Christmas 2012 - There is but one...

Verification Log

a story for Christmas 2008
by
Paul Brazier & Juliet Eyeions

?“There he is now!” Tim called. A thin, elderly man in a red all-weather jacket strode along the grassy verge of the road. White hair straggled from beneath a shapeless black hat and his boots and dark corduroy trousers were liberally caked with mud. “Look, kids, it’s Santa on his holidays!”
    Fiona winced and gritted out, “Tim, we talked about this!” It was only last night they had discussed how they should play down the Santa Claus stuff. While Jason was too young to know any different, Sally was very bright for her age and she was starting to question everything. They really shouldn’t encourage childish fantasies – but Tim was on a roll.
    “Christmas is only next week! D’you suppose the reindeer are all ready to go? Is Rudolf ready to lead Dasher and Prancer and Dancer and Vixen and Cupid and Comet and Dunder and Blixem out to deliver presents to good children everywhere? Don’t you think it’s about time he got back to Lapland?”
    “You could stop and ask him, Dad.” Sally had always been a level-headed child.
    But the old man was dwindling in the rear-view mirror and Fiona’s words were beginning the percolate Tim’s creative flurry.
    “Ahh, no, Sally, we… haven’t got time. We’ll be late and…” he couldn’t help himself, “… and, anyway, you wouldn’t want Santa to think we’d seen through his disguise, would you? He definitely wouldn’t come at Christmas then!”
    Beside him, Fiona groaned, while Sally, sitting high behind him on her booster cushion, wondered why he was fibbing and what about. She was aware that there were a lot of stories about Santa but couldn’t make up her mind whether he was a fantasy figure invented to keep children quiet and well-behaved or a real magical being who visited once a year. But if he was, how on Earth could he visit millions of homes in a single night? And what did he do for the rest of the year? When she had asked her Dad, he had waffled and pointed out the old rambler they had just passed, who they often saw on their way to school.
    Sally wasn’t satisfied with this blather. She wanted some tangible evidence beyond the neat stacks of presents under the tree on Xmas morning. In the absence of any help from her parents, she had decided to gather evidence for and against and was keeping a log of any she found – she had been tempted to call it a Yule Log but decided it wasn’t serious enough for her purposes and, mindful of what she had learned in science lessons at school, settled on calling it her “Verification Log”.
    She pulled it from her school bag now, and noted down Dad’s outburst and how he had backed down and fibbed after Mum mumbled something to him. The book was filling up with such contradictions but, as she looked over the entries, no definite pattern emerged. She hoped to have some firm evidence soon. She had devised a Santa detector and was determined to make sure it was working all through Christmas Eve night. It was her very own secret. She had told no one, not even Mum and Dad. If she had, she was sure they would have found some way to mess up her experiment and she was burning to be sure, one way or the other, even at the expense of losing out on Christmas presents in future.

