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furtheradvofsanta · 5 years ago

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Santa Claus Letter 2019

Every year for Christmas I write a story for my nephew in the form of a letter from Santa. I recognize this is after Christmas, but we’re exchanging presents late this year, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This time I was inspired by how much I hated The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Enjoy!

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Santa’s Workshop

Beyond the Riphean Mountains

Beyond the North Wind

True North Pole

December 20, 2019

My dearest [name],

I am sending you this letter on the occasion of your fifth Christmas, but I worry it may arrive to you late. You see, I’m not sending it from home, despite the return address I have attached at the top. I worry the mail here is not quite as efficient as it is at home, so this letter might arrive well after Christmas, for which I apologize. It’s something of a long story, which I think you will soon come to understand.

Anyway, you won’t believe the year we’ve had here at the workshop. You wouldn’t expect that after our troublesome visit from the gremlins last year that we would have another problem that threatened to keep Christmas from happening on time for a second year in a row, but sometimes things just happen that way. I hope we don’t make a habit of it. This time, at least, nothing surprised us at the workshop that almost blew us all up. Our home was safe this time, but we had to travel far away to make sure everyone else was safe, too.

I believe I told you last year that I take every chance that I can to visit my friend the Man in the Moon, but I don’t think I told you anything about him. I’m sure you’ve seen him; he’s just up there in the sky hanging out most of the time. But I’ll bet you didn’t know he has a name and a wife and a dog, and I’d guess you don’t know how he got up there in the first place. Well, I’ll tell you, and you won’t have to wonder anymore.

His name is Cain, a name that unfortunately bears a rather bad history, and this Cain was a bit of a troublemaker himself when he was still on Earth. Oh yes, he was once a regular Earth person, but that’s been many years ago now. One night--a Christmas Eve, in fact--Cain was out with his dog gathering sticks for the fire when he passed a neighbor’s garden that was full of cabbages. His head should have told him that stealing was wrong, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of his empty belly telling him that cabbage soup would make a fine Christmas dinner.

He shifted all the sticks he was gathering into a bundle on his back and began loading up his arms with stolen cabbages. He was so excited about having soup for dinner that he didn’t notice that a handsome man in a fine suit was now standing in the garden watching him.

“Would you rob me on Christmas?” the man asked Cain.

“Christmas on Earth or Monday in heaven makes no difference to a man in need of supper,” Cain replied.

The man thought about this for a moment and then asked Cain if he would rather burn in the sun or freeze on the moon. Cain laughed at this, because it seemed an impossible question, but he supposed he would rather freeze on the moon.

“Then may it ever be a Moon-day in heaven for you,” the man said, and he wished Cain to the moon, bundle of sticks and stolen cabbages and all. He’s been there ever since, because Death doesn’t know to look for him there. He’s not the first Man in the Moon--before him there was a man sent to the Moon by Moses as punishment for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and then there was the shepherd Endymion who was beloved by the Moon--but he’s the only one now.

At least he’s not completely alone up there. He has his dog Phoebe to keep him company as he shines down on Earth and eats cabbages. There’s also a large rabbit constantly pounding rice into rice cakes, and a number of other strange things I notice every time I go to visit. They say the astronauts who have landed on the Moon have never seen these things, but explorers who have gone to the North Pole have never found my workshop either, so perhaps they just don’t know how to look properly.

You might be surprised to learn that the Man in the Moon is married. It’s true! He has a wife, but he only sees her once a year, at--you can probably guess--Christmas. The rest of the time she lives in a cave near the border of France and Germany, where she is greatly beloved and known affectionately by the people as Auntie Harry. Every Christmas, the great goose-footed fairy Auntie Harry leaves her cave and takes her donkey Marion to visit the good children of her region and leave them toys, candy, and treats (especially if they have left a snack of hay or turnips for Marion). When she has finished her task, she and Marion fly up to the Moon, where she and her husband Cain renew their wedding vows every year.

They say that if you know when to look, you can catch the Man in the Moon turning around once a year, on Christmas Eve, and that is true! He is turning around to see his wife, Auntie Harry, flying up to see him. He misses her so much during the year.

