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Nicholas St. North had grown used to the lights winking out. It happened all the time. Children grew up, grew older, harder. They lost their wonder with things unknown, things unseen, promises of a jolly old man sneaking into their homes through their chimneys, leaving the perfect gifts wrapped perfectly beneath perfectly trimmed trees. He had come to understand that they couldn’t possibly believe forever, especially not these days. Not when too often the perfect gift was not something that could be wrapped, when the idea of a tree was sometimes abandoned in favor of heat and food, when chimneys had in many places become hard to come by. Even though those very things used to be what fueled the greatest belief of all.
Yes. North had long ago made his peace with the little lights of belief on the globe in his workshop flickering out like depleted candles. But this was a bit of an unusual case.
It was a week ‘til Christmas, smack in the middle of a pleasantly snowy December, when belief, for all intents and purposes, should have been at an all-time high. Yet there they had gone, a dozen and a half tiny believers clustered in a tiny little town winked out from existence at once. North reached up and tapped his fingernail experimentally upon the surface of the globe as if it could possibly have had an electricity malfunction. It, of course, couldn’t, not running on electricity but on faith.
He hummed, turning away, the tapping of his fingernail now becoming lost in the white thick of his beard. It was a week until Christmas, and the yetis would have a lecture and a half for him when he returned, but Tsar Lunar help him, he needed to find out what had happened.
North made a mental note of the missing lights’ location, and went digging for a snow globe.
The portal spat him out in the woods on the fringe of an empty elementary school playground. It was cold, but not North Pole cold; hastily, he tore the heavy coat from his shoulders and tossed it back through before the door to his workshop snapped shut. The elves would take care of it. They liked red things.
Better suited to the weather now, and better camouflaged, North stepped out through sparse, hibernating branches towards the building. High windows rimmed the red brick structure’s perimeter, every shade drawn as if to coax in as many rays of the weak winter sun it could. Inside, he found with delight, little white lights twinkled around the room to make up for the sun’s lack, lining the ceiling, the bookcases, the cubbyholes. Across the room from the window into which North peered, across rows formed out of nineteen young children seated obediently at their desks, a green construction paper tree hung on the back of the door, wrapped with a gold plastic garland and topped with a gold plastic star and bedecked with twenty little paper ornaments marked proudly with the names of the teacher and her students. Nineteen red. One blue. Three or more packs of green paper had been used up elsewhere, out of which had been formed holly leaves, wreaths, poinsettia leaves—mimicking every little bit of foliage the winter grudgingly allowed.
So cheery! So festive! But this had been the spot where the dozen and a half lights had winked out at once. How could it be? North peered closer, ears pricked, eyes squinting. One of the perks of being Santa Claus was that mere windows and distance and point of view were no object when it came to seeing children.
And see them he did. The students in their neat, square rows, their expressions a variety pack of misery. Some boys and girls looked downtrodden, as if someone had just told them the beloved class hamster had died. Some had their chins jutting out in one last show of defiance they no longer felt burning in their hearts. One or two were crying. Only one girl, near the front, on the right side, had her expression cooled into something resembling calm. Smugness, that of a child sure of her truth.
The teacher at the front of the class was pleading with them all to calm, her long thin fingers spread as if each could reach out to a spurned child’s heart and placate it.
“Alright, now let’s calm down, please,” North heard her say, for his hearing, old as his ears were, was as good as his sight. “It’s important to remember to hold fast to what you believe in. It’s not right to go trying to tear down others’ way of living if it’s not harming you.” Her strict dark gaze pointed briefly at the calm girl in the front. ”Do you understand?”
The girl’s fists inside her desks clenched. ”But it is harming me!” she responded, to the arching of her teacher’s stern eyebrows. “Santa Claus is just a—”
“Just as important to your classmates,” said the teacher firmly, “as your traditions are to you. And that’s the end of it. Chris, come up and get a tissue from my desk. We’ll continue on with our lesson.” The girl remained silent as the teacher slipped back to the front of the room, but once her back was turned, the girl narrowed her eyes into a glare.
North clucked his tongue. From behind the window, he watched the girl fold her arms and fold in on herself and ran mentally through his lists, thinking he was quite sure upon which he would find her. But her name, as clear to him as the expression on her face, was not on either one. It never had been.
The blue ornament.
“Ahh,” whispered North.
A couple years ago, when video games had begun to feature strongly in the letters he received from children, North had become aware of a strange phenomenon that had stuck in his memory. In some games, there would be many houses, many rooms, many areas one could enter, controlling the little collection of colored blocks on the screen—but many others that simply wouldn’t open, that were there for decoration, to fill out the scenery. They had no other useful purpose.
This house, and many others like it, had often struck North like that: simply there, not to be entered. Until tonight. Clinging carefully to the rooftop, North felt a thrill of excitement at climbing into such a place, and wondered briefly why he had never done it before.
Compared to the other houses on the block, it was dark, blending gently into the cold blackness of winter. Everywhere he looked, as he stood on the roof, bright squares and arcs of tiny lights winked back, lines of joy wrapped around tree branches like brilliant electric leaves, showing off roofs and windows and railings even in the darkest hours of the year. Below him, in one little window, four little candles had been burning quietly for almost an hour, and would soon wink out.
He crept inside.
The girl, snuggled in her new fluffy bathrobe, was sitting up in the bed she was meant to be asleep in, reading a new book by flashlight beam. She was so absorbed that for a moment or two he could watch her unopposed from the darkest corner of her room. The reflected light off the pages of her book cast an unruly shadow of curls on the wall behind her, and the curve of her nose in the shadow of her profile reminded him strongly of home.
