Chapter 8: Saturn Rises

The first morning of my training to be the future Mother Christmas started with Junior and I reporting for duty at 9 am, which actually turned out to be just in time to join our hosts for breakfast.

“We always discuss the Christmas preparations and the actions of the day,” Young Nick boomed as we took our seats at the dining table at breakfast. “We’ll be doing a tour of the main workshops, my boy, before checking that the flying reindeer training is up to scratch, then check out our sleighs to see if they need repainting or refurbishing before CECA.”

I whispered to Junior, “What’s CECA?”

“Christmas Eve, Chocks Away,” Junior whispered back, trying hard to keep a straight face.

‘Damn!’ I thought to myself, ‘Today’s going to be a toughie.’

“And ve vill start viz ze kitchens, Christmas cakes don’t bake zemselves, you know,” Hilde added, “und ve have so many cakes to make und bake und decorate.”

Mother Christmas’ duties included organising the household staff. Gronwynk was at the heart of this and she quietly informed me that she had my back in this regard, bless her. There was an unbelievable number of elves involved in maintaining Santa’s house, in the shape of cooks, cleaners, elves in charge of supplies, provisions, distribution and disposal, housemaids, firelighters, light-lighters, stable lads, dressmakers, ironers, decorators, maintenance elves, snow clearers, the list seemed endless.

The first most remarkable thing to me, when I innocently asked about keeping household accounts and transaction records, of pay, holiday pay, taxes, insurances, pension provision, petty cash, etc, I was told quite clearly that no-one was paid anything, so nothing was deducted for tax.

All the elves were volunteers that could come in and work or not, only they always came into work regardless, always, rain, shine, snow and more snow. There was no money to take account of because the North Pole didn’t have any currency, nor were people paid in kind. Everyone worked for nothing except for the sheer pleasure to do something they enjoyed doing and did it well.

The economy was utopian. The suppliers were elf farmers who grew crops in the temperate area, cheerful elf carters would collect harvests and deliver them to shops where they were put on the shelves and folk would collect what they wanted when they wanted. The farmers who grew the grain came into the shops to collect their bread and veggies. There was always plenty, so there was no need to ration supplies, nor hoard supplies because there were always surpluses. Nor was there any waste as at the end of the day before the shops closed, there were always elves queuing up to take whatever was left over for canning or bottling, by elves who simply loved canning and bottling, often coming back to stock up the shelves themselves with cans and bottles when fresh supplies of such vegetables were out of season.

There was no crime, no stealing, no fraud or scams. If you wanted something you asked if you could have it, like your neighbour might have two sleighs and you hadn’t got one. If the owner wanted to keep his best sleigh, he might offer you the second best, or he might just say, I’m sorry I’m saving this for my son for when he finishes agricultural college and the neighbour would happily accept this.

Another neighbour, perhaps one who makes sleighs, upon hearing this conversation, or being informed of it, because elves are curious and venerable gossips, may well offer to make the neighbour a bespoke sleigh, because that’s what he likes to do.

In an enclosed society like the North Pole such generosity and careful consideration of ones fellows worked well. Everyone got along, there were frequent parties and feasts and dances, but in between they worked hard, doing what they particularly enjoyed doing most, with the whole community sharing and enjoying the benefits. No-one starved, no-one was homeless or envious of anyone else, because there was always someone willing to help, often a queue of willing elves able to provide solutions to fix any problems.

I loved being in the North Pole, it might be cold and frozen up there, but the ambiance was like a breath of fresh air.

Working with Hilde was a surprise to me during the first week of my Mother Christmas apprenticeship. She was informative and conversational, giving me little insights into her first few years of her work here, learning the ropes from her own mother-in-law, the gorgeous Georgianna, and gradually taking on more of the responsibilities until taking it all on some thirty years ago and moving into the Main House.

Although she explained it was a year-round job, I wouldn’t be needed except for a few weeks each year in December. She insisted that I was to concentrate on enjoying my family life with my husband in the outside world, to enjoy my own family while they were still alive, even if it meant moving away from them when the non-ageing became obvious and meeting family thereafter had to become rather more clandestine.

She explained that she and Young Nick married in the early 1920s and lived in the real world for nearly 60 years, moving constantly as the political upheaval after 1918, through the Depression, followed by the wars of the 1930s and 1940s made settling anywhere very difficult. They lived in England, during part of the period, but with all the anti-German feeling at that time, Hilde’s accent made her feel uncomfortable and they left Junior with his grandmother Georgianna in their peaceful Cotswolds home for up to ten months of the year. Now they found that they stayed at home in the North Pole all year round, while Old Nick and Georgianna still spent most of the year in their rural England home.

