All the Elves are Dead

        He was just finishing the tenth lecture of the month and it was the last talk he had committed to give in return for the publisher taking a chance on an unknown writer.

With his bushy beard and eyebrows he looked the exact opposite of the beings he was talking about. Elves they all knew were supposed to be slender, graceful, nearly hairless magical creatures. He on the other hand was stocky, and had such poor posture that he always seemed to be crouching over the podium as he spoke.

This audience, like most of the groups he spoke before after the first few lectures, was composed of those who believed in magical creatures and were here to see how wrong he was, and good religious folks who supported his position as they knew that there was no such thing as magic and he was their leader. The later, in a previous time, would have been stacking up the kindling to burn all the witches.

He started out by questioning the supposed qualities these beings called elves were supposed to have. Elves, he said, were supposed to be extremely long lived. There were no tales of elves getting a cold or sniffles. No mention, he reminded his audience, of a plague of measles striking down the pointy eared folks of legend. No he had researched all of the books, both new and ancient and there was no mention of a sickness among the elves. Not even a hint of hiccups.

So if these almost eternal beings were supposed to be so healthy where the heck were they. Why after supposed centuries of living among mankind did they suddenly disappear as if some black plague had wiped hem off the face of the earth.

Which brought him to his next observation. The elves, according to the fancies propagated among the believers, were supposed to be among the wisest of the peoples of the olden world. Thus, he questioned, even if there had been some sort of deadly disease raging through the ranks of magical creatures, wouldn’t the all-knowing elves have been able to devise some sort of cure. This he maintained was further proof of the non-existence of elves.

He spoke eloquently for over an hour and took questions from his listeners for nearly that long after he close his formal remarks. As mentioned there were quite a few believers among those who heard him that night who threw story after story at him as proof of the existence of elves and indeed all manner of magical creatures. For each claim he had a defense, and with each refutation the believers weakened in their resolve and the non-believers cheered him on.

It was late in the evening when the last of the audience left the auditorium. Each of those who attended that night had bought a copy of his book, which had the same title as his talk, “All the Elves are Dead”. The cover had an image of an elf lying on the ground with what appeared to be an arrow, or perhaps a magical wand, sticking out of his chest. The image was a clear reflection of the intention of the book, elves are gone and probably never were here in the first place.

He thought that those who believed in magic and magical creatures were buying the books to burn in their back yards, or at the next meeting of the Middle of the Earth society. They might even be buying the books with the hope of getting them off of the streets. The others, who were fully committed to the position of “no-such-thing-as-magic,” were buying the books to bring home and throw at their children and neighbors who persisted in holding on to magic as a solution for the world’s ills. They realized that it was seemingly impossible to prove that creatures that never existed in the first place were gone, but his book was proving to be the very best defense against the fools who believed.

So powerful were both positions that his book had risen to one of the top really non-fiction books on the shelves of the world’s book stores. Not that actual brick-and-mortar bookstores weren’t becoming almost as hard to find as the supposed creatures he wrote about. Still he believed that the book was serving it purpose. There were fewer persons who believed in elves today than there were last year. In fact it was being postulated that his book alone was acting as the driving force for the collapse of the whole magical world construct.

The fact that he was also managing to make a nice little pile of money at the same time was a benefit he had not foreseen. His wife, who had warned him that he was a fool to take on this mission, was going to be pleasantly surprised.  Now he could buy things in the marketplace that she had wanted but had no money to use. When the council had approached him with the idea for the book he had resisted. While he enjoyed writing poetry, he had never been a great fan of the works of non-fiction he had been able to read.

To write the book he had to do a lot of research into the myth’s of elves. He had laughed for weeks at a time over how some stories had developed from the simplest truths about elves. After he had finished he book he faced the next major challenge, getting it published. He had no agent, and thus had to promote the book on his own. While actually getting the first several hundred copies printed hadn’t been a problem, he faced a rather monumental problem of getting them distributed and read.

Luckily today the almost magical world of the Internet existed and he had been able to send copies of the book to groups and societies who manifested a presence of role playing and fantasy which indicated a base belief in the creatures he was writing about. He had been advised to send copies to those who hated the idea of magic. They would be the logical recipients of his credo, but he had resisted. To challenge those who believed would fan greater opposition than to provide yet another ember to the warm glow that non-believers had to warm themselves by.

