***
A few days after his marriage to Martha began, jolly St. Nick began expressing himself through a catchphrase.
“Ho ho ho,” he’d often say every morning, to express the newfound joy in his heart.
Eventually the elves caught onto his catchphrase, and they, too, began to use it.
“Ho ho ho,” they’d respond in kind.
Because it was his thing, St. Nick eventually had to whip them. But he let them enjoy themselves for a while. It was a fun thing to say.
But, as time progressed, and the thrill of having a partner in his life began to equalize with the rest of his daily routine, his old attitudes began to resurface, and the next thing he knew, he was back to business, treating the elves like employees rather than as friends, and his life found a new balance that kept him content for the next ten years, but not necessarily happy.
One day when he was buffing the side of his rowing machine, an elf came to him crying. He didn’t ask what was wrong, or offer any type of compassion that could calm the elf down. He simply stared at him. When the elf saw that he would do nothing more to acknowledge his grief than to fix his gaze on him, he broke down into a smattering mess of explaining things.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said the elf. “I didn’t meant to do it. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. It just happened. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
St. Nick said nothing. He just stared.
“It won’t happen again. Promise. I’m so sorry.”
St. Nick went back to buffing the side of his rowing machine.
“I didn’t mean to break the treadmill,” said the elf. “I thought I could train our reindeer to run faster. Didn’t mean to ruin the belt. So sorry, so sorry, please don’t kill me.”
St. Nick wiped a layer of grime off the rowing machine and tossed the rag to his side. Then he grabbed another rag and wiped off another layer.
“Please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
St. Nick tossed the new rag on top of the old one. Then he stared at the elf. The elf’s eyes were wide in their plea for mercy.
“So sorry.”
Finally, St. Nick shrugged, then went back to polishing the rowing machine.
The elf walked away confused, clearly thinking he was about to receive the beating of a lifetime. But St. Nick didn’t have the heart for it. Truth was, he was beginning to tire of his job, and he didn’t care anymore if something broke around here.
When he went to bed that night, he told Martha what had happened. In her usual calming way, she told him what was wrong.
“You’re stuck in a rut. Change it up a little.”
He scoffed at her.
“What are you talking about? I don’t get stuck in ruts.”
“Everyone gets stuck in a rut eventually. It’s called repetition and boredom. You make gym equipment all the time. Make something else. It’ll make you feel better.”
When he told her he was at a loss for ideas, she reminded him that he used to make dolls and mannequins for fun.
“I have too many bodies standing around here already,” he told her. “It’s not really the change I need.”
She winked at him.
“Try it anyway. It’s different. You used to enjoy it, right?”
He shrugged.
“I guess so.”
“Good, problem solved. Now let me sleep.”
The next day, he took his wife’s advice. And she was right; he did feel better making something different. In fact, it energized him. So, he kept making toys. And the momentum took over faster than he thought possible. When the elves caught on to his new plan, dolls came cranking out into existence by the minute.
St. Nick’s workshop had suddenly come close to bursting from having so many toys cluttering the floor. There were so many dolls lying around that they began spilling into his living quarters. And even though he was pleased with his newfound creative energy, Martha was not as pleased, and she had given him an ultimatum.
“I know you needed a change,” she told him, “but this is ridiculous. Either the toys go, or I go.”
St. Nick was proud of his inventions, and he was proud of the collection he had built up over those few productive months, so her ultimatum had left him slightly heartbroken, and confused. But he hadn’t made the kind of toy that could keep him jolly, so he acquiesced to his wife’s request and threw the pile of dolls into the snow.
And for days he’d stare at the pile as it grew taller and taller, wishing he had someplace better to store it. But for the life of him he couldn’t think of an ideal location, for the village was already filled with his newest inventions, and even the elves were tired of looking for places to put them.
It was then that Martha provided him with an idea.
“Why don’t you just get rid of them?” she asked. “What purpose do they serve you?”
St. Nick had spent his life hoarding his inventions, and he wasn’t ready to throw them out.
“Because I don’t want to.”
