” she said. And then she stepped back and looked suspiciously at her husband in the dawn light. “How did you manage to get a suntan on Christmas Eve?” she asked.

“Never mind that,” Klaus said. “Look at this!” And he gave her the folded note. When she read it, her eyes grew wide. “Oh my,” she said.

“I know,” Klaus said. “This changes everything.”

E
xplanations about the mysterious suntan Klaus had acquired would have to wait. That is what Anna thought as she eyed her Saintly husband’s healthy glow, though she did wonder what he had been up to and if he had been having fun without her. And Klaus thought,
Wait till she hears about Time stopping! And about all those languages and how big the world is, and no more need to worry about chimneys!

But what they both thought was,
First things first. What shall we do about this letter left at the foot of the Straight Road?

The letter was from a child. This is what it said: “Dear Santa, Next Christmas Eve will you please bring me a kite so I can fly it in the summer? I would like it best if it had a picture of a dragon on it, because that is my favorite animal in the world. Very sincerely yours, Sophie. PS: I love you, Santa, and so does my little brother Arnulf, who would like a puppy.”

Now, the alarming thing about this letter was not that it was addressed to someone called “Santa.” All at Castle Noël knew that this name for Klaus was becoming increasingly popular, since it was—or was near—the word for “Saint.” Nor was it alarming that the letter asked for a toy Klaus did not know how to make. For many Christmases now Elves had been making toys based on ideas of their own or Anna’s. That is very much the case now, of course, though all toys must still be personally approved by Klaus.

No, the truly troubling thing about the letter was simply that Sophie
had asked for a specific gift
—which had never happened before. Oh, Klaus had sometimes made a toy specially for a child—remember little Lena’s rattle? But
no one had ever written to
ask
for a particular one. You can see the implications of this, I’m sure, as clearly as Anna and Klaus could. What if everyone began asking for specific gifts? Would they be able to honor these requests? Children might ask for anything. Arnulf had asked for a puppy, which neither Klaus nor even the most skilled of the Elves could make. And was little Arnulf ready for a puppy? This last question led them to an even larger one: What if children asked for toys that were not right for them? What should they do then?

Dasher and his siblings declared themselves too tired to pursue these thorny issues at the moment and trotted off to their stables for a long winter’s nap, but Klaus and Anna stayed up well into the night sipping mint hot chocolate by the enormous fire in the Great Hall of Castle Noël and trying to decide what was best to do. About the subject of dangerous playthings Anna grew quite excited. She instantly began planning a range of toys that would re-create in full working detail, but in children’s sizes, the armor and weapons of the Roman Ninth Legion. “Think what fun my children would have with their own real swords and shields!” Anna exulted, her eyes glowing. “And we could make a line of working catapults! And scale models of Teutonic Heroines on Horseback! I could stitch their outfits
myself!” And then Klaus wondered aloud if parents would object to toys that might lead to loss of blood, and Anna declared indignantly that that was all part of a happy childhood. But in the end she reluctantly conceded that decisions about toy safety would probably have to be left up to parents. “Mind you,” she grumbled, “I’m sure the children would see it my way.” And she returned to her enormous project of stitching all the battles of the Crusades onto Christmas stockings for the Elves.

They talked through the night. And by morning, though they were tremendously sleepy and full of cocoa, they had hammered out the main ideas of what became the famed Christmas List Protocols, and retired to their sleigh bed contented with their work. As Klaus drifted off to sleep, into his mind came the words of Saint Abigail, spoken so many years before: “One day, from all over the world, will come to Klaus the petitions of children.” So, he thought, smiling, this was what she had meant.

The three original Protocols, decided that night, were as follows:

These original Protocols were posted at the foot of the Straight Road with the conviction that Sophie and Arnulf would spread the word. Given the volume of requests that poured into Castle Noël the next year and the steady increase for many years thereafter, we may safely assume that is exactly what happened.

I am sorry to have to report, however, that these three simple and commonsense Protocols have had to be much amended over the years, due to changing conditions and misunderstandings in the world. So long as the Straight Road remained tethered to the earth, these additions to the original Protocols were posted periodically at its foot. But when that tie was broken, they had to be communicated, imperfectly I am afraid, through dreams and bursts of inspiration to sensitive souls on earth, generally on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, this means of transmission has inevitably led to distortions of the Protocols. However, on the plus side, it has also resulted in many a jolly, if
inaccurate, story or song about how to behave when “Santa Claus is coming to town,” the correct attitude to adopt in the unlikely event of seeing “Mommy kissing Santa Claus,” etc. Around Castle Noël, these always get a good laugh.