He had been right. The more that the believers had objected and raved against his book. The more that the non-believers took to it as a realistic thorn to stick in the sides of the believers. Even he had been surprised at how quickly the brush fire he had started had spread. In less than six months he had publishers in Europe and the US who signed book deals with him. It was the US publisher who had demanded that he agree to a book signing/lecture tour to promote the book. Up until that time he had been happy to continue his writing career from a distance.

The numbers of books that the US publisher had promised were too large to pass up and so he found himself touring the US speaking before ever larger groups with each passing week. To be honest he rather enjoyed talking with them, and he felt just a wee bit guilty crushing the hope of the believers. Still he had agreed with the council that the surge of fictional books about magic and the creature of the magical world were becoming a threat to the anonymity they had enjoyed for centuries. 

It was still highly unlikely that mankind would find a way to breach the walls that had been set to keep them out. However, with each passing year more and more people began to think that here might be something to the legends. If that trend continued who knew if they might someday find a way. After all there was magic in a small number of them as well, but fortunately they had never tried to use it.

He left the hall with his traveling assistant and caught a taxi to the train station. There he passed through the main hall and went to the lockers where he had previously stored his true baggage. He put a tag on the suitcase he had used these past several months stating it was to be sent to New York. He knew that once it arrived there it could remain uncalled for during several lifetimes before anyone would think to open it. He didn’t plan to return to this world, but if it became necessary he would have those clothes to use. 

His traveling assistant, Orego, had created his persona and developed an Internet page for him to use along with an E-mail address he was able to access from home. Strangely, neither of the publishers had thought that his bank account in Malta was unusual. He knew that Orego had chosen that bank because it was built entirely on a site that was solid rock. They both hated the temporariness of dirt. What was dirt after all, just broken rock. Stick with the original Orego had said.

With their baggage on their shoulders and everything else taken care of they slipped away through the back door of the station which opened out to a small park. There they brought out crystals that they scattered around in a circle. When they were sure that they were alone in the park, they stepped inside the circle of crystal, said a few words, and disappeared from the world of man.

Snap-Shot Thought

Recently a young woman joined us [ https://www.facebook.com/beckydanzenbaker ] who is a professional photographer, and that got me thinking about photos and what they mean to us. [Please don’t insert the Kodak slogan at this point. I looked it up and I had it wrong all these years. Turns out it isn’t “How the heck do you get this thing into the camera?” This is of course meaningless to those of you who have never loaded a real film camera.]

I suspect that photographs have different meanings depending on who we are. My very young granddaughter comes into our house for a visit every so often. I have observed that as long as she’s there long enough to take off her shoes [Note: This time period must be measured in nanoseconds.] she will always manage to come into the kitchen and look at a photograph we have there of her and her mother. It is in sepia so I suppose you could say that it’s different from other photos in the house. But I believe that it’s because it is the sole photo in the house that only has her and her mother. In this one place she doesn’t have to share her mother with her brother, friends, or even her father.

We literally have thousands of photos from our parents loaded in albums. These photos are from my mother and father’s early years. There on paper is the proof that my parents were teenagers and young folks who cavorted and snuggled. It’s reassuring to see them at a time of their lives when they were unburdened by the cares of the world, or children. Here the photos give me the chance to see a part of history before I was inserted into their lives. They look happy.

Scattered about the house are photos of our family taken at different periods in our lives. Children as babies. Family portraits with all present, but no one has gray hair or an overstuffed waist line. Only adults, and adults with children. Even a few of family pets who have gone on to better places than hiding under the dining room table at Christmas hoping for a dropped piece of turkey

.

Each of those, lets us call to mind what happened at the time those photos were taken. A mother holding a just born baby, and the hope and joy of those first few days. Games and parties for the children in our lives and how those events serve as place markers in our lives. Trips taken, both near and far. Blowing Rock, North Carolina and Warsaw, Poland. As I sit here typing, the mouse pad next to me has a photo of two reasonably intelligent people fully clothed, standing in water up to their knees. It only has meaning if you know we were standing in the Aegean Sea at the time.

Memories, emotions, love, laughter, and melancholy. Photos can bring us all of those.

Santa's Revenge

We all know about Santa, right. He has a beard that’s white as snow. His cheeks are rosy, and his nose is like a cherry. He has a little round belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly when he laughs. He’s a right jolly old elf, who with a wink can assure us that we have nothing to dread

 But suppose he’s not.