At any rate, it was Auntie Harry who tipped us off to all the trouble this year, and I am thankful for it! I don’t know what we would have done if she hadn’t been looking longingly up at the Moon from the mouth of her cave in France and noticed something was wrong. Something that looked like a long, bumpy, squirming tentacle, she said, appeared as if it was stretching its way up from the Earth to the Moon. We took a look with our most powerful telescopes and, sure enough, there was something like a tall, wiggling tower growing up out of what appeared to be eastern Germany.

I decided I needed to take a closer look, so I had Rupert, our farmhand, prepare the sleigh with my fastest reindeer so I could go see what this strange and alarming mass was. I knew, however, that I would have to be careful, as this part of Germany was under the protection of the small blonde angel whom they call the Christ Child (not to be confused with the actual baby Jesus). While the Christ Child is a loving gift-bringer and protector of children to much of Europe, she does not care for me very much, and she doesn’t appreciate it when she feels that I’m intruding on her territory, which she is very protective of. So I knew I would need to stay high in the sky to avoid being seen by her, lest she send against me her frightening companion, the walking scarecrow, Hans Trapp. Fortunately (in a way), the mysterious tower had grown far above the ground and up into the sky, so I didn’t have to get too close to the actual city.

You will never guess what I found, not if you had a million guesses. Was it a giant finger? No. Was it an enormous carrot, stretching out for the Moon Rabbit to nibble on? Oh, if only. Was it one billion marshmallows, hoping to escape into space? No. You will never guess. This miles-high tower that was now, I would have to guess, nearly halfway to the Moon was in fact a giant pile of squeaking, squirming, black-eyed, long-tailed little mice, all stacked on top of each other as if trying to turn themselves into a stairway to heaven.

What could be the cause of this? What could be the reason for it? I had no way of knowing, so I pulled the reins of the reindeer and told them to fly up so that perhaps I could see what was at the top. I have never seen so many mice in one place, and I could hardly guess where they had come from. If you have not seen any mice this year, it is probably because they left their home in [state] to join this tower of mice above Germany. How did they all get there? I can only imagine the number of mice sneaking across the ocean in boats and planes, following some irresistible order that only mice could hear. I shudder to think of it, frankly.

When I arrived at the top, I saw something that should not have surprised me. Which is a thing that should surprise you, because the thing I am about to describe is in fact quite surprising, so the fact that I shouldn’t have been surprised tells you the amount of surprising things I see on any given day.

What I saw was a mouse much larger than all the others, who stood on his hind legs and wore a long, purple military coat with a sabre strapped to his side, and a broad, fur-lined cloak over the top. At the top of his body rose seven heads, hissing and squeaking orders at the mice below him, and each gray head had a shining golden crown on top. This was, perhaps needless to say, the Mouse King.

You might have heard of the Mouse King, as his misdeeds are fairly well known, especially the uproar he caused at the Stahlbaum household so many years ago, but you may not know how such a scoundrel came to be. His mother was, of course, the Mouse Queen, and he inherited more than just the Kingdom of Mice from her. Her name was Madame Mouserinks, and in addition to being a queen, she was also a powerful sorceress, and a troublemaker of some renown, to boot.

You see, many years ago in a kingdom far away, a queen (a human queen) was making her husband the king’s favorite dinner of sausages, when Mouserinks tricked the queen into letting her eat all of the lard the queen needed to make the sausages. This made the sausages too dry, which made the king very angry, and so he swore revenge on the Mouse Queen. He summoned the court inventor, a rather ingenious clockmaker named Drosselmeier, to make the cleverest possible mouse traps to capture Mouserinks and her seven sons.

The traps managed to capture the seven Mouse Princes, but the Mouse Queen escaped unscathed, and she swore her own revenge against the king and queen for the loss of her sons. As it happens, the king and queen had just had a child of their own, a beautiful princess named Pirlipat. Knowing that Mouserinks would like come after her child due to the capture of her own, the queen assigned seven nurses to sit in Pirlipat’s room and hold seven cats--the famous tomcat Herr Schnurr, as he was known, and his family--in their laps, constantly petting them to make sure they were ever awake and alert to look out for Mouserinks and her sons.

