Page 31 of Wrap Me Up

“Speaking of. Snow should be showing up sometime today to start working on shipping out our orders.”

Jolly squeals. “Yay! I’m so glad you took him up on his offer.”

“Me, too.” The song wraps up, and we go back to work. The image of the North Pole is shaping up nicely.

A few hours later, Mistletoe comes to grab me when Snow arrives. We don’t want him seeing our competition entry piece to go tattle back to Dylan about. Snow bounces on his toes to the beat of the song. He plows into me when he sees me.

“You okay?” Snow asks.

“I’m good.” I give him a grin. “What about you? You were stressed about Santa stuff earlier. Is it any better?”

He toes the floor. “Yeah, I just felt overwhelmed, but Dylan helped a lot. He’s amazing.” Snow sighs happily and I know exactly how he feels. It’s how Noel helps me, too.

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road.” I lead Snow to our mailroom, which is a lot smaller than Dylan’s, but just as organized. Dylan helped us decide how to arrange everything for maximum efficiency.

We have wire shelves lining the back wall and two side walls. A worktable is down the middle of the room to fill the orders from. Shelves are labeled by the region of the world each order goes to. Every finished order goes in a bag with their order sheet and address label to keep everything together, then placed on whichever shelf it belongs to. It’s a genius plan, but like Dylan, sometimes we get overwhelmed with orders and backed up from packing and shipping.

I show Snow exactly how to pack our products. We have discreet packaging. Every box gets lined with black tissue paper, has a postcard with a thank you note written by yours truly, and a business coupon for a future purchase. Super easy, but so time consuming when it’s not your favorite part of the job.

“Easy peasey,” Snow says, and works through an order as I watch. He moves with precise actions, knowing pretty much what to do after a year in Dylan’s mailroom. “How’s this?”

“Dang, even the labels are perfectly centered. I can’t even do that.”

Snow chuckles at the praise. “Dylan is very particular about his labels, so I did my best to learn a few tricks to make sure they are always perfect.”

“I didn’t know he was that particular about his labels. Interesting.”

“Cracker Jack, you have no idea.”

I snort at his rolled eyes. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. If you have questions, any of us are happy to answer. I’ll be working on our competition piece, though, so I’ll be hidden away from your prying eyes.”

His hand flies to his chest. “I do not have prying eyes.”

“You totally do. You want to spy for Dylan.” I stick out my tongue, but end up laughing instead.

“I mean, I’m curious, but I won’t tell Dylan anything.” Snow acts as if he zips his lips and throws away the key.

“Nope, sorry, still not letting you see it.”

“Fine. Fine.” He mumbles. “It’s fine.” But he cracks a smile, so I know he’s not really annoyed with me. “I’m sure it’s going to be amazing and I can’t wait to see it.”

“I can’t wait for everyone to see it.” It’s our best work yet. “Oh! How is the gift exchanging going for everyone else?” I have to admit to not paying much attention to whether or not everyone is integrating more.

Snow shrugs. “It’s going? It might take a few gift exchanges for things to really start working the way we had hoped.”

“And it doesn’t help that Noel and I went off the tracks.” Not that I feel bad or anything.

“I think a few others have already revealed themselves, too.” Snow works on the next order. “There does seem to be more friendships among the workshops forming, so it’s getting the job done. Just slowly.”

“Well, the North Pole wasn’t built in a day. We’ll get there.”

“Technically,” Noel’s voice is suddenly behind me. “It was. The first Santa built the weather barrier and the original version of the North Pole with his magic in just under seventeen hours.”

“Huh, didn’t know that,” Snow says. “Santa and Jack haven’t gotten to North Pole history yet. They want to teach us as much of the Santa magic as possible, then teach us how everything came to be how it is. He’s given us a few books to read for homework and they’re fascinating, but I get bored easily.”

I turn to face Noel. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s lunchtime, and I wanted to take my man out.”

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