We visited as many activity centres at the North Pole as we could fit in. The kitchens were first port of call of course, and I found Santa’s large rambling house had several kitchens. The main kitchen did the main meals, the bakery baked bread and cakes and biscuits, oh, let me tell you, the gingerbread men they make were absolutely to die for!

Our main task in the kitchens that first week was feeding fruit cakes with brandy. This had to be done every two weeks, taking a cake from one of several pantries, unwrapping, drizzling one or two tablespoons of brandy, rum or whisky (each pantry shelf was marked with which spirit) to keep the cake moist as it matures, then rewrap and return to the store. There were dozens of narrow pantries, crammed full of shelves and each shelf was stacked with cakes.

“What do you do with all these cakes, there must be thousands?” I asked Hilde, exhaustedly, after I had completed ‘feeding’ just one shelf full of heavy cakes.

“Oh, we consume quite a few here, don’t we girls?” Hilde said, the elves around us ranging from teens to centuries old, all nodding as they worked methodically through the cakes. “But the rest are given out as gifts, some as whole cakes, halves or even slices, all packaged and gift-wrapped. Weddings are popular at Christmas as you know,” at which some of the elves giggled and one even winked at me, “so some get used as wedding cakes. In the Pantry marked ‘W’ over there, we have different sized cakes on each shelf, so that tiered cakes for weddings can be made up.”

Well, that first week in the Christmas kitchen was an eye opener for me, a nose opener too. Oh, the range of Christmassy aromas of cinnamon and spice was sometimes overpowering, it took all week before those smells faded into the background of normalcy and I could pick out the aroma of my coffee again.

Here I must confess to you, my dear reader. I assume that you are a friend or a descendant of mine and, if you do actually know me, then my admittance that I am a complete doofus in the kitchen is no feeble attempt at modesty. No, it is my previous experience in a kitchen that deserves the honest reference to feeble attempts. Now, in my defence I will say that my mother is a reasonable cook, limited in range but quite proficient at what she does, bearing in mind she was a working mum, so her kitchen time was limited.

So I never learned to cook from my mum, because I did homework after school while Mum rustled up something quickly and didn’t have time to tutor me. Then I moved to London, the home of every nation’s takeaway cuisine in the world at the end of a phone or mobile phone app. My then boyfriend Scott and I had a galley kitchen in our little flat we were paying a mortgage for and, in my eight years there I only used the oven to heat up part-baked rolls or heat up pizza from frozen. Then for eight months after kicking Scott out of my life, I lived on my own in a studio flat in a single room that was part bedroom, part sitting room and the basic kitchen was along the short wall next to the bathroom, and who bothers to cook for one anyway, unless you’re a castaway on a desert island?

As for the last eleven months as a married housewife with my own luxury kitchen that is the envy of my mother, my sister, my brother’s wife and recently my best friend, my kitchen is actually Junior’s domain. I mean, I am a career woman learning how to manage a commercial haulage and logistics company while studying to be the legendary home support of a legend, so when do I ever get time to cook? Especially when my loving husband trained for three years as a cordon bleu chef in Paris during the 1950s when he was in his early thirties but looked 16 at the time and fresh from an English boarding school? Yes, Junior is an excellent cook of not just fancy stuff with fish, poultry and mushrooms, but his ‘ordinary’ cottage pie and Welsh rarebit are anything but ordinary, they are masterpieces I could simply die for.

So, Hilde had me mixing fruit cake mix over and over again and baking them for my own personal Christmas store. ‘You can never have too much fruit cake as you will have lots of visitors over Christmas wishing you well,’ Hilde had said. And the elves all nodded sagely. I wasn’t sure that I had the pantry space for all the cakes I was making in the log cabin but I didn’t want to admit anything after having spent three long weekends in my second home and I hadn’t yet opened a single kitchen cupboard door!

After preparing and baking my fruit cakes, Hilde had me join the elf crew who were icing cakes. They were mixing up vast batches of royal icing and slapping it on like plasterers on insanely generous piecework rates, but these little guys were doing it simply for the pleasure. They were clearly a close-friend bunch as they gently took the Mickey out of my efforts to mix small batches of icing by Hilde, until I got used to making icing with the right consistency and keeping it loose enough to work it onto my cakes.

I hated that my icing efforts on the cakes already made were put to one side instead of being carried back to the pantry for storage and I couldn’t help but notice at the end of each day the kitchen elves (and, it seemed to be, a stream of several outsiders) were taking the rejects home with them. Now I can’t blame elves, nobody loves rich alcoholic fruit cakes more than elves and everybody hates waste. But what worried me was that some of those cakes would be wrapped up and saved for one day when I was Mother Christmas myself and lording over those less proficient in everything than me, and some of my worse efforts will start to emerge from the cracks in the kitchen woodwork to haunt me and put me firmly in my place.