But, as happens to people when given a boring job, or as happens to cats whenever they feel like, all seven nurses and all seven cats fell into a deep sleep. And so it was that they missed the moment that Madame Mouserinks used her magic to transform the beautiful princess into a very strange creature indeed. Where once Pirlipat had had the face of an angel, now she had a huge head attached to her tiny body, with large staring eyes, a large toothy grin, and a shock of white hair.

The king was outraged and set the task of curing his daughter on the poor court inventor, Drosselmeier, threatening to cut off his head if he could not solve this problem in a mere thirty days. Even a clever man like Drosselmeier was worried he wouldn’t be able to solve such a riddle in such a short time. And so he went to visit his friend the court astronomers to see if there was any help to be gained by observing the stars.

From this visit, Drosselmeier was able to determine that the princess could only be cured by eating the meat of the great nut Crackatook, the hardest, most delicious nut in the world. How would one go about cracking the hardest nut in the world, you might ask, and that would be a fine question. It turns out the only way was for a young man who had never yet shaved nor worn boots to crack open the shell with his teeth and hand the princess the nut with his eyes closed before taking seven steps backwards without stumbling.

This, as you might imagine, was a difficult mission even for Drosselmeier’s genius. Well, to make an already long story somewhat shorter, Drosselmeier traveled the four corners of the Earth--plus a previously undiscovered fifth corner that he called “zorth”--only to discover both the nut and the young man were to be found in his hometown of Nuremberg in Germany.

He found the great nut Crackatook in the shop of his brother Christoph, the greatest dollmaker in all of Nuremberg (which is no small feat, as Nuremberg has long been famous for its toymakers. Some are even almost as good as I am. I would say the Drosselmeier brothers are the closest anyone has ever come to the quality of my workshop, so I am glad they are my friends and not my rivals!). Also in that shop, he found his nephew, the seventeen-year-old Nathaniel Drosselmeier, who had never shaved and never worn boots. What’s more, the young Drosselmeier was so good at cracking nuts that the impressed young ladies of Nuremberg had taken to calling him Nathaniel Nussknacker, a name that means “nut-cracker.”

With quite a bit of to-do that we can skip over for now, Nathaniel Nussknacker was presented with the chance to crack the great nut Crackatook and rescue Princess Pirlipat and earn a great reward for his uncle and marriage of the princess for himself. He managed to crack the uncrackable nut in his teeth, handed the meat to the princess with his eyes closed, and began his seven steps backwards. As he did so, the princess ate the nut and was returned to her normal, beautiful self: lily white skin, eyes of azure blue, and golden curls in her hair! The king rejoiced, trumpets blared, drums rang ou! But at his seventh step, young Nathaniel Nussknacker stepped on and crushed Madame Mouserinks, who had just come crawling out of a hole in the floor! The boy stumbled, and in an instant, he had transformed just as the princess had: a huge ugly head with great white teeth, huge round eyes, and hair and beard of cottony white. If you have ever seen a nutcracker, you can picture how the young Nussknacker was changed.

No need to worry, though, as young Nathaniel did eventually find the true love that returned him to normal through defeating Madame Mouserinks’s seven sons who had been reborn as the seven-headed Mouse King and saving the Stahlbaum household. When young Marie Stahlbaum promised to love him despite his looks, she broke the curse on him, and the two traveled together to the Kingdom of the Dolls, where they were married and live as king and queen to this day.

And so you can see why I was so concerned to see that the Mouse King had returned and was planning to make trouble for the Man in the Moon. I suspected that the Mouse King had heard that the moon was made of green cheese (perhaps you have heard this, too) and thought that he and all the mice on Earth could climb to the moon and eat cheese to their hearts’ content without worry of cats or mousetraps or shrieking people swatting them with brooms.

I was also concerned because the presence of the Mouse King meant that the base of this column of mice was certainly in Nuremberg. Nuremberg is perhaps the city where the Christ Child is best known and at her greatest strength. There was no way I could go there, either to inspect the base of the mice column or--more importantly--to go talk to my friend Drosselmeier and his nephew Nathaniel Nussknacker to see if they could help me defeat the Mouse King, as they had done before.

