And just as Santa Claus never truly stopped believing in Christmas, the children of the world had not forgotten him or stopped believing in him, either. Soon one letter after another began to drift northward, carried on the back of the wind, letters filled with love and apology. A five-year-old boy scrawled, with his mother’s help:
Dear Santa Claus,
My name is Jimmy. I’m sorry last year how I threw away your present. Will you be my friend again? This Christmas I would like a bicycle and a baseball bat and . . .
A little girl printed carefully:
Dear Santa,
I am glad you are all right. Really I didn’t like that lollipop last year, it made me air-sick. Since then I have been a good girl and I would like a doll with curly red hair . . .
Wrote another boy:
Dear Santa,
Please don’t be mad about last year. My little brother wants a guitar but my mom says . . .
Santa sat in his easy chair, peering through his spectacles, reading letter after letter until his eyes brimmed and his smile spread from ear to ear. He seemed to hear the children’s voices as he read, like a choir singing a song of joy and love, the most marvelous music he had ever heard.
He sighed and settled back, putting his feet up at the long day’s end. Sipping his cocoa with marshmallows and watching the colors of the fire, he let their happy voices sing him a lullaby as he drowsed contentedly before the glowing hearth.
Anya smiled fondly from the bedroom doorway, where she had just tucked the children into their beds, as all around the compound the elves and even the reindeer were settling into their beds for another long winter’s nap. In the perfect stillness of the polar night, the lights began to wink out one by one, the elves’ village slowly melting into the greater darkness. But above the mountain where the peaceful town lay, aurora still twinkled and shone, its crystalline colors rising to form a great Christmas tree of light, crowned by the North Star, the brightest star of all in that magical place.
The shining tree marked the spot, as it marks it still, where the true magic of unselfish love has always existed, and always will. It is a place that few of us may ever see, but it exists, somewhere beyond the edge of our reality, all the same. And, gentle reader, if you believe in Santa Claus in your own secret heart—in the spirit of loving generosity, in the true and sometimes almost-forgotten meaning of Christmas—you may glimpse those twinkling lights in the darkness when you dream tonight.
Joan D. Vinge, Santa Claus: The Movie Novelization
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