What he didn’t tell her was that he didn’t know how to. But he knew in his heart that Martha was right. He didn’t need any of this stuff. It was rare that he ever looked at these toys again. He didn’t even use his gym equipment much anymore, either. It was just the thrill of building something new that had formed his attachment to them in the first place. They didn’t make his life better. They just got in the way.
But how could he get rid of them? That was the question he didn’t know how to answer.
“I really don’t know what to do anymore,” he said.
She gave him a hard look.
“Your first problem is that you build things for yourself,” Martha said, “and you’re overstuffed. You need to make a change.”
St. Nick argued that making a change was her last suggestion, and the reason he had so much junk stacking up outside in the first place. Making a change was the last thing he needed to do.
She simply put her hand on his cheek and smiled.
“You’re thinking too selfishly. That’s always been your problem. Think about others for a change. You won’t find contentment until you do.”
St. Nick stared at her as if she were resting her head under a piston. Thinking of others was not really his forte. But then he remembered how he’d felt after the elves first came to work for him, and how he’d felt when he’d brought Martha home for the first time, and it occurred to him that the aches in his heart had always found comfort whenever he’d allow someone new to enter his life. So he voiced the thought in his head for a second opinion.
“Should I kidnap a new bride?” he asked her. “Is that the change I need?”
Martha lost her smile, and he didn’t know why. Then she slapped him across the face. He still didn’t know why.
“No, that is not the change you need. Think more charitably.”
“I should invite a new bride to kidnap me?”
Martha slapped him again. She had a lot of power in the flat of her hand, probably due to the workouts she’d been doing the last ten years.
“Make gifts for people,” she finally said. “Instead of hoarding them, make dolls for children. Make tools for adults. Make treadmills for the unhealthy. Don’t make them for yourself.”
St. Nick had trouble looking at her after that. He couldn’t believe she was suggesting that he gave his hard work away for free. That was crazy talk. Who was this woman he had married?
“The pain you feel in your heart comes from being selfish,” she said. “Bless the children with toys if you really want it all to go away. That’s how you get rid of that mountain outside. That’s how you make yourself happy. That’s how you make me happy.”
Skeptical St. Nick didn’t care much for his wife’s advice, but she had yet to steer him wrong, so he decided to give her suggestion a chance. So, when the summer came and the ice began to soften, he threw all of his spare toys on a sled and dragged them through the wilderness down into Canada or Siberia, and passed t
hem out to any child he could find playing in the streets. Even though their parents tried to attack him out of fear that he was up to no good, the children walked away with a smile. They now had something they were never given the privilege to have before. They now had a toy to play with.
St. Nick didn’t feel any kind of emotional change when he returned to the North Pole, so he ordered his elves to build him another series of dolls. He thought maybe the sensation of joyful giving hadn’t found its way through his skin yet, and he wanted to give it another try. So, with his second set, he traveled south again, this time in the opposite direction. Even though the results were similar with the children he found in the newer location, the feeling he had in his heart was different. Now he was beginning to notice the difference. Now he was beginning to understand the value in his new line of work. Children who grew up with nothing but a frown on their faces could now go home with a smile, something of which he’d never had himself prior to meeting Martha. Now it finally began to make sense.
He went out a few more times throughout that year, making sure to hit different parts of Canada and Siberia, where he could find desperate children and drop off his new line of mannequin loot. He also experimented with giving the children clothes to wear, but he found they were less thrilled about receiving socks as they were about receiving toys, so he stuck to his mandate of making only things kids would want to play with.
By the end of the year, he had stockpiled his greatest cache of dolls and mannequins, while tossing in a few experimental baubles like toy animals and fake tools (for those who wanted to be like their parents), and on one embarrassing moment, tossing in an elf, which he had to apologize for later, but never got around to it since apologies weren’t really his thing, and dragged his sled the farthest south he had ever gone in a toy drive: Moscow.
It was there that his name began to go viral.
