by Jeff Guinn
“Though I started my gift-giving with the help of a good inheritance, even that large amount of money had to run out sometime,” Nicholas explained. “There was a time I feared my mission would have to end because I had no funds left.”
“I know the feeling,” I replied, and told him how we had met at the very moment my own money for gifts was completely spent.
“God’s grace is a wonderful thing,” he replied before giving me a big hug. As a former priest and bishop in the Christian church, Nicholas never, ever doubted that his special powers came to him directly from the Lord. “Layla, there is truly no coincidence where this mission is concerned. When my money ran out, for instance, was the same moment Felix and I learned that we could carve book covers with the same speed that we could walk great distances. It was true— is true—of Felix in particular. You will have noticed how I might carve one cover in a night, and, in the same few hours, Felix can carve five or six.”
“Felix is amazing,” I said, making sure my voice was loud enough for Felix to overhear where he stood a few yards away. My sudden presence was not always easy for him. He’d been used to being Nicholas’s only companion for almost seventy years, and now he had to share his friend with someone else. Though Felix and I were very cordial to each other, I sensed sometimes that he felt uncomfortable, if not resentful, now that Nicholas had a wife who received so much of his attention. So I went out of my way to make sure Felix understood how special he was to my husband, and how I very much wanted us to become good friends, too. I think, over the centuries, we eventually did.
There was another benefit to traveling and working with Nicholas. I stopped aging, too. I know that in the thousand and more years since, many of our later companions took this for granted from the start, but they had the benefit of our experience. Then, we had no idea whether the magic would touch me as well, and so for months and even a few years—all right, decades—a day didn’t pass without me taking out a disk of polished metal—because we had no glass mirrors then—and peering anxiously at my reflection, looking for lines around my eyes or my first gray hair. They never appeared. By the time I had been with Nicholas for about forty years, making me seventy-five and extremely elderly by the standard of the day, I still looked exactly the same and knew I had stopped aging, too.
Those forty years were full of love and excitement and, I admit, some sadness and frustration. We gloried in our mission, and our ability to range so far across Asia Minor and Europe to give our gifts. We gave thanks for the special powers God had granted to us. But we were always aware that even these powers had their limits. Any time we came near wars, our speed was reduced to that of normal humans.
It seemed, in those years, that all the world we knew of was torn by war. The Roman Empire was gradually crumbling. Tribes with names like Vandals and Visigoths made bloody bids for supremacy. We were able to avoid capture, perhaps even execution, because in those days Christian priests were known to be noncombatants, and so were allowed to wander where they would. Nicholas and Felix were assumed to be priests, and, in the case of my husband, that was close to the truth. Any time we were stopped and questioned, we simply said we were on our way somewhere to minister to the poor—and that, too, was certainly true.
As he had promised, my wonderful husband treated me as an equal partner, both in our marriage and in gift-giving. No decisions were made by Nicholas alone. He always consulted me, and Felix, too. Sometimes Felix or I might suggest where to go next. Of course, in some ways having a woman along was very helpful. In a small village, I could casually join other wives washing clothes in a stream or gossiping by a well. I would hear about local families who were hungry or wearing ragged clothes. More and more, we concentrated on gifts for children. This was not because we didn’t care about grown-ups. It was just that there was so much need that we had to set priorities, and, more than anything, we wanted all children to grow up feeling loved and hopeful about their lives. A constant source of frustration was that, no matter how hard we tried, we could never bring gifts to every deserving, needy child. There were so many children, and in so many places!
I had the great pleasure of seeing Rome, and Alexandria, and other famous cities. Gradually I became familiar with hundreds of towns and villages in what we called “the known world.” But all three of us never stopped feeling curious about those countries we had yet to visit, and finally in the year 453 we decided it was time to travel to the legendary, mysterious land of Britain. What we knew of the island nation was fascinating. The Romans had conquered some of it for a time, but according to most stories it was still inhabited by wild people who painted themselves blue and lived in trees. It sounded too interesting to resist, so we began making our way there. Under peaceful circumstances we could have made our way from Rome to Britain with three or four nights of magically fast walking, but there were battles all around us and we could only manage about ten miles a day. In particular, a famous Hun war chief named Attila was known to be marching toward Rome. As it happened, we met him, or, I should say, were taken prisoner by him. But after some conversation with Nicholas, Attila admitted he was tired of war. When Nicholas impulsively told him about our special mission, Attila asked to join us, along with Dorothea, his wife.
This was a turning point. Until that moment, we had never even discussed adding to our number. “Do we really want a warrior coming along?” Felix asked me, and I believe it was then that he finally accepted me as an equal rather than just as his best friend’s wife.
“I think we have to trust Nicholas’s instincts, and he wants Attila and Dorothea to join us,” I replied. “We’ll watch Attila carefully, because he’s used to fighting with anyone he meets. And it will be nice for me to have another woman to talk to.”