Just suppose for a minute that Santa has human tendencies just like the rest of us. Suppose that during those long winter’s nights up in his hideout at the North Pole he thinks about all of the ungrateful little twerps who never say "thank you" and leave stale cookies on a plate. Not to mention the room temperature milk that goes bad by morning. Let’s look at a few cases that examine how he might react.

The Case of Ralph Murphy.

Ralph Murphy, who as a child was called “Ralphy”, asked for an air rifle when he was ten. He wrote letters and even went to the Santa Clause at the mall and made it clear what he wanted. Instead, that year he got the deluxe set of Lincoln logs. Over fifty wooden pieces that could make houses, barns, and all sorts of wonderful things that a ten year old should be happy with. Was he happy? No! He threw a fit and threw the logs out the front door of his parent’s six bedroom house in the better part of town. There was a lot of snow that year and it was Spring before his father found the logs in the yard. The coloring had bled off and the wood was rotten. He put them in the trash.

Now you’re asking what can Santa do? Put him on the naughty list? Big deal since Ralphy no longer believed in Santa anyway. But elves have very long lives, and there is a rumor that Santa may be immortal.

Twenty two years later, Ralph Murphy was co-owner of Classy Motors a luxury car company in that same town. He was married with two children, both girls. His daughters, who were nine and ten, watched a lot of TV and for Xmas that year both wanted the latest Toy-of-the-month, a Talkative Terry. Ralph’s wife told him he had one thing to do that year. She would get everything else ready; including a present for his mother who hated her. All he had to do was to pick-up two of the Talkative Terry dolls. Make sure that they have different colored dresses so that his little darlings could tell them apart.

Now Ralph was a busy man. You could ask anyone, including his secretary who knew just what was keeping Ralph busy at the dealership. He put off buying the dolls until Xmas Eve. After all he was a wealthy man and who could afford to pay the prices that the only toy store in town charged. He thought of sending his secretary out to buy the dolls, but was afraid of what she would say to running personal errands. And so at noon he took off from the Xmas party and went down to the store to pick up the dolls.

The clerk said they were on the middle shelf in the doll section. Ralph went there and couldn’t find the dolls. He went back to the clerk, who now had three other customers waiting to check out, and told her she was mistaken. He demanded that she go to the shelf and show him the dolls. He started to raise his voice and the clerk rang for the manager to help Ralph. She checked the store inventory on her computer and it said there were a dozen of the dolls left on the shelf.

The manager came out of his office to settle a customer down and found Ralph complaining that he was a busy man. He demanded that he be given the dolls he wanted. The manager took Ralph back to the doll section and after ten minutes had to admit that they were out of them. Ralph was incensed at having wasted time at the store and demanded the manager tell him where he could find the dolls.

The manager gave him three other stores in the area that carried he dolls. The closest one being at the mall that was ten miles outside of town. Ralph stormed out of the store and raced to the mall. As he left two customers came up to the register carrying boxes of the Talkative Terry doll. 

At the mall Ralph was irate when the discount store that had advertised the doll in their window seemed to have run out of the dolls just before Ralph came through their door. He jumped into his luxury car and drove to the next town, some fifteen miles down the interstate. He checked the clock in the car and realized that he was missing the best part of his Xmas party, when half of the staff got too drunk to notice who was grabbing who.

Now two towns away from his dealership he stormed into that town’s toy store. They were mystified that they somehow had run out of the most popular toy that year. The manager was yelling at the stock manager as Ralph ran out of the store, heading for the next doll selling location. The stock manager showed the store manager that there were dozens of the dolls on the shelf that the manager had just examined along with Ralph.

Ralph was now in the city of some fifty thousand people. As he searched for a parking place, he was thinking of how many of the people he passed could buy one of his cars if he could only convince them to drive the forty miles to his dealership. He finally found a spot on the street that was five blocks away from the store he wanted. He sort of jogged to the store, and ended up looking a bit sweaty as he came through the door.

This was an exclusive store in the high end of the town’s shopping district. The store’s sales assistant looked at Ralph, who by this time was looking a little frazzled and starting to smell just a bit from all of his efforts, and wondered if Ralph could afford the inflated price that the store had put on the dolls. None the less he walked with Ralph over to the display table set up for the dolls, and was dumbfounded at the empty space where just a few minutes ago he had restacked the twenty five boxes of the dolls. They were all gone.  “No,” he assured Ralph, there weren’t any more of the dolls in the back room.

