The Fat Man_ A Tale of North Pole Noir - Ken Harmon [75]
Oh, you better not pout!
You better not cry!
Santa picked me up and carried me to a quiet place while the sleigh loading was finishing. He put me on his lap and gave me a pat on the back. “Thank you again for discovering this lesson, Gumdrop,” Santa said. “But I’m interested in what brought about your change of heart.”
I told him the story of the kid with the blanket up on the roof. About what the kid said about doing things out of love, instead of making sure everything was fair. How love, simple love, was what we should aim for and let everything else just fall away.
He sees you when you’re sleeping,
He knows when you’re awake!
“That’s very wise advice from such a little boy,” Santa said with a twinkle in his eye. “Tell me more about him.”
“He was just a kid, Nick,” I said. “Maybe seven or eight, nothing special, had a blanket with him.”
“A blanket, huh,” Santa said.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness’ sake!
“You know, Gumdrop,” Santa said. “Sometimes blankets are called swaddling clothes. I’m just saying. You may have just had the best Christmas gift of all of us.”
CHAPTER 29
Gather Near to Us Once More
All of that was a long, long time ago. I kept elfing for a couple hundred years more, and then decided to retire. It was time. I’d made a lot of toys, enjoyed many, many Christmases, and had been blessed more than I deserved. I decided to quit while I was ahead and let some younger elves know the joy I discovered. Santa said that I had earned the privilege of throwing another Yule log on the fire and to stay at home and do my best to drive Rosebud crazy.
Yeah, I surrendered. Rosebud and I got hitched pretty much after Misfits joined the regular toys in going to boys and girls all over the world. Santa officiated and Dingleberry Fizz was both best man and maid of honor. He cried like a baby, the little sap.
A lot of credit was heaped on me for the success of buddying Misfits and regular toys, but Dingleberry did all the heavy lifting. He worked up an entire formula for matching the right toys together and then putting those toy teams with the right kid so that now Kringle Town doesn’t even see a toy as a regular or a Misfit. They’re just a toy, a gift. They’re something special. Only an elf with a heart as big as a house can do that, so when a kid squeals with glee at their present and learns to love it, flaws and all, thank Dingleberry Fizz.
Ding will never retire. He’s busier than ever with the Toy Buddy Program and, of course, organizing the Kringle Town Comic Con and blogging about By George Adventures in his spare time. Rosebud and I don’t see him as often as we like. Every once in a while, Rosebud will whip up some big feast (I insist on swan, naturally), and Ding will come over and we’ll talk and laugh all night long. We’re happy, but seeing Dingleberry Fizz raises our spirits even more.
Though times have changed and the toys are more complex than ever, Santa is still the same, jolly and bright. The Fat Man is back up to “shakes like a bowl full of jelly” and still gets a charge out of the kids’ joy. The other thing I noticed is that, because Santa’s gifts are made and given completely in love, the kids have changed a little too. Oh sure, there are still some little thugs out there who would gripe about anything, but in some magical way, the kids seem to really receive their gifts as something special, and that’s not bad. Not bad at all.
My bride does a little bit of everything. She quit the paper after winning every piece of newspaper hardware she could get and turned to writing a series of mystery novels set in Kringle Town. The North Pole Noir series stars a tart-mouthed, peppermint-chewing investigative reporter named Lucy Lemonade. The dame is always stumbling onto trouble, but you can always count on Lemonade to solve the caper and lock up the bad guy by the last page. The books are as hot as sunburn, and Rosebud has been cranking out about a book a year with titles like Rudolph and the Foggy Bog, The Mysterious Myrrh