by Matt Haig
The Truth Pixie screwed up her nose. Her triangular little face was lost in thought. Then from out of nowhere she shouted a word into the air. ‘Giving!’
‘What?’
‘Giving is what makes you happy. I saw your face when you gave me the viewing stick. It was still a big strange human face but it was so happy!’
Nikolas smiled and rubbed his chin. ‘Giving, yes. Giving . . . Thank you, Truth Pixie. I owe you the whole world.’
The Truth Pixie smiled some more. ‘This humble cottage and these Wooded Hills are enough for me.’
Then Miika crawled across Nikolas’s knee and wanted to jump on the floor, so Nikolas held out his hand for the mouse to climb on, and gently lowered him to the ground. ‘Cheese is better than turnip, isn’t it?’ said Nikolas.
‘It most certainly is,’ said Miika. And Nikolas seemed to understand.
Nikolas got off the tiny chair and crouched his way out of the tiny house.
The Truth Pixie thought of something as Nikolas made his way down the hill towards Elfhelm. ‘Oh, and you should grow a beard! It would really suit you.’
Forty years later . . .
The Magic of Giving
It takes some people a long time to work out exactly what they are here for.
In Nikolas’s case it took him another forty years.
He was now sixty-two years old. He had not only kept his beard, as the Truth Pixie suggested, but he had been leader of the Elf Council for A Very Long Time.
In that time he had preserved and expanded happiness in Elfhelm. He had started a weekly spickle dance (with singing Tomtegubbs) in the village hall, given free toys to every newborn elf, converted the tower into a toy workshop, established a University of Advanced Toymaking, expanded the School of Sleighcraft, set up the Pixie–Elf alliance, signed a peace treaty with the trolls, invented the mince pie, and sherry, and gingerbread men, and had raised the elf minimum wage to five hundred chocolate coins a week.
But he still felt he needed to do more. He knew he needed to do more because he was still getting older by the day. Most elves – with the exception of Father Topo and a few others – had stopped ageing at around forty, and it was getting a bit silly. He was taking so long to find his purpose. He loved helping the elves, but it was time to help the people that part of him still belonged to. The people he had left behind in their world, one that was too often full of loss and pain and sadness. He could sense them. He would lie awake in bed at night and hear their voices in his head. He could feel the whole world in there. The good and the bad. The naughty and the nice.
One Sunday night in spring, when there was no moon, he took Blitzen from the field and flew beyond the mountain.
There was no better feeling than flying through the sky on the back of a reindeer. Even after a lifetime of doing so, Nikolas – who was now so comfortable with the name Father Christmas he called himself Father Christmas – loved the magical feeling of zooming through the sky. They kept flying. Right across Finland, across the forest where he last saw his father, searching for him, the way he always searched for him whenever he flew. It was foolish. His father had died long ago, but it was an old habit. They flew on into southern Denmark, over towns and cities, over the small fishing port of Helsinki, where trawlers and other boats waited for the fishermen who would take them out onto the rough seas again.
Father Christmas desperately wanted to speak to one of his own kind, but he had long vowed to the elves that he would keep their secret. He knew they were right. Humans probably still couldn’t be trusted to know about elves and their magic. But that was only because human lives could be so hard.
On and on they flew, over the kingdom of Hanover, the Netherlands and France. The lands below were all dark, but with brief bursts of light from all the fires and the gas streetlamps that glimmered in the cities below. As Father Christmas finally asked Blitzen to head home, he thought all of human life – and certainly the life he remembered – was like this landscape. Dark, with occasional bursts of light.
As he flew back north, under the moonless sky, he realised that although he might not have been able to live with the humans again, the question still bothered him: how could he make their lives better? Happier?
The following day he asked that very same question in a meeting of the Elf Council.
‘We need to find a way to spread as much happiness as possible,’ he announced.
Father Vodol arrived a bit late, clutching a stack of presents.
‘Happy birthday, Father Vodol!’ said Father Christmas.
They all sang ‘Happy Birthday’. When Father Vodol was seated he turned and smiled at his good friend, Father Christmas, and wished he could turn back time and change that day he had put him in prison.
‘But everyone is happy,’ said Mother Noosh, who was now a successful journalist, as the Daily Snow’s chief reindeer correspondent.
‘Everyone here is still happy,’ corrected Father Christmas. ‘But I want to spread that happiness beyond the mountain.’
There was a collective gasp from everyone who was there, which wasn’t many, as there was a cake-eating competition going on down-stairs in the village hall.
‘Beyond the mountain?’ asked Father Topo. ‘But it’s too dangerous. Everything is perfect here. If we let all the humans know we are here it would be chaos! No offence, Father Christmas.’
Father Christmas nodded thoughtfully and scratched his beard, which was now as white as Father Topo’s whiskers. Father Topo always had a point and this was no exception.
‘I agree, Father Topo, I agree. But what if we did something that gave just a little bit of magic? Something that could brighten their lives?’
‘But what?’ asked Father Vodol, who was opening a birthday present. ‘A cuddly toy reindeer!’ he squealed with joy. ‘It looks just like Blitzen! Thank you, Father Christmas.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Father Christmas.