Likewise, most of my toughest companions would likewise be recognized and unwelcome in Nuremberg: the Krampus, Belsnickel, and the Klaubauf would all be detected immediately. Rupert and Father Whipper would likely be more welcome, as the two of them sometimes help the Christ Child, but both worried about possibly coming into conflict with the terrifying Hans Trapp: Rupert is too kind-hearted to fight, and Father Whipper is too cowardly. And while Pete is my most trusted apprentice, this job was too dangerous for him and his brothers, no matter how much they might beg me to go to the moon.

As there was no way I could go on my own--in any of my many disguises--there was only one choice left: my wife, Mrs. Claus, a fearless woman who is definitely sturdy enough to handle the cold of the moon. The only question was how she would get there. My reindeer, horses, and donkeys were just as likely to be recognized as I was, and she needed something that could fly her to the moon, and fast. There was only one real choice: our fierce and loyal ally, Lunicursor, king of the griffins of the Riphean Mountains.

Once he had agreed to help us, Mrs. Claus and the griffin king headed out for Nuremberg. I myself had a number of quick stops to make myself before I could head to the moon. First, I wanted to make sure that Christmas would be taken care of if I somehow found myself trapped on the moon. Stranger things had happened before, and I have found myself captured by less powerful foes than the Mouse King, and time was running short before the big night.

As such, I made the quick trip from the North Pole down to the small nation of Iceland and out to the vast lava fields were Iceland’s many trolls live. There I found the thirteen troll brothers who love to make trouble for the children of Iceland at Christmas time by gobbling up their Christmas treats or slamming doors when they try to sleep, but they also delight the children by filling up their shoes with toys and candy, not just one night, but thirteen nights, one for each brother. They are called the Yule Lads, and they live in the lava fields of Iceland with their mother, a hideous ogress who likes to gobble up naughty children, and her cat, an enormous beast who looks for kids who did not receive new clothes for Christmas. (Next time you get socks for Christmas instead of a toy, be grateful, not sad! It’s better not to have the Yule Cat after you, I promise!)

By the time I got to the lava fields, the first few brothers had already set out for town, where they would bother families by drinking all their milk and scraping all the good leftover bits out of the pan with stubby little fingers. Luckily, the fourth brother--who is known as Spoon Licker because of his tendency to lick all the spoons in a house, hoping that there’s delicious sauce or cake batter left on there--was still to be found. I was able to get him to stop licking a spoon long enough to promise that he and his brothers would make sure presents got delivered to all the children of the world if I didn’t make it back in time. The Yule Lads could be hard to predict, but they weren’t nearly as naughty as they used to be before I taught them that helping children was more fulfilling than teasing them, and with thirteen of them plus help from Pete and Rupert and the elves, I thought surely they could manage to do the job I normally do in one night by myself.

I also had one other favor to ask them that I will tell you about momentarily.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor had made their way as quick as lightning to Nuremberg, where they managed to slip unnoticed to the home of the clockmaker Drosselmeier. They immediately recognized him by his eyepatch, his shabby frock coat, and his shocking wig made of spun glass. He welcomed them warmly and promised to help as much as he could, as he was shocked and concerned to learn about the Mouse King’s return.

Soon Drosselmeier led Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor to a wardrobe with folding doors that was full of traveling cloaks lined with fox fur. Hiding above a large cape fastened to the ceiling of the wardrobe by a piece of lace was a ladder made of cedar wood. Climbing this ladder was the secret entrance to the Kingdom of the Dolls. You may have heard of similar secret doors in other wardrobes; some wardrobes are just that way.

Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor emerged with Drosselmeier in the Field of Sugarcandy, where everything was made of candied orange peel, burnt almonds, and sugared raisins. Soon they passed through the Forest of Christmas and over the River of Orange Juice, past the Village of Sweet Cake, along the River of Rose Essence full of golden dolphins, through the Wood of Preserved Fruits, and finally, to the capital, the City of Candied Fruits.

The capital always carries the scent of roses and has a slight pink glow to it, which comes from a lake filled with silvery pink waves on which swim silver swans with golden collars and jumping fish that shimmer like diamonds. It was on the other side of Rose Lake, past the noisy and bustling capital city, that the three came at last to Marzipan Castle. They found the king and queen--Nathaniel Nussknacker and his wife Marie--inside waiting for them.