The sales assistant wrote down five other stores in town that should have the dolls. Ralph headed out the door to the closest store. Now he was actually running as he realized that the stores might be closing early for Xmas. The first store couldn’t understand it but they were out. The same happened at the next four stores. No one could understand where their stock of the dolls had gone.

Ralph was out of luck and time, as it was already dark and the streets were quickly becoming deserted. He left that last store absolutely depressed. As he got to the street he realized that he had been heading farther and farther away from where he had parked his car. He walked to his car just barely dragging himself back for what he feared would be certain doom. 

He was over-heated. He had taken off his tie, his shirt was out of his pants, and he had slipped twice in his rush. One leg of his pants showed the rip that resulted from that last fall. He was nearly back to his car when he saw a light on in a store front ahead. It was a Salvation Army store. “What the heck” he said, and went into the store. The older man, who was about to close down, took one look at Ralph and thought that he could manage a little more time to help out this lost soul.

Ralph asked the man the same question he had asked in all of the other stores he had been in that day. The man didn’t think they had such a new toy but walked with Ralph to the section where they kept their toy stock. It was pretty empty. This time of year the man explained was their busiest for toys. There was no doll to be seen.  Ralph was  leaving the store dolless, just as he had been doing all day, but the man called him back. There under one of the tables was a box. 

It was a shoe box, but inside were two dolls. Their dresses were dirty and one of them had a dent in her head but they seemed to be those very talkative dolls that had disappeared from every other store. The old man said that he was sorry they weren’t in better shape but perhaps Ralph’s children would like them anyway. He offered Ralph the box and said that since they were damaged if Ralph could spare a dollar they were his.

Ralph felt a tear roll down his face as he held the box with the dolls. The old man misinterpreted the tear and said that since it was almost Xmas the store could afford to let Ralph have the dolls for no cost. After all Ralph at that time didn’t look as if he could afford much.

 Ralph thanked the man, wished him a Merry Xmas, and handed him a crumpled bill.

Ralph knew that he was in deep trouble at home but at least he had something near to what he was supposed to get for his girls. He trudged down the street.

 The man in the Salvation Army store was turning off the lights as he made his way to the front of the store. He took the bill that Ralph had handed him and was about to place it in the store’s cash box when he realized that it said one hundred dollars. Now a tear was rolling down his face.

Ralph made it back to his car and found a parking ticket on the windshield that warned the fine of one hundred dollars would double if he failed to pay it at city hall within thirty days.

It was late when he returned to his house. As he walked through the door his wife shrieked. She took one look at the normally meticulously dressed man she married and thought that he had been mugged. He tried to explain where he had been and even showed her he parking ticket from the city as proof that he hadn’t been at the Xmas party all day.

He explained about the sudden shortage of dolls, to which she said if he hadn’t waited until the last minute he wouldn’t have had a problem. She took the box and laid the dolls out on the kitchen table. She took the dresses off the dolls and put them in the washer. Then she rummaged around in a box of toys that she had brought from her house and found a hat on a doll that she had gotten from Santa one Xmas. The hat fit on the doll with the dent, so that the dent was virtually invisible. The dresses came out of the washer clean as new.

The dolls with their clean dresses and one with a hat were wrapped in Christmas paper and left under the tree with a note from Santa. The next morning his wife would explain to the girls that when Santa makes his toys he doesn’t put them in all of those plastic boxes. A new tradition was started in the family, that toys from Santa were wrapped in paper, not the packaging that the toy companies used

Ralph’s wife had saved Xmas for the girls, but it would be weeks before she saved anything for Ralph.

The case of Susan Leary

Susan Leary was not a pleasant little girl. She was the youngest of five children and the only girl. This year she had just turned nine, but her next oldest brother was almost fourteen. Her father had died that summer, and her mother was struggling to keep the family together. To say that money was tight was a great understatement. They hadn’t lost their house but it was a close thing.