And Father Christmas watched that joy on Father Vodol’s face, and thought – as he often did – about the magic of giving. He thought of the day he had been given the sledge. And the time, a few years later, when he had been given the turnip-doll. Even though a sleigh is significantly better than a turnip, the feeling of receiving both had been the same. The Truth Pixie had been right. Giving was what he was good at.
And then that night, at around midnight, it came to him.
It was the biggest and craziest idea he had ever had in his life.
The idea would involve a lot of things. First of all, a lot of hard work. But elves loved work – if it was fun – so he would make sure it was fun. It had to be fun, because if they weren’t having fun then it would go badly wrong. He would convert the tower from merely being a toy workshop to being the greatest toy workshop imaginable.
The plan would also involve reindeer. Yes, all of the reindeer would be needed. He would need Blitzen to lead the way, because no one was as good in the air as Blitzen. He was not only strong and quick, but he also had determination. He would never leave a journey half finished, just as Nikolas would never leave a mountain half climbed. As well as Blitzen, he would need Donner at the front to help with navigation. Or maybe that new reindeer Mother Noosh found wandering the Wooded Hills. The one with the strange red nose.
And they’d need a good sleigh. They’d need the best sleigh there had ever been, in fact. He’d need to recruit the best sleighmakers. He would need it to be strong and streamlined and silent through the air.
But there was still a problem. He paced his bedroom, munching on chocolate. He looked out of his window, past Blitzen and the other eight reindeer asleep in the dark, over to the village hall. He looked at the new clock face. Fifteen minutes had gone by since he’d first had the idea. Time moved so quickly.
He’d need to do something about that.
About time.
How could he travel to every child in the world in a single night? It was impossible.
But Father Topo’s words from long ago ca
me back to him.
An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand.
He looked to the sky and saw a comet’s fiery trail as it made its path between the stars, before fading away into the night like a dream.
‘A shooting star,’ he said to himself, remembering the one he had seen with Miika all those years ago.
‘I do believe in magic, Miika,’ he said, imagining the long gone mouse was still there with him. ‘Just as you believed in cheese.’
And where there was magic, there was always a way.
And this time he knew he would find it. He stayed up all night thinking about it, and then he stopped thinking about it and started believing in it. He believed it so completely that it was already real. There was no use trying to think of a way, because it was impossible. And the only way you could make something impossible real wasn’t through logic or sensible thinking. No. It was to believe it could be done. Belief was the method. You could stop time, expand chimneys, even travel the world in a single night, with the right magic and belief inside you.
And it was going to happen at Christmas.
And the moment he knew it he felt a warm glow. It started in his tummy and spread through his whole body. It was the feeling that comes when you find out who you really are, and who you know you will be. And in finding himself he had stopped growing old right there. The way you stop when you reach a destination after a long journey, or after reaching the last page in a book, when the story is complete and stays that way for ever. And so he knew that he – the man called Christmas, who really still felt as young as ever, a sixty-two year old boy called Christmas – wouldn’t age another day.
He picked up his father’s old red hat. He placed it to his face and was sure he could smell the scent of pines from the old forest where his father had spent every day chopping down so many trees. He put the hat on his head, then he heard the distant sound of voices coming from the village hall. Of course! It was Monday. Dance night. He opened his window wide and saw hundreds of happy elves walking back to their homes. He felt such a joyous spirit inside himself he leant out of the window and shouted as loud as he could.
‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’
And everyone looked up at him, and without question said, ‘Merry Christmas!’
And everyone – including Father Christmas – laughed.
‘Ho ho ho!’
And so it was that he closed the window and finished his chocolate and went to bed. He closed his eyes and smiled with such joy, thinking of all the magic and wonder he would share next Christmas.
The First Child to Wake Up
The very first child to wake on Christmas morning was an eight-year-old girl called Amelia who lived in a small house on the outskirts of London in the grey and rainy country known as England.
She opened her eyes and stretched. She heard her mother coughing through the wall. She saw something in the darkness of her room. An unmoving shape at the end of her bed. The sight made her curious. She sat up. And there was a stocking bulging with parcels.
She unwrapped the first parcel, her heart racing.
‘Impossible,’ she said, opening it up. It was a little wooden horse. Exactly what she had always wanted. She opened the next present. A spinning top, perfectly hand-painted with the most lively pattern of zigzags. Something else. A little orange! She had never seen an orange before. And money made out of chocolate!
She noticed a piece of cream writing paper folded up in the bottom of the stocking. She began to read:
Acknowledgements
Every book is a team effort and this book is no exception. So here is the A Boy Called Christmas ‘Nice List’.
I would like to thank –
Chris Mould, for turning my words into fantastic pictures. Francis Bickmore, Head Elf, for helping make the words better. Jamie Byng, the Santa of Canongate. Jenny Todd, Mother Christmas. Rafaela Romaya, Sian Gibson and all the elves in the Canongate workshop. Kirsten Grant and Matthew Railton for getting the snowball rolling. Clare Conville, for sprinkling her pixie dust on my working life. Camilla Young and Nick Marston for their festive film wisdom. Everyone at Conville and Walsh and Curtis Brown. All the film folk at Blueprint Pictures and Studio Canal for their joy and goodwill. All the wonderful booksellers that spend their lives spreading the miracle of books, and not just at Christmas. My soulmate Andrea Semple, for helping in infinite ways on this book, and for turning my world into something magical.