But trying to keep my cool, remember all the little tips the elves gave me, and doing them in the right order or at the right time was ex ... hausting.

Boy! Was that hard work! Hilde was a slave driver of the worst kind. I swore to myself that I was going to gift her a cat-o’-nine-tails for one of these Christmases, but save it until I was so proficient she wouldn’t be able to use the blessed thing on me!

Yeah, I was in no doubt she’d use it if I offered. At least the thought had a calming influence on me.

I was glad that the North Pole had no currency and the kitchens had never needed a swear box before, otherwise I would never have paid off what would have amounted to the National Debt of an average modern economy, like Portugal or Norway during the four working days of that first week. After that I relaxed and, although I put in just as much effort as I could, I tried not to take myself too seriously and ended up surprising myself that I was getting the odd cake right every now and then.

I was determined to persevere. One positive thing about my marriage to Junior, which incidentally was wonderfully crammed full of positives (lucky girl that I am), was that, while a single person I might have thrown down my spatula and stomped off in tears of frustration and anger, now such a thought never even occurred to me.

It wasn’t just my pride that needed to be maintained or enhanced, it was bigger than that, it was all connected to Junior. I was simply not an island any longer, I had to be a good Mother Christmas for Junior’s sake.

I know that the love Junior has for me would forgive any of my failings as a wannabe Mother Christmas, but my love for Junior was at a level where I couldn’t even contemplate his love for me disguising his disappointment in me. I had to become the best Mother Christmas ever, because with me removing any doubts or concerns about me holding my end up, he could concentrate solely on being the best Father Christmas ever, and he had every right and expectation to be.

So, by the end of the week, when the pile of rejects was rationed out only to a few kitchen staff and no outsiders, I felt I’d turned the corner at last.

I brought home a surprisingly good fish chowder for our supper on Friday, which Junior admitted was excellent.

Hilde had me cooking something every day, leading me though a series of simple cooking tasks which was giving me the building blocks of skills in the kitchen. Junior had happily eaten each of the meals, Tuesday through Thursday, he was as hungry as I was, being put through a similar ringer to me, but on that Friday he was actually being enthusiastic in his praise.

One side effect of the magic that is Christmas is that somehow we are strengthened and can draw on deeper reservoirs of stamina so, although we went to bed as early as we had to the rest of the week, we found the energy to make love that night and again more leisurely in the morning. (Sorry, kids, I could say at this point that I had written a full account of our lovemaking, every gasp and every ooh and ahh, that our spoil-sport Chief Elf Librarian had blue pencilled, but no, as Junior’s better half, I cannot lie, I am simply not going into details about our love life except to say with a sigh that it’s heavenly.)

We enjoyed a leisurely Saturday morning after the intensity of the week full of training undertaken by both of us. While Junior took a shower, I prepared the coffee and finally checked out all the cupboards in the kitchen for the first time, thinking not just about what we had learned but also all that had happened in the previous week, the longest spell of time that I’d spent at the North Pole in one go.

When Junior came down it was just in time for toast and marmite. I had chosen something savoury because I felt I needed a break from the sugar content that was usually a significant proportion of the NP diet.

“Honey,” I said as we sat down with the coffee and toast, “I’ve been thinking about the monsters which attacked Santa and Hilde last Sunday night while we were at Hollyhock Hill.”

“Yes, About what?”

“Well, I still think there is more than just a simple coincidence about this invasion, something that is unheard of within living memory of the elves I understand, and it happened very shortly, within about six hours or so, after we vacated these cabins after our long weekend visit.”

“Yes, but sweetheart, Gronwynk said that she not only went over the eight buildings and all the outhouses with a fine tooth comb, and they put everything neatly away again, so that everything had been given a second look over. And these elves knew the old monsters very well, and know what they were looking for.”

“I know, and I accept that they were thorough in knowing what they were doing. But, looking through the kitchen cupboards this morning for the very first time, I couldn’t help but notice that our friends and families, not only packed their clothes and the little presents to bring here to the North Pole but they also brought household stuff and they left that stuff here for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the elves’ supplies are all homemade and even the pots they seal their delicious goodies in are hand crafted here in the North Pole. But in the cupboard here I noticed this morning that there are pots and pots of commercial brands of jams, honeys, the marmite we’ve just had on our toast, tins of biscuits, shortbread and table sauces, even cartons of cornflakes, porridge oats, and mueslis, that the guys kindly brought all the way here and left them for us to enjoy in our kitchen cupboards, knowing that we would be here for a month and might miss the everyday things we’re used to. How very thoughtful. And we’ve no idea what else was left by our guests at the other log houses, either deliberately or otherwise. Could they have brought those monsters with them in something and left them here, or at least some sort of portal that the monsters used to get here?”