In fact, our two new friends fit in right away. Because he’d had to study so many maps while planning battles, Attila knew his way around better than the rest of us. Dorothea was very kind and, though soft-spoken, quite intelligent. By the time we crossed the channel to England—a monk named Patrick happened to be floating by in a small boat on his way to Ireland and offered us a ride—we were all enjoying one another’s company very much, except for Attila and Felix, who constantly argued with each other. But these arguments were entertaining, and kept the rest of us amused as we traveled.
We loved England immediately, for it had the greenest hills and clearest streams any of us had ever seen. Sadly, the lives of the people there did not match the beauty of their land. There was fighting everywhere, with fierce tribes in the north and west constantly assaulting the people of the central and southern regions. At the same time, Saxons from across the sea often sailed over to conduct raids. Why, we kept asking each other, couldn’t everyone stop fighting and begin enjoying the wonderful world given to them by God? Then Attila would remind us that too many people measured themselves by how much they could take from others.
“I was like that,” he would always point out. “Though I’m pleased to have learned giving gifts is more satisfying than owning things myself, it was a hard-earned lesson. But if I can learn it from you, then others can, too.”
Attila
Almost everyone in Britain was desperately poor. Though we’d arrived with plenty of money, very little food or clothing was for sale. What we did find in sad marketplaces were old, stringy vegetables, and sandals and blankets so filthy and tattered that beggars in other parts of the world would have disdained them. So we had to arrange to buy proper gifts like cheeses and dried fruits and well-made blankets from markets in Europe, and have these shipped by boat over to Britain. Then we paid English farmers to let us store these things in their barns. So long as we paid in advance, no one ever asked us why we were doing this. They were just grateful for the few extra coins.
And yet, with the awful fighting and nearly universal poverty, there was still something special about this country. If the people were poor, they were also hopeful, certain that somehow, some way, they would eventually live in peace. Inst
ead of moping in times of trouble, they made up songs and stories about wonderful heroes who would one day come to their rescue. For fifty years we wandered among them, leaving our gifts when we could, trying to avoid battlefields and hoping along with all the ordinary folk that better times for them would soon be coming.
Around the year 500, a British war chief named Arthur won several spectacular victories against Saxon invaders. Many people in Britain believed he must be the longed-for hero who would save the land, but Attila told us that there was no chance Arthur could hold off the Saxons for very long.
Arthur
“There are too many of them,” he said, looking rather sad. “This Arthur is a brave man and a great leader, but anyone who fights constantly must eventually lose to someone stronger. This is true now, and will be throughout history. I only hope he escapes with his life.”
With our help, Arthur did. One day we found him lying badly wounded in a barn, with his Saxon enemies all around. Obviously, we couldn’t leave him there, and he became our sixth member. After he recovered, Arthur proved to be a very good addition to the group. He was brave, as Attila had guessed, and quite resourceful, too. He could carve wood book covers even better than Felix, and his love for his country despite its terrible wars was sincere.
I believe it was because of Arthur that Britain remained so important to us all. For the next six hundred years we divided our time between that island nation, Europe, and Asia Minor, meeting people and giving gifts and trying always to bring a little joy and comfort to children who most desperately needed reminding that the world was not entirely a cruel, dangerous place. All of us were happy anywhere we went, but it was during our visits to Britain that Arthur seemed the most content.
“Though battles and invasions continue—the Saxons who conquered my people are now being challenged in their turn by the Normans sailing in from France—I know that the English people themselves are especially noble in spirit,” Arthur said one night as we gathered around a campfire in the hills outside the town of London, which had originally been built by the Romans a thousand years earlier. “If peace ever comes to this land, the rest of the world will look to Britain for inspiration and leadership.”
Britain itself often looked to Arthur for inspiration, though the man of its legends had little in common with the war chief who’d joined us. Ordinary people comforted themselves in times of trouble—and, in Britain, it seemed always to be a time of trouble—with tales of Arthur the mythical king, who defeated enemies with the help of a magic sword and the advice of a wizard. There were tall tales about Nicholas and Attila, too, but the stories about Arthur were, at this time, the most widespread. We would tease him about them, always understanding that if they brought some comfort to frightened people, then they were good rather than harmful.
We had great adventures in Britain and everywhere else we went. My husband, Nicholas, wrote about many of these in his own book, so in most cases I won’t repeat them here. It was our great good fortune to be befriended by Charlemagne, the king of the Franks who became the leader of the Holy Roman Empire. Thanks to his generosity, we were less dependent on carving and selling wooden book covers to pay for our gifts and travel costs. We studied with great interest events in far-off lands—how a man named Muhammad, for instance, founded the religion of Islam, and how there were rumors that Viking sailors had crossed a great ocean and discovered some vast, fertile new land. Though we could not travel to these places yet—our gift-giving services were so badly needed where we were—Nicholas, Felix, and I declared that someday we would explore them for ourselves. Arthur’s main interest was Britain; Attila and Dorothea remained especially devoted to Europe and Asia Minor.
Sometime in the middle of the twelfth century, the nature of our mission changed. We still gave gifts, but of a different sort. As Britain, Europe, and Asia continued to be torn by war—the latest flare-ups were called “the Crusades,” with Christian rulers raising armies to march to Jerusalem and try to take back that holy city from the Muslims—our efforts to bring comfort and happiness to children began to seem almost foolish. If we left food, it was eaten and gone in a day or two. Cloaks and sandals wore out, if the children didn’t outgrow them first. The times people of all ages had to live in seemed to be getting worse rather than better. What difference did our gifts of a little food or new clothing make, really?