For the next two years, he would revisit the same places, giving the same kind of toys, and each time the children would cry out to their parents, “Saint Nick is here! Saint Nick is here!” The parents were still uneasy about having this muscular man in a red suit giving their children playthings, especially on an annual basis, but they gradually accepted his charity when he began giving them exercise equipment and power tools to play with.
But with word of his name spreading like wildfire, and regions where he’d never set foot starting to also chant his name, the news had come back to him that the rest of the world was eager for its dose of St. Nick’s generosity. By the time his name had circulated throughout the nations and each nationality had done its job in butchering it, he discovered that the world had no longer known him as St. Nick, but as Santa Claus. He had no idea how such miscommunication could garble up something so simple as his name, but he decided he liked the change—something about it was catchy, almost brand-like. So, he ran with it.
Yes, the demand for his charity grew hot overnight. But, he soon realized how economically destructive handling everyone’s request would’ve been under his current system, so he had a brainstorm session with Buddy, his elf commander-in-chief, about how to keep up with the influx of requests.
After many agonizing nights of budgeting resources and designing the quickest production schedule they could afford, St. Nick went to work scouring the entire Arctic Circle for hidden elvish villages, immediately hired any elf he could find within range, and gave them permission to rebuild their homes in and around his workshop. Within a few days, he had multiplied his current elven population by five, and his village of elves had turned into a city of elves.
He also had to refurbish his workshop to handle not only the new demand, but the new storage space required to hold the massive boost in inventory he and his elves were about to create. So, he and the elves went to work on expanding his workshop, not only outward, but upward, too. They built several new wings on either side of the original gym, and a complete factory floor over the dead center of the North Pole. Building the factory right over the pole allowed for more balanced testing of things like compasses and magnets, so he was happy about the move. He also ordered several new floors added to the workshop so that each fleet of elves could work on a different product line from the ones working on the floor below. That meant keeping a steady influx of variety, and a greater range of happiness for each diverse child in the world. Soon, he could build not only dress-up dolls for the girls, but action dolls for the boys, as well as snow globes, mechanical creatures, and anything else his elves’ imaginations could develop.
The final logistical problem he had was with delivery. Simply leaving the village every month to make a toy run down south was not helping his production speed, and dragging it hundreds of miles through the snow by his own two feet was also too slow. So, he and his elves worked out a plan to involve the reindeer. He figured he could tie a couple of them to the sled and force them to drag him across the wasteland at a much faster speed than he could walk himself. When they brainstormed the perfect number, they decided four would be enough. The sled, after all, was not that large. But even as they prepped it for delivery, they encountered another problem. Because St. Nick had decided he would make only one trip a year, at the beginning of winter when the rest of the world was experiencing the same cold he had felt year round, he discovered that a year’s worth of toys created quite the mountain of crap, and stacking it all on that tiny little sled was almost impossible. And even if he could’ve wedged it all together, four reindeer would not have had the power required to drag it and still maintain optimal speed. So, he and his elves built an emergency sleigh capable of holding as much as eight times the sled’s limit, decided to up the reindeer limit to eight, well, nine on those nights that he needed to use the red-nosed one to see in the dark, and then raced out across the tundra to deliver those gifts before the New Year had a chance to throw him off schedule.
The reconstruction effort paid off. He was able to visit far more villages in far more regions than he had previously been able to reach on his own. And now the kids were screaming his name, “Santa!” as if he were a popular concert pianist.
But he still had one logistical problem that he could not overcome no matter what new modifications he had given his sleigh. He couldn’t travel across oceans, or reach islands in the middle of nowhere. His sleigh wasn’t equipped to float, and his reindeer, unfortunately, couldn’t swim. So, he asked his wife, Martha, for some help.
“Here, let me have a look,” she said.
She came back to him a short while later with a solution.
“Just say, ‘On Dancer, on Prancer,’ and list all of their names in a row when you need to get somewhere impossible to reach in a hurry.”
The following year, when St. Nick went out to make his annual delivery, he took his wife’s advice, and without breaking even the slightest sweat, he was able to travel in one night with his reindeer as far south as Brazil, where it was still summer. Because Martha was from Canada, she was able to teach the reindeer how to fly.