Once the car was out of sight, the old man stepped off the road into a thicket and, checking carefully to make sure no one was watching, he vanished.
    He needed his daily walk to keep fit and, for all that he had the entire world to choose from, loved more than anything walking in the English countryside in Winter. The quiet confidence of the trees that there would be another spring and another green coat to wear to drink the sunlight always made him feel the joy of hope, while the cold air was bracing and helped keep up his trademark rubicund complexion.
    But there was work to do now. The reindeer might not take an active part in the delivery of presents any more – the population explosion of the past two hundred years had made it physically impossible to get to every home in a single night, even for flying reindeer – but they were still magical beings. While they were immortal for as long as anyone believed in them, they were subject to all the other physical problems of existence and needed food and exercise and grooming and mucking out – and Rudolph’s nose was in need of a good shine.
    Then he had to speak to the Support Elves about the Trouble with the Trapezium Minitron. This was the device that allowed him to move around the world almost instantaneously and which he had just used to return from England. It had been created to address the problem that had retired the reindeer; that it was no longer physically possible for him to visit every child to deliver gifts in a single night.
    One Christmas when he had returned from delivering in his sleigh only moments before dawn, the Accounting Trolls had insisted he reconcile policy with resources. It had become clear that the policy of presents for everyone was untenable for, while the credit crunch is no bother for anyone with unlimited magical resources, time is finite and having only a single night to deliver was the limiting factor.
    He had had to call in the Elves.
    In their peculiarly latitudinal way, the Elves had seen the problem not as of logistics or distance, but primarily of magnitude. For a much larger being, distances are relatively much smaller. So they developed an idea they had found in a classic science fiction novel about a Galactic Hero called Bill, where instead of making the distances smaller, they made the traveller bigger, and built the Trapezium Microtron.
    It worked by reading the location of the centre of his being, making him so huge that his destination became enclosed in his body, moving his centre to that location and shrinking him again. Being the same mass but much larger meant his substance became attenuated, almost misty, so he could pass through anything solid during the transitions.
    Even this solution, which allowed him to move from place to place in microseconds, was not sufficient, however. He still couldn’t visit billions of children individually in a single night. So the second prong of the Elvish solution was to fine-tune demand. First, they had seeded humanity with the idea that present-giving should be shared; all presents should be gathered under the Christmas Tree. This more than halved the visit-need – from one per child to one per dwelling.
    But their master stroke was then to entice humans into believing they knew better than anyone what their children wanted and so buy presents to supplement the benison they found under their trees. Soon, the parents had taken over almost the whole giving process, reducing by several magnitudes the physical burden of delivering presents.
    Of course, while these presents were wonderful, they weren’t magical. They needed fairy dust to bring the magical spirit of Christmas fully alive in everyone’s hearts. And the Trapezium Minitron solved this problem perfectly – when it worked.
    Santa simply made himself absolutely huge then, using a simple siphon-like device the Elves had attached to the Minitron, ran a finger through the rows and rows of houses, depositing an insignificant and anonymous package among the human gifts in each home – how often have you wondered who gave whom that little china dog, or where that unusual tree bauble came from, then forgotten about it in the general bohhomie? That was Santa’s fairy dust package, and it was this process he wanted to talk to the Elves about.
    He had been conducting dry runs in an Australian desert recently and there had been an occasional hiccough where the device generated a negative feedback loop and, instead of sending, it received. After a while, he had learned how to to flip the settings into reverse momentarily to return the odd wallaby or parakeet he had picked up; but the gila monster – his first inadvertent transportee – still perched stubbornly in the back of his sleigh, blinking occasionally and tasting the air with its tongue, a living statue of itself, apparently content with Lapland and in no hurry to return to the Outback. Santa needed to send the gila monster home; and he needed the Elves to ensure this glitch could never happen on a delivery run. But the Accounting Trolls would be there too and they did tend to take over.

Christmas Eve was almost over. Sally watched quietly behind the bannisters as Dad, dressed in an implausible red and ermine suit, magnificent false white whiskers and a ridiculous prosthetic belly to fill out the costume, took all the presents from their “secret” hiding place and put them beneath the tree. He then drank the port and ate the mince pies they had put out for Santa and, turning away from the mantlepiece, encountered Fiona standing coyly beneath the mistletoe in the middle of the room.
    “You are a big softie,” she said, putting her arms as nearly around him as she could reach. “I sometimes wonder whether you do this for yourself or the kids.”
    “Oh, I just like the extra port and mince pies. No, really, who am I kidding. Santa exists for our children just like he did for me when I was a kid and I loved that. I want Sally and Jason to enjoy it as much as I did. So I do my best to keep up the illusion for them.”
    Aha, thought Sally, something new. She noted it solemly in her log. Now Mum pulled the false whiskers away from Dad’s face and planted a huge great smackeroo on his lips.
    “I think it’s past time we were all in bed,” she said in a husky voice, and turned and led him towards the stairs. Sally shrank back into her hideout until they had gone into their room, then crawled out and tiptoed down the stairs. She was going to sit by the fire all night and see if any other Santas came along.

Santa was not having a good Christmas. He had turned on the Minitron and loaded his destination file and Trapezium had promptly crashed. So he had halved the file and started again. With the machine humming gently and apparently working now, he had enlarged himself until the planet sat on his lap like a great blue-and-green cloud-shrouded balloon. He always began about a hand-span into the darkness behind the dusk terminator, which was just after midnight for the locals, and worked around the planet towards the dawn. He could never quite keep up with the terminator but nevertheless had always managed to be done before dawn touched the last household.
But the crash had delayed his start so he had tried to go faster than usual and he thought that might be the reason the Minitron was glitching more than usual. A very bewildered looking red squirrel was attempting to stare down the gila monster and various bits of fir tree were scattered across the floor. Then the device burped again and delivered a spitting, hissing ball of fur and teeth and claws into the mathom hopper. He stepped down from the control seat and attempted to fish the feline fury from the cloud of shredded gift wrap and ribbon, so it is hardly surprising he didn’t notice a little girl in pyjamas, creature slippers and dressing gown pop out of the Minitron and sprawl on the floor behind him.