However, to set the record straight, all the List Protocols are reproduced in Appendix H of this
Green Book,
precisely as they appear in the striking tapestries woven by Anna that hang in the Gifts Pavilion by Advent Lake in the True North. Here, for a sample, I set down just three of the more recent amendments:

Once the original Protocols were devised, Klaus and Anna and all the Elves began to think of their toy making in a new way. And in this Anna was the leader. For it was her ingenious innovations that brought the True North into what we historians consider the Modern Epoch
^*
—although it began simply as Anna indulging her taste for adventure.

As soon as Anna heard about Chronolepsy, she laid her plans. And the very next Christmas Eve, for the first time
in a long time, she was back beside Klaus in his sleigh—but not for very long. For as soon as Klaus called out “Time Stop!” and they all plunged through the dancing lights of the Aurora Borealis, Anna leapt from the sleigh directly onto the back of Donner—who had agreed to be her accomplice—and unhitched him from his traces. “See you when you get back, husband!” she yelled over her shoulder to Klaus as she and the reindeer raced back up the Straight Road. Klaus gazed fondly at her swiftly retreating back. “After all, Dasher,” he said, “why should I have all the fun?” Secretly, Dasher wished he were going with his old racing companion instead of Donner, but he knew he could not be spared from leading the team.

And so, while Klaus made his deliveries that year, Anna and Donner made an intrepid expedition into the mighty
range of mountains far to the west of Castle Noël. There what had begun as merely a trek for sheer fun turned into something more important even than that. For in those mountains—which Anna named the Yuletide Massif—they discovered enormous veins of pure gold.

And that discovery led to a still greater one: Anna found her True North vocation. Oh, she would continue the dangerous and hair-raising adventures she had begun that Christmas. How could she not? She was Anna. (These, incidentally, will be fully recounted in her own memoir, which Anna hopes to complete one day when her labors permit; I may say here, just to give a taste of them, that the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest was
neither
Tenzing Norgay
nor
Edmund Hillary.) But as she took up the task of converting a gold mine into the practical and charitable activities which now comprise the Castle Noël economy, she uncovered in herself a talent for what to this day she modestly refers to as “helping out where I can,” but which Klaus beamingly calls “running the whole show.” She invited many Elevated Spirits with a wide variety of unique skills to the True North. Arnulf’s request for a puppy prompted the establishment of the Saint Farouk Kennel and Cattery, staffed by Elves skilled in animal husbandry. Sophie’s request brought a cadre of engineers who
could fashion ingenious kites—and later miniature locomotives, space shuttles, and the like.

Christmas Eve after Christmas Eve, Anna took full advantage of Chronolepsy to establish the institutions that today play such a vital role in the True North—all while Klaus was away. It delighted him to return from a Christmas Eve flight one year to discover that Anna had founded and staffed the Saint Nicholas Munificence Bank, and another year the Flying Eight Weather and Travel Bureau, and another the Institute of Toy Prognostication with its crack, handpicked research team.

And then Klaus and Anna and as many reindeer as wished to go would fly off to their tropical retreat together for their well-earned vacation and to catch up on all they had done while they were apart.

At the risk of inserting too much personal biography, I will note that this immigration of newcomers to the True North eventually included Your Humble Author. Saint Klaus expressed a desire for a scholar to establish the Castle Noël Archives and serve as Court Historian. I had a smattering of training from my days as a history don at Exeter College, Oxford, and my application was accepted. May I simply say that the last hundred and seven years have been amongst the happiest and most stimulating of
my life? And until the assaults, which I must shortly report, came upon us, the most peaceful, too.

So much of what the world now thinks of as Christmas and its traditions was born in these years. The Christmas letters of children began to be Magically snatched from pillows and mantelpieces and post offices around the world and transported to the vast Receiving Center built hard by Castle Noël. And if grown-ups felt they couldn’t write letters to Santa as their children did—though some secretly did—they could send season’s greetings to one another in the form of cheery cards. Unconsciously mimicking old, old traditions, Christmas trees and Christmas stockings began to appear in more and more homes. And it was in this period that a famous author caught a fleeting glimpse of Klaus on a Chronoleptic Christmas Eve flight one year. He suddenly felt inspired to write a tale of miserliness and its redemption, featuring, if only he had known it, Klaus himself as his Ghost of Christmas Present. A poet having a similar experience wrote of a Christmas sighting and, though he missed rather badly on Klaus’s character and appearance, to the astonishment of everyone at Castle Noël, he somehow got the names of every one of the Eight Flyers right. And the world grew more and
more in love with Christmas each year. For a time, anyway. For two or three mortal spans of years.