Chapter 16: All's Well

It was in the warm summer early morning in late August when the local news radio report came on with headlines that reminded us of what I had forgotten even as a vague dream.

I was stood in the kitchen preparing breakfast when the news came through of Shane Deakin, a student at our local university, had been convicted of plotting a terrorist attack, with damning evidence and information contained within his laptop computer, and that he had accumulated a number of weapons from blades up to electronic devices which were intended to be used in these planned attacks, all in connected with Christmas shopping and festive celebrations.

Junior also heard the broadcast and rushed into the kitchen to ensure I was all right. I admitted that I felt faint and as he helped me towards the sitting room when I diverted and made it to the downstairs bathroom and thus avoided ruining our cream carpet.

“Are you?” Junior asked.

“I think I might me, I’m a week late, so I’ve got an appointment with the doctor at 10.30.”

Epilogue

FOOTNOTE TO “MRS JENNIFER NIXON’S FIRST CHRISTMAS JOURNAL” Ever since I arrived in this magic land of Christmas on the morning of 6 December in the Year of Our Lord 343, with my Lady wife once more restored to life and all my children delivered to this place around me, I knew I was in the midst of a miracle.

I didn’t have to believe in God to be awed by the power I had been granted to carry on my caring ministry beyond the peaceful grave for which I thought I was destined.

I was granted the inner peace, of that I was in no doubt, I had a strength beyond any physical feeling I had ever had, the restoration of my late wife was beyond even my wildest dreams, but to be able to communicate with the world through children who believed in this magic was incredible.

Even more uplifting, if that was at all possible, were the inhabitants of this wonderful paradise, the elves, who had already built the Main House in anticipation of our arrival and by brute force, they proudly puffed out their little chests and boasted that they had forced their former lords and masters to flee this winter paradise.

If I feared for my family in the midst of such fierce resistors of enforcement, they were continuously proven unfounded and undermined by their eagerness to please, to embrace my ideas of providing some bounty and relief for children all around the world. They readily agreed to help and provided the toy workshops, the wrapping and signing departments, the identification and allocation of gifts. Distribution was the only difficulty. The elves had the flying reindeer, the wonderfully designed and decorated sleighs perfect for this winter wonderland but they declared only the ‘Old People’ had the ability to cross the divide between worlds.

Well, I declared, my dear wife and I are ‘old people’, why don’t we take off and give it a go?

I think their kind little hearts were heaven bent to please and feared the disappointment this silly old person was about to feel, but I thought of our old home of Myra in the Roman Province of Lycia and lo and behold we were soon flying over the long beach of Patara, where I was born on 15 March about 63 years earlier. Once we flew back to the warm interior of the Main House and the dark creamy hot drink that was the elves’ particular invention, I declared that we would make gifts for all the deserving children of the world and hand them out on Christ’s birthday as determined by edict. That day has changed several times over the past almost seventeen hundred years, but notwithstanding that, we have always delivered and my family have promised always to do.