One night in 1194, Nicholas called us together for a full, honest discussion. We all agreed something had to be done differently. We couldn’t do much to lessen the violence of the world, but at least we could find a way to carry out our own mission more effectively. I spoke for a while about the difference between the body and the spirit. Food and clothing were temporarily good for the body, but we needed to give gifts that gave more lasting comfort to the spirit. It was Dorothea, the quietest among us, who eventually made the best suggestion—she thought we should give gifts of toys instead. Now, at this time toys were not something every child, or, indeed, many children, actually owned. Those that existed were very primitive—marbles made of clay, hoops fashioned from bits of wood, dolls carved from wood or sewn together from rags. But the more we thought about it, the more sense the idea of giving toys made. Bread or fruit would be gone after one meal; children could play with toys for years, and in the process forget, at least for a while, about the dangerous world all around them.
Dorothea
We couldn’t purchase toys as we could buy cloaks or loaves of bread. There were no companies that made them, no stalls full of toys in city marketplaces. So we learned to make them ourselves, and it took some time. The first dolls Dorothea and I sewed looked more like socks or mittens than pretend people. Our earliest attempt to make marbles found us using the wrong sort of clay, so they didn’t roll straight and then broke on the rare occasions that they actually hit the other marbles at which they were aimed. Still, with some practice we were able to craft toys at the same incredible speed with which we’d been able to carve book covers. We took this as a sign that we should keep trying, and finally we made some that we considered good enough to take to Rome, where we offered them for sale at a market. We sold everything, dolls and marbles and hoops, within minutes, and at a good enough profit to buy materials to make hundreds more. We left those as gifts for poor children in Naples to the south of Rome. The next morning we returned to their neighborhood, and how wonderful it was to see boys and girls shouting with sheer joy as they shot their marbles or played with their dolls or rolled hoops across the meadow.
“Perhaps they’re still wearing rags, and too many of them will go to bed hungry tonight,” I said. “But for now, they’re happy, and tomorrow they’ll still have their toys to play with. We must keep on giving gifts of toys.”
“Then we have to keep making them,” Felix observed. “That’s going to be the hardest part. Food and clothing we can buy anywhere and give away the same day. Crafting toys is far more complicated. It will be impossible for us to have some to give away every night, no matter how fast we work.”
Though we wouldn’t realize it for another three hundred years, the solution to that problem was already in progress. Gradually, people in Britain and Europe were defining specific dates when special gift-giving was most appropriate. Today, many people think that Santa Claus or St. Nicholas or Pere Noel or Father Frost—the name is different in almost every country—simply selected December 6 or 25 or January 6 as the day he brings gifts to children. In fact, those dates were picked for us.
Forget the word Christmas for just a moment. Though not known by that name, the date of December 25 became especially holy in the Christian church in the early 300s, when it was arbitrarily selected as the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus. That date was borrowed from other, earlier religions. Mithra, the Persian god of light, supposedly had been born on December 25. The Romans traditionally enjoyed a weeklong celebration called Saturnalia from December 17 through 24. They had parties and ate special food and gave each other little gifts. When Christian
ity became the official religion of Rome in the 300s, people still wanted their holiday. In 350, just seven years after my husband supposedly died in Myra, Pope Julius I used December 25 as Jesus’ birthday on the new Roman calendar. Of course, the holiday was intended from the start as a special time to give thanks to God for sending Jesus, and not everyone carried over the old Saturnalia tradition of giving gifts on that date. But many people did. In some places, grown-ups began giving small presents to children on January 6, called Epiphany, and supposedly the day that the three Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem to give their gifts to Baby Jesus.
Going to church on December 25 was something most Christians wanted to do; the service held then was known as a mass. Because this particular mass was devoted to Jesus, it was called Christ’s mass. In the year 1038, people in Britain started using the term Christmas, combining the two words. Christians in other countries began doing the same, altering the wonderful new word to fit their own languages. In Holland, for instance, people now looked forward to Kersmis, since the old Dutch word for Christ was Kerstes.
We were thrilled with the celebrations of Christmas and Epiphany; not only did they celebrate the birth of Jesus, they also gave common people a better chance to forget their troubles for a little while. Their holiday feasts might be the only time all year that there would be a little meat with their vegetables, or sweet candy for the children afterward. Many villages would hold dances or put on holiday plays. This may not seem very exciting today, when almost every family has a big meal every night and then settles down to watch television or listen to music or play videogames. But in those times, life for adults and children alike mostly consisted of hard work all day, little to eat, and bedtime when the sun went down, since there were no electric lights and candles cost too much to use very often. Perhaps the date of Christmas was based on old pagan beliefs, but why did that have to matter? What counted was that December 25 had become a time to give joyful thanks for Jesus’ birth, and the opportunity for everyone, rich or poor, to put aside worries and be happy, even for only a day.