Sally had become bored watching the chimney for interlopers. On one of her frequent checks to make sure her Santa-Spotter was still on and functioning, she had decided to have a sneak preview of the presents, and had crawled in under the Christmas Tree, only to find Greyfire, their adorable tom cat, curled up among the gifts.
    She had reached out to tickle his ears when he had suddenly leaped up, all his fur on end, arched his back and, hissing, had vanished with a silent, sparkly pop. She had barely begun to wonder what on Earth had happened when the sparkles reappeared and enveloped her and, with another silent sparkly pop, she was sprawling on her back in a vast, cold room filled with weird machinery behind a figure in a red suit like Dad’s who appeared to be trying to extract an angry cat from a huge bin filled with Christmas presents.
    “Gotcha!,” the figure cried and turned towards her. A gorgeous grey tabby and white tom-cat hung wriggling and hissing from his hand.
    “Greyfire!” she cried, at which the figure in red let go in surprise. The cat fell to the floor and scampered away to hide behind the vast chair built into the machinery.
    “Who on Earth are you?” the figure in red cried, plainly distressed. “And what are you doing here?”
    Alarmed in her turn by his tone, she stepped back and stumbled over the foot rail of the chair. In reaching out to save herself from falling, she knocked a huge bar which slid meekly away at her touch and snicked into place as if it were happy to be home.
    The machine noise died away and it suddenly became very quiet in the vast hall.
    “What have you done?” cried the figure in red. “What have you done…?” He suddenly went quiet, turned to the machine and flicked a couple of switches.
    A message scrolled up before him –

hi santa.
congratulations on finding the secret switch. the machine is now on full auto setting and fairy dust is being delivered to all the addresses you loaded without need of further intervention from you. this has always been possible but we didn’t want you to feel unwanted. now you can relax and enjoy the holiday just like everyone else. merry christmas and many happy and prosperous new years to you.
the elves

He sat in the control chair, utterly dismayed.
    “I’ve worked for so long to make this system work. Now I find I haven’t been needed for years.”
    “Oh, but you have,” said Sally. He looked down, suddenly reminded she was here and shouldn’t be.
    “Oh, dear,” he said. “The machine must have picked you up by mistake and now I don’t know what the co-ordinates of your source was. How on Earth am I going to get you home?”
    “You’re not listening to me,” she cried. “I’ve been researching this – ” she waved her Verification Log – “and if you weren’t needed you wouldn’t be here!”
    “What?” he mumbled.
    “You’re magical. You can only exist if people believe in you. So if you exist, you must be needed! You are the spirit of Christmas. Without you, there would be no Christmas. The work wasn’t necessary except to help you justify your existence. Everyone knows you are vital to Christmas. You should recognise it yourself.”
    “I see what you mean,” he said, and the wrinkles in his forehead began to smooth out. “I’m only needed really for ceremonial purposes, which is what the reindeer have been telling me about themselves for years.
    “Once the gifting is done, Rudolph and I often take the other reindeer and the sleigh for a quick tour of the dawn, so early rising children might glimpse us as we sail across the brightling sky.”
    Now he had calmed down, the cat had emerged from behind the chair and was weaving around Sally’s legs. She picked him up and scratched his ears.
    “Come, little girl, bring your cat and we will go and tour the dawn together. And I suspect Rudolph will know how to find your home and get you there before you are missed.”
    He had barely finished speaking when, with a swish and a tiny thump, the sleigh plumped down in front of them, drawn by its famous team of reindeer.
    “Climb in, little one.” She made to get into the sleigh but stopped, startled. The red squirrel and the gila monster were still staring at one another in the back.
    “Don’t worry about them,” said Santa, “They just need a ride home too. Now, let me show you how to drive a magic sleigh,” and he picked her up and sat her on the bench beside him.
    “Take the reins lightly in both hands. Just a twitch either side will make Rudolph lead the other reindeer in that direction. Now, to make the sleigh stop, you shout ‘Whoa!’ but most important is how to make it go. Shout ‘Ho!’ to let the reindeer know you are ready to leave, then ‘Ho, ho!’ to move forward and then, when you are ready to fly, cry ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ and you will be up, up and away.”
    She took the reins in her hands and cried, “ho, ho, ho!” and the reindeer rose up into the sky, drawing the sleigh effortlessly behind them, and across the face of the full, fat moon and the glistening blanket of stars they flew, racing the dawn around the world.

“Sally,” said Tim, “Sally! Wake up.” She stirred, curled up beneath the Christmas tree, deep in the huge new silver and black hearth rug Dad had bought for Christmas, snug among all the presents and sparkle and glitter.
    “Sally!” Tim spoke with more authority now. “We need to tell you the truth about Santa.” He and Fiona had discussed it that morning, and this seemed best.
    But she just snuggled deeper into the rug.
    “I already know about Santa, Daddy,” she murmured, clutching her Verification Log. “I found out for myself. I know!” She turned over to go back to sleep and, as she snuggled down, faintly but distinctly, the eternal cry of Christmas drifted out into the still morning. “Ho ho ho,” she cried quietly. “Ho ho ho!”

• F I N •

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