The oldest brother had a full-time job at the local auto repair shop, and had just finished high school at night. The twins, who were the middle boys, each had newspaper delivery routes. One of them had gotten a part time job stacking shelves at the neighborhood grocery store. The youngest brother raked leaves all fall and was doing a booming business shoveling sidewalks for their neighbors. Susan was busy being the baby of the family and keeping up the family’s fashion reputation at her school.

Everyone in the family, except for Susan, seemed to understand the financial situation they were in and expected little more than a warm “Merry Christmas” on the 25^th of December.

Susan had made it clear that while she didn’t expect a lot from the family she had written letters to Santa Clause and he had better deliver. She told everyone that she was embarrassed to show up at school in her green stocking cap. Every other girl in her school had a new hat for the season and they were secretly laughing behind her back because of her out dated head gear.

Their mother had taken the afternoon off from her job at the department store’s lady’s fashion department for her eldest son’s graduation. He had lost half a year because of the job he took to help keep the family’s heads above water, and she couldn’t have been prouder of him for doing it. She wished that she could have gotten him a new suit for his graduation, but even with her employee discount a man’s suit was out of her reach. She took her husband’s best suit out of the bag she had put it in after the funeral and did a little late night tailoring. While it wasn’t perfect it was the best she could manage and he looked terribly hansom as he walked up to the stage to get his diploma.  While she was pressing the pants she found a ten dollar bill in the back pocket. It was found money, so she decided to splurge and get her youngest a hat.

She went to the discount store, which was four blocks down from where she worked, and found a beautiful red Beret with a white pompom on top that made it seem very seasonal. So on Christmas morning the boys got lots of fresh fruit and candy bars in their stockings. Susan opened her package, wrapped in recycled wrapping paper from last year, and exclaimed, “Its red. Mary and Sally have red hats. I asked Santa for a blue one.” She tossed the hat onto a chair and ate the candy bar in the bottom of the stocking. Susan’s mother could feel a tear falling from her eye as she picked up the hat and wondered if the store had a blue one she could exchange for.

That next year was a little better since Susan’s mother was made the department head and got a nice raise in the balance. The hat couldn’t be exchanged and Susan went bare headed most of that winter, rather than wear a hat the same color as the rest of her pack. 

Seventeen years later found Susan, who now called herself Suzan, working in New York for a fashion design house. She had risen from a cutter to a junior design assistant and was earning a reasonable living. She hadn’t been home for Christmas for the past five years. Actually her family had moved to different regions as well. Her oldest brother had stayed in town and her mother lived quite near to him. The twins had moved west, with one in LA and the other in Phoenix. Her youngest brother was living in Florida with his second wife.  

This year just as the past she was sending their presents rather than bringing them. She had gotten those special boxes from the post office that let her ship any weight as long as it fit in the box. To make sure that the family all understood how much of a fashion expert she had become she had spent hours each night finding just the perfect piece of clothing for each of her brothers and their wives. She had looked over the latest family photos that they all sent around and coordinated the colors perfectly. When she was finished she imagined them lined up in a catalog at the finest store.

Just so that there wouldn’t be any chance that her wonderful presents wouldn’t be there in time to be opened and awed over on Christmas morning, she mailed them nearly two weeks before the big day. She fully expected to receive phone calls on Christmas morning extoling her tremendous skill in fashion.

The big day came and Suzan even passed up a brunch at one of New York’s finest restaurants to be home to accept the accolades from her siblings and their mates. She had received gifts from all of them as well and carefully unwrapped them and made notes so that after they thanked her she could with all the sincerity she could manage thank them in return for their presents to her. They had sent books, picture albums of their families, and from her mother she got a book titled “Santa’s best gift ever” and inside the book she found an airplane ticket for a round trip back home.

It was getting late and she was considering an offer she just got from her friends at work to meet them for a festive lunch. She checked her watch and recalculated the time difference from the West coast. She was sure that they all should have opened their presents by now. Why didn’t they call?

She could just see each of them holding up her choices for them and marveling. So why didn’t they call? She sat there and fretted over the silence of the phone. Finally it rang and she grabbed it before it could ring a second time. It turned out to be her friends who called to tell her she was missing a great time at the restaurant. The place even had a jolly old Saint Nick who was passing out small toys for the children and holding all the young women on his ample lap questioning whether they had been good little girls. It was great fun and if she hurried they would wait for her. “No,” she told them she had to wait for an important call from home and didn’t want to take it in a crowd.  She could hear the laughter as she hung up the phone.