She looked up to flick to a new page, and the beam of her flashlight caught the glimmer of his gaze. She gasped, panicked, until her light revealed the full form of him.
Then she narrowed her eyes again, as she had done to her teacher’s back.
“Is this a joke?” she demanded.
“No joke,” North promised, holding out his hands as if surrendering from the corner of her room.
“Your costume isn’t very good,” said the girl, her eyes narrowing further. She glanced down at her book briefly, as if it were responsible for this. ”Am I dreaming?”
“Maybe,” North conceded, raising himself to his feet. The girl’s eyes, he noted with some satisfaction, widened a little as he stood at his full height.
“Okay,” she said, seeming calmed by this.
“Can we talk?” North stepped carefully over the stuffed animals littering the floor toward her bed, and sat down at the foot as she nodded, once.
“What are we talking about?”
The bed shifted as North settled his substantial weight at one end. The girl bookmarked her place in her story and drew her knees up to her chest, watching him closely.
“About what you said to your friends today,” North said, gently keeping an accusatory tone out of his voice.
She dodged him anyway, her voice pitching higher in denial. ”About what?”
“Santa Claus?” he reminded her, eyes twinkling.
“Oh.” She paused. ”This is just a dream. I’m still right.”
“Of course,” North soothed, patting the covers just over one of her small feet. “Thing is, a lot of your friends—a lot of children—really need Santa Claus right now.”
“Why?” She clutched her book to her chest. ”He’s not—you’re not real.”
North looked at the cover of her book, pointedly. It depicted a pair of children dressed in modern clothing, riding with a medieval knight on horseback.
“It’s just a story,” she exclaimed, exasperated.
“And maybe,” North shrugged, “so am I. But sometimes stories are even more important than real life.”
“They think you’re real.”
“And so? What if they do? What is the harm?”
“Because!” she cried, her face scrunching up. “Because you’re everywhere!”
“I am,” North agreed, nodding.
“But it’s not Christmas yet! It’s Hanukkah, and you’re still everywhere!”
“Ahh.”
Tears had sprung to the girl’s eyes, but North sat with his hands tightly folded, so as not to interrupt her.
“Every year it’s Hanukkah, and there are Christmas lights up! And Christmas carols on the radio, and Santa Claus in the mall! Everyone on TV celebrates Christmas! Every door at school has a Christmas tree with Christmas presents under it! Tomorrow I’m ‘sposed to go sing Christmas carols at the old people home! And when we left the store yesterday they said ‘Merry Christmas!’ But it’s not even Christmas!” she finished, her words boiling over with young, mistreated tears. “It’s Hanukkah!”
North struggled with where to begin. His memory stretched back to her classroom, to the scene that had been surrounded by colored construction paper shapes that had somehow personally offended. ”You had a Hanukkah ornament,” he offered. She stared at him, a mixture of pain and disbelief.
“Listen,” he hurried onward. “Christmas is...is lots of things, to a lot of people. For many people, it is sacred—religious. Very important.”
“But not for everyone!”
“No,” North agreed soothingly. “For many other people, it’s a time of wonder. Hope. Light.”
“But not for everyone!” the little girl insisted, her pain filling her voice like needles.
“Listen,” North insisted, ducking his head to look her in the eye. “For a lot of people, this is a time to come together. To give and receive gifts. To shine lights into the darkness and warm the cold of winter. A time for miracles.” He raised a heavy eyebrow at her, even as her gaze narrowed again. ”Does that sound familiar to you?”
She did not answer.
“I know it can feel lonely, being a blue ornament in a sea of red ones,” said North, smiling wryly. “We all celebrate this time of year a little differently. Some more than others. But in a lot of ways, we all celebrate it the same. Christmas miracles, Hanukkah miracles—these are all winter miracles. They’re the miracles of helping each other through dark times by bringing each other light. The carols, the trees, the specials on television—they are just different lights, my little friend. And we need as many of them as we can get. Do you understand?”
The girl’s eyes fell to where his great hand still rested over her foot, and she nodded slowly. ”I think so,” she said.
“I am also one of those lights,” said North, quieter. “Whether this is a dream or not.”
“I shouldn’t have told them you weren’t real,” she mumbled in realization.
North’s smile was so subtle it nearly got lost in his beard. “They’ll agree with you soon enough. Let them believe a little bit longer.”
“Okay,” she said, and North forgave her reluctance.
“Be proud of your blue ornament,” he offered, drawing his hand back into his lap. “It makes you different—but it makes you special. It means you have something to teach them, and they have something to teach you. It means more lights, more brightness. More warmth.”
The girl’s little face scrunched up in confusion, and North laughed, not unkindly and not quietly. His belly shook with the motion.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will,” he promised. “For now, just remember this: You are not alone. Christmas, Hanukkah, or however you choose to shine light through darkness, it means you are not alone. You are surrounded by light.”
He waited, a long time, while she frowned down at her knees, but finally she looked up hesitantly, to match his blue gaze with her brown one. ”Thank you,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” he replied, sensing that a light that had never before been lit had just winked to life on his globe. He ruffled her already unruly hair as he stood to make his way back over to her window. ”Happy Hanukkah, little friend. Don’t forget to get some sleep.”
“I won’t.” The little girl smiled faintly. ”Merry Christmas,” she said, and he was gone.