Mrs. Claus quickly informed the young king--handsome in his coat marked with a giant golden spider, a sign of his membership in the knightly Order of the Golden Spider, which he had been awarded for saving Princess Pirlipat--that the trouble-making Mouse King had returned and that we at the North Pole required the help of the only man who had defeated him before.

Unfortunately, Nathaniel Nussknacker told Mrs. Claus that he would not be able to help us this time, as he had received word that the infamous giant Sweettooth had awakened and was returning to the capital with the goal of eating up Marzipan Castle. In the past, he had done great damage to the castle, eating the top of one tower and beginning toward the castle’s great dome before the people of the capital promised him the city’s Almond and Honey District in exchange for leaving the castle alone.

Likewise, when Mrs. Claus asked if the king had any word on the whereabouts of the descendants of the cat Herr Schnurr, who had frightened Madame Mouserinks in the past, he told her that he had unfortunately lost touch with that famed cat since taking up the throne in the doll kingdom.

Mrs. Claus was disappointed that King Nathaniel would not be able to join her in battle against the Mouse King, but she understood that he needed to protect his home against the giant. As she was preparing to get on Lunicursor’s back and fly back out of the Kingdom of the Dolls, however, Nathaniel Nussknacker stopped her and offered her the one bit of help he could: the use of the great sword Crackatook, which he carried strapped to his side at all times. The sword was named after the hard nut, as the shell of that great nut had been coated in gold and placed at the sabre’s pommel, where the name Crackatook could be seen carved into the shell in Chinese characters. The magic of the nut passed on to the sword, ensuring that its blade would never break or grow dull. It was also the only sword that had ever defeated the Mouse King before, as it was the same cavalry sabre that had previously belonged to Queen Marie’s brother, Fritz, who had lent it to the Nutcracker for his finally duel against the Mouse King.

Mrs. Claus thanked the king and his uncle for their great help and promised to return the sword in good condition (which is always important when someone lends you something that has great meaning to them). She strapped the sword Crackatook to her side, and she and King Lunicursor sped over Rose Lake, out of the Kingdom of the Dolls, out of the wardrobe, out of Nuremberg, and up to the moon!

All of this was accomplished while I myself was still meeting with Spoon-Licker in the lava fields, so it was of some importance that I make my way to the moon as quickly as possible so that I could aid Mrs. Claus and help protect the Man in the Moon from the Mouse King’s ravenous armies of mice. However, even my fastest reindeer--more rapid than eagles though they may be--are not as fast as King Lunicursor when he races to the moon, and so I knew I would need to take a shortcut. And so I planned to make my way to the moon by way of the stars.

I flew my sleigh at all speeds back up to the North Pole, where I called out to my dear friend, Callisto, the North Polar Bear. She lives most of her life among the stars above the North Pole, where she and her son Arcas help remind people which way is north. After I called out her name, she and her cub--both bigger than houses--lumbered down from their place in the sky. I explained the situation to her, which was not a surprise to her, as she had seen the pile of mice reaching up into the sky herself. She understood the urgency of our situation immediately, and of course offered to carry me and my sleigh up into the Star Land, especially once I promised to reward her and Arcas with large vats of their favorite soda once I had returned.

The Star Land is the home of the Star Man, who is the Christmas gift-bringer in western parts of Poland. He lives up in the mystical Star Land together with the Little Star, who is the star that the Three Kings saw at the first Christmas, and who brings gifts herself to children in southern Poland. Together with them are large numbers of Star Boys, who spend the Twelve Days of Christmas wandering around singing carols and welcoming the Three Kings, and a host of small angels, who also help deliver gifts. Normally, the gate between the Star Land and the Earth only opens on Christmas Eve after a child has seen the first star in the sky, but access between the worlds is easy when you live among the stars like Callisto and Arcas.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to speak with my friend the Star Man, but I spoke with him enough to explain why I was passing through his land so that I wouldn’t appear rude. I promised him I would return soon for a longer visit, during which I would bring some pierogi, herring, and poppy seed noodles for us to share.