Suzan opened a can of tuna fish for dinner and checked for the fifth time to see if there was a dial tone on the phone. Finally as she sat there and realized that it was getting darker outside she gave up and called her mother. Her mother, she figured, would tell her she liked what Suzan had sent no matter what.

Her mother didn’t answer her phone call and the machine went into message mode with her mother’s voice wishing whoever it was calling a merry Christmas and hopping that they got everything they wanted from Santa. Now Suzan was getting angry. Even her mother was using that old Santa bit as a part of what they had for the holiday. “Huh,” she thought, “What had that old fat man ever done for her.” She could still remember that awful Christmas right after her father died when she got the terrible hat from him.

In a fit she called her oldest brother to see if her mother might be over there. Sure enough her mother was celebrating Christmas with her oldest brother and his family. Her mother came on the phone and seemed out of breath. She had been rough-housing with her two grandchildren. She wished Suzan a merry Christmas and hopped that she was having a great time with her friends in the city. Her mother went on for ten minutes updating Suzan on how each of her brothers was doing and how they had all called earlier to tell her how they were enjoying the holiday.

Finally as her mother ran out of family tid-bits Suzan managed to bring the conversation around to the present she had sent her mother. Her mother said that the dress was a lovely shade of grey, but that the size was considerably smaller than she could wear. Since it was from one of the most exclusive stores in the Big Apple it couldn’t be exchanged in her home town. Her mother promised to mail it back to Suzan and perhaps she might be able to return it for her.

Suzan listened to what her mother was saying and was dumbfounded. She had spent almost an hour in that store getting her mother a beautiful blue sweater that was the perfect size for her. She had the store clerk box it with the special Christmas tissue paper they were using that year, and had written a small “M” on the back to be sure that she wouldn’t get it mixed up with the other purchases she had made that night.

This, Suzan realized, did not bode well for her picture of a perfect Christmas. She told her mother that there was a mix up since the grey dress was supposed to go to her youngest brother’s wife. She asked her mother to send the dress back to her and she would re-mail it out west. Her mother of course said not to worry and she would mail it for her.

Suzan was worried about the other mailings and she asked her mother if her oldest brother had liked his present. Her mother told her that he thought it was a great gag gift. The idea of surfer shorts for someone who lived in a land locked mid-western town was very amusing. While her mother was talking Suzan had gotten out her list of who got which presents. As she checked the shorts were supposed to go to her brother who lived in Los Angeles.  That made two packages that had gone wrong. She was almost afraid to ask what her brother’s wife thought of what Suzan had sent her. Her mother paused for a minute, and then said that his wife wasn’t sure that the bikini was quite the right for their swim club. But that she loved the color and might wear it with a gauzy top to cover it.

Suzan tried to explain how she must have mixed up the packages, but her mother said that it was no big thing and it was the thought that she had remembered them all that counted. Perhaps next year she could bring all of her presents with her if she visited at Christmas since her other brothers were all bringing their families back home for the holidays.

She told her mother that it was a great idea and she would start to plan for it. They closed the call with merry Christmases for each other.

Suzan sat there in her New York apartment as the dark started to close in and realized that all of the effort she had put into getting everyone just what they would love, had been wasted. What was even more disturbing was how everyone still seemed to love what she has mis-sent them.

The case of John Holder

Timmy was nearly ten years old. He and his father John Holder lived alone in a small suburb of Detroit. Timmy’s mother had died before he had turned five. It had been right around this time of year when all of the store fronts had lots of snow and men dressed in red suits appeared on every street corner ringing their bells. It might have been because of his mother’s death, but Timmy’s father never seemed to enjoy Christmas.

 OH they had one of those fake Christmas trees and each year Timmy’s father brought out a small box of ornaments for the tree. The tree was almost two feet tall and they placed it on a table in the living room of their apartment. It cheered Timmy to see it when he would come home from school, but his dad seemed to avoid looking at it.

This year had been particularly hard since the automobile industry was suffering from one of its occasional down turns and that meant that the factory where Timmy’s father worked was eliminating all the overtime that used to help pay for Christmas presents.  John Holder had told Timmy that they might have to be a little careful with their money for a while and Timmy said that he understood.

 That year he had asked Santa to help his dad pay the bills. He told Santa in a letter that he didn’t need any new toys.  

