The Christmas Chronicles (14 page)

“It was fantastic!” the boy said, checking his recording equipment. “I’m glad we got it down.”

“You really are a born storyteller,” my wife said, smiling. “How do you come up with it all?
The Green Book.
I like it.”

I was flabbergasted. They didn’t believe me. Was Rolf Eckhof at work even in my own family? “Wait, wait,” I said. “What about how I was stuck in the snow up on the mountain? How do you explain that I got home?”

My wife got a funny sort of worried look on her face. She excused herself for a moment and came back with her own piece of paper. “This is the notification from the tow-truck driver that he submitted his bill to our insurance
company.” She handed me the email. “For pulling you out of the snow last night.”

I stared at the paper. I was in shock. “I’m telling you, cross my heart and hope to never celebrate Christmas again, everything I’ve told you is true,” I said.

The boys were looking a little uncomfortable. My wife frowned. “Honestly, dear, why do you have to take everything so far? We’ve said we like your story.”

“But it isn’t a story,” I protested weakly.

“I’m sure you boys have lots to do on a Saturday,” my wife said.

“Right,” said one.

“Thanks for the great story, Dad!” said the other.

“I told you, it isn’t …” But they were gone. I looked at the paper again. “There was no tow truck,” I said.

“Oh, honestly,” said my wife. “The evidence is staring you in the face.”

The next couple of weeks were the most miserable I can remember. I would try to talk to my family about my experience, try to persuade them about Klaus and the True North, and at first they were patient, but before long they just didn’t want to hear about it anymore. I didn’t mention it to anyone else. And as the bright memory of that day in the mountains began to recede into the past, it faded and
got muddled. Had I really seen an Elevated Spirit? Had I really heard a reindeer talk? It had all seemed so real, but maybe it wasn’t. On one subject, however, I was clear. Or mostly. There had been no tow truck. How could I have forgotten a whole tow truck? After a week my mind started to lose the words of
The Green Book.
It was recorded, of course, but I found I didn’t want to go back and listen to it.

Usually in December, I attack Christmas tasks with a kind of manic glee. This year I found I just wasn’t up to it. I asked the boys to put up the Christmas lights. I found it hard to shop for presents. The heart had gone out of the holidays, and everything around me began to look a little … gray.

But on Christmas Eve, I tried to pull myself together. I figured I owed it to my family. It had snowed a couple of days before, and the world was fresh and white again. I bundled up and went for a late afternoon walk in the neighborhood, just to try to straighten myself out. As I trudged along, I brooded on all that had happened, and for some reason I began thinking about it in a new way: Klaus in his village, figuring out how to help his mourning neighbors and finding joy in it. Anna and then Dasher bringing hope to Klaus when he despaired of making his Christmas Eve deliveries. And then suddenly, easily, like a whisper in the
December air, a great truth breathed gently into me and blew away the gray: If the True North and Castle Noël and Anna’s maple sugar cookies were made up, then the hope and joy they represented were not. And if I had concocted the whole story because I wanted so fervently to believe in Christmas Magic, well, Christmas was magic enough all on its own. It didn’t need my story. Hope and joy. They were enough to live a life on.

As I walked back home, the sun began to set. On the houses I passed, Christmas lights started to wink on. In the east, Jupiter was rising above the mountains. My spirits lifted. I sang a carol softly to myself: “God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay.” I was happy about Christmas again.

In fact I was so happy that as I plodded up our steep driveway and admired the lights the boys had put up—we favor the big colored bulbs—I didn’t really notice a sharp spicy scent in the air. And when I saw one boy at the side of the house scanning the horizon in high excitement, I didn’t at first understand he was looking for me.

But he was. “Dad!” he shouted. “Thank goodness you’re home! Come into the backyard!” And then, when I didn’t actually run, he shouted, “Hurry! Come on!” and disappeared around the corner of the house.

That’s when I registered the scent in the air.
Oh my,
I thought, and then,
Could it be?
I wondered. I sprinted into the backyard.

There was my wife bundled up in a quilt and pack boots as though she had just come out from a long winter’s nap.
How like Anna she looks!
I suddenly thought. And there were the boys, underdressed for the cold as usual. And all three were staring with shining eyes.

What were they staring at? Why, at two silver pots, each engraved with a star and a reindeer rampant. And at two variegated holly bushes in silver pots from which the sweet scent of peppermint was perfuming the frosty air. And at the new snow in our backyard, all patterned and churned with the hoof marks of reindeer and the track of a sleigh taking off into the Christmas Eve sky.

Oh, I must tell you: When we called our insurance company after Christmas, they knew nothing about any tow truck.

Spread the word.

T
IM
S
LOVER
is a writer and professor of theater at the University of Utah. His plays have been produced off-Broadway and in theaters throughout the United States and in London, where he spends part of each year. His wife, usefully, is a marriage and family therapist, and their two sons were the original audience for
The Christmas Chronicles.
For the purposes of yuletide decorating, each Christmas Slover continues to cut a few pine boughs at an undisclosed location.