With that settled, I quickly re-entered my sleigh and set off for the moon. You might know that there are no stars between the Earth and the Moon, and that is true, but the Star Land is a magical kind of in-between place that people with calculators and telescopes mostly don’t have the ability to see anymore. Fortunately, if you do know the way, the trip from the Star Land to the Moon is quite quick.

When I arrived at the Moon’s surface, the scene was quite a mess! The moon was simply covered with mice, so that it looked like it had a wiggly brown carpet on it. There were some empty patches, however, that were not covered in vermin, and it was in those patches that I could see my friends: the Man in the Moon, Cain, fighting off mice with the thorn branches he usually carries on his back, and his little dog Phoebe barking and snapping at them; the moon rabbits abandoning their rice cakes to smash at mice with their hammers; and of course, Mrs. Claus and Lunicursor fighting valiantly against the mouse hordes with beak, claw, and the unbreakable sword Crackatook!

Though they were doing their best, they were greatly outnumbered, so I knew something needed to be done soon. And so I called out “On, Dasher! On, Dancer!” and, well, you know the rest. And at top speed I circled around the Moon, light side and dark side, until I finally spied the hideous, seven-headed, seven-crowned Mouse King, spurring on his army to swarm the Moon.

I lowered the sleigh to hover near to him and called out to catch his attention.

“Mouse King!” I shouted. “Call off your armies! You can’t eat the Moon, we need it! It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to everyone! Besides, the Moon hasn’t been made of cheese for hundreds of years!”

“Bah!” called the Mouse King with seven voices at once. “The Moon is mine by right of conquest! If you want it, you should fight harder for it! I know you’re hiding the cheese somewhere!”

I hadn’t really expected that reasoning would work with him, so I knew I would have to use my backup plan.

“Mouse King!” I shouted again. “Nice purple cloak! Is that new?”

I could tell now that the Mouse King was annoyed with me. “No, you fool! This cloak has been in the royal family of the Mouse Kingdom for generations! New clothes are for peasants!”

“That’s what I thought you might say,” I replied, reaching back to open my magic sack. “I have someone who might want to meet you, then.”

Remember I told you I asked Spoon-Licker for one more favor? Besides asking them to cover for me in case I didn’t make it back for Christmas, I also asked if I could borrow their cat. You know, the enormous, shaggy cat that hunts down those who didn’t get new clothes for Christmas?

Well, once I opened the mouth of my sack, the Yule Cat, who had not particularly cared for being cooped up in a magical bag, leaped out as if he had been in a bathtub where the water was too hot. He made straight for the King of the Mice, and the King’s once fearless army soon found themselves scattering like their feet were on fire. The mice scrambled in hordes and jumped back to the Earth, many splashing in the ocean, some crashing onto the land, some going who knows where. It may be generations before all the mice find their way back home.

I’m not sure what happened to the Mouse King in all the chaos. All I could find was a pile of seven crowns and a tattered purple cloak. The Yule Cat can’t speak, but I’m not even sure he would tell. All I know is that he seemed much more contented when he went back into the bag.

Anyway, the Moon is safe again, for now. I will need to return the Yule Cat to Iceland, and Mrs. Claus will need to return the sword Crackatook to the Kingdom of the Dolls, but even with all that, I hope to still have Christmas ready in time and without many mistakes.

I hope this letter finds you well, even if not on time. I hope you have or will have had a merry Christmas! Maybe a happy New Year as well! Hopefully we both have an easy time of it in the coming year. Until then, I remain:

Your friend,

Santa Claus

P.S. I am sending along to you a book with more of the story of Marie and the Nutcracker so you can learn more about how the two of them met. It’s somewhat different from what I told you in this letter—which is not surprising, as there are many different versions of this famous story; sometimes they even call Marie Clara instead, or leave out the story of the hard nut Crackatook altogether—but I promise I told the story to you just as it was told to me by Godfather Drosselmeier. I also sent along small toys of myself and the Christ Child that I hope you will like.

P.P.S. If you have the book The Alphabet of Christmas, you can see pictures of some of the different people from this letter, like the Christ Child (under C), Father Whipper (F), Star Man (G), Krampus (K), Rupert (R), Auntie Harry (T), the Yule Lads (Y), and Pete (Z).

#christmas #santa claus letter #santa claus #nutcracker #man in the moon #yule lads #yule cat #prose

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