It was a week before Christmas, when John Holder looked through the mail hoping that there wouldn’t be any unexpected bills. Instead he found an envelope with his mother-in-laws address listed in the top left corner. Timmy had gone to bed for the night and John was alone in the living room. He had shut off the Christmas tree’s lights as soon as Timmy left the room.

He slit open the envelope and found two cards inside. One was addresses to him and the other to Timmy. The card with his name on it had a note from his wife’s mother saying that she hoped all was well. She was sorry that they wouldn’t be able to visit her this year. Florida was fine but she said she missed the snow and her grandson. 

She had heard that times were slow in the car business so instead of sending a toy and a tie, she sent a check. She hoped Timmy’s father would spend a part of the check on a small toy for Timmy and say it came from Santa. John Holder unfolded the check and saw that it was for $100. That was going to be a big help getting through the holidays. He checked the other card and it was just a “Merry Christmas from Grandma” card with a note saying she missed her little boy.

John Holder thought about it and remembered that Timmy had said he understood that money was tight and he said he didn’t need any more toys. With that thought in mind he figured that he could deposit the check, pay his bills, and save what little he had in his savings account for another month. He knew Timmy would understand and his wife’s mother would never find out.

And so that year Timmy and his dad celebrated Christmas together in their apartment. His dad had fixed a small turkey breast for their dinner and together they watched a movie about a family in the fifties who had a really hard Christmas. Timmy sat in his dad’s lap while they watched the movie, even though he knew he was getting too old for that sort of thing but somehow at Christmas it seemed OK.

John Holder was right. Timmy never asked for any toys that year and his wife’s mother never found out that Timmy didn’t get anything from Santa that year. They never found out, but someone knew.

The snow had started to melt away in the spring but Mother Nature had one good snow storm left. It was near the end of March. Well after most people expected any more snow, when the winds blew in from Northern Canada and the moisture collected off of the lake. People in Detroit went to sleep with the weatherman warning they might get a “dusting” of snow during the night

At midnight, when all good reindeer were in bed the snow started to fall. It kept falling throughout the night. By six, when John Holder got up to get ready for work, he was stunned to see more than a foot of snow covering his yard and driveway. Sure enough when he turned on the TV he saw a banner running across the bottom of the screen that said all public schools were closed for the day. 

He phoned his neighbor and asked if it would be OK if Timmy came over to her place while he was at work. She agreed since Timmy was in fact one of the best behaved boys on the block. John realized that if he was to make it to work on time he needed to get outside and start shoveling all of the snow off of the driveway. He called to Timmy and told him he didn’t have to go to school today and that he was going to spend the day next door at the neighbors. Then he went outside and started to shovel

He started at the top of the driveway where it met the doors of the garage. Then he pushed the snow down and off of the surface of the driveway. They didn’t have a huge driveway, but it was more than ten feet long, and John Holder knew it was going to take a while to move all of that snow. He had just about finished when a snow plow from the city came by and cleared the street. Of course it also blocked off the end of the driveway he had just shoveled.

Back he went to redo the last part of the job. He had almost cleared the last bit when he felt his feet start to slip on something and he fell. He landed on his back and it hurt like all heck. He got back up and almost gave up the effort as the pain shot up his spine. He stumbled back to the house and chugged a handful of aspirin.  He operated some heavy machinery at work and didn’t dare take anything stronger.

He called out to Timmy who was on his way down to the kitchen and reminded him to have some cereal for breakfast and then to go over to the neighbor’s house in about an hour. Then John Holder made his way to the garage. He managed to get the door open without crying out and then backed the car out, and returned to the door to close it before he drove off to work. His back would bother him for the next one hundred days and then mysteriously heal itself.

Timmy got his gloves and coat on and started to go over to the neighbor’s house for the day. He put several books into his back pack as well as one of his few games that he knew the boys in that house enjoyed playing. The easiest way for him to get there was to go down the driveway that his father had already shoveled and then use the street to cross to the neighbor’s yard.

Timmy got to the end of the driveway and just as he was about to go into the street he saw something shinny on the ground right at the end of the driveway. He reached down and found a string of Jingle Bells just lying there as if someone had placed them there for him to find. He put the bells in his pocket and smiled as each step he took jingled the bells. It was great fun and Timmy thought of the bells as a late Christmas present from Santa.