Page 6 of Santa Daddy, I'm Not the One

I had missed The Great Cookie Exchange. For the entire year, the citizens of Twinkle Glen, the Twinks, perfected holiday Christmas cookies. They tasted each other’s cookies and swapped recipes. I’d also missed one Midnight Wish Lanterns, but another was coming up I wasn’t inclined to attend either. What was the point?

With a sigh, I turned away from the window and returned to my workbench. The unfinished toy train looked exactly how I felt: incomplete. I tossed back the rest of my coffee, set the cup aside, and picked up the toy. It was beautifully crafted by my hand, yet all I saw was emptiness. The joy we poured into our toys felt like a farce. Each year, the kids wanted more and more while believing less.

Slamming the toy back on my table harder than intended, I startled a nearby elf who dropped his own project.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, turning my face away.

The elf simply smiled and returned to his work. I frowned. I had to get out of this funk. Christmas was just around the corner. While the workshop slowed down time, it didn’t stop it. Christmas was still coming.

I focused on the task at hand, finishing the toy. I was good at what I did, but the magic of it all felt draining. My hands wereweathered and calloused from years of careful craftsmanship. Yet the touch of these inanimate objects did little to reawaken the life within me.

As I tried to refocus, two of my elves, Pix and Dix, entered the workshop. They were brothers and a part of the expedition crew that made trips to the “real” world during the periodical Yuletide Crossing. Earlier they’d made their annual trip to cross over an adult human whose heart was pure and still believed. Yes, they still existed, though rare, and their presence usually lifted the spirits of Twinkle Glen, giving us hope and spreading their cheer.

I needed that infectious spirit to get me out of my funk.

“Pix. Dix. Is our guest settling in?” I asked.

They both stopped in front of me and glanced at each other. Oh no, something had gone wrong. Was that the reason for my uneasiness?

“What happened?”

“We might have a tiny problem,” Pix said.

“What sort of problem?”

“The human… he didn’t want to visit us.” Dix shuffled and wrung his hands.

“And?”

“It’s even worse, Santa. He says he doesn’t believe you exist. That he never did.”

I frowned, perplexed. “How can he not believe? The List of Hearts is never wrong. It guides us to those who embody the magic of Christmas. Did you go to the right address?”

“We checked it twice.”

“We could not have gotten the wrong house.”

“But seeing you two, he changed his mind?”

Of course, some adults had been skeptical over the years, but once they saw the elves, they believed rather quickly.

Pix shuffled his feet. “Actually, he was quite adamant that Santa doesn’t exist. Didn’t even seem excited to see the workshop.”

“Hmm.” I stroked my beard. No matter how short I kept it, a day before Christmas Eve, it grew back overnight. “What did you do?”

“Well…” Dix glanced at his brother and scratched his head. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, so we, umm, took some initiative.”

“Yeah, we took initiative,” Pix said. “That’s on our job performance review.”

I leaned forward, a sense of foreboding washing over me. “What initiative?”

“We kidnapped him,” Pix blurted out.

“You did what?” I bellowed, my voice echoing off the walls. All the elves in the workshop stopped what they were doing.

Pix played with his fingers. “We used the sleigh dust, Santa,” Pix said. “And dumped him into the limitless loot bag.”

“You kidnapped a human?” I hissed. “Don’t you know that is against the rules? The one who enters Twinkle Glen must do so of their own free will.”

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