The Night I Met Father Christmas Read online

  For Jackson, Harrison and Lana

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  When I was small, one of my friends said something really silly. He said that Father Christmas didn’t exist.

  ‘So where do all the Christmas presents come from?’ I asked him. He didn’t have an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s just something my older sister told me.’

  ‘Who comes down the chimney and eats the mince pies and drinks the brandy?’ I asked. ‘Who rides the sleigh?’

  My friend was silent for a while.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘You’re right. I don’t know why I brought it up. Do you want to play marbles?’

  That night, I had trouble getting to sleep. I had won the argument, but my friend had planted a tiny seed of doubt in my mind. What if Father Christmas wasn’t real?

  As Christmas approached, I began to ask myself all sorts of worrying questions: who was Father Christmas? Why did he bring presents? How did he deliver them all in one night? How did it all start?

  I made up my mind that there was only one way to find out the truth. I had to meet Father Christmas, face to face.

  Of course, I didn’t tell anyone about my plan. My parents would have tried to stop me, and my twin sisters would have wanted to tag along, even though they were much too young. This was a serious operation and I couldn’t risk it going wrong.

  Finally, Christmas Eve arrived, and my parents came up to kiss me goodnight.

  ‘Do you know what day it is tomorrow?’ asked my mother, her eyes twinkling.

  ‘Is it Wednesday?’ I asked, pretending not to care.

  She looked at my father, who shrugged.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she said, trying to maintain an air of suspense. ‘It is Wednesday. But it’s also Christmas Day.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m not really that interested in Christmas.’

  ‘Really?’ said my father. They both looked very disappointed, and for a very brief moment I felt bad for tricking them.

  ‘It’s okay, I suppose,’ I said, ‘if you like presents and chocolate and sweets and things like that, but I prefer to work through a few maths problems while listening to classical music.’ And then I faked a big yawn and closed my eyes.

  ‘Whatever makes you happy, darling,’ said my mother, sounding worried. They kissed me goodnight, switched out the light, and went downstairs.

  I lay there in the dark, with my eyes closed, listening. I could hear my sisters in their bedroom down the hall, talking in their own special made-up language, which only they could understand. Usually, when I heard them talking like that it made me feel a bit left out, but not tonight, because I knew that I was doing something very special.

  Eventually, my sisters fell quiet and the house suddenly seemed very deep and dark. I could hear the low murmur of my parents talking downstairs, but soon that stopped too, and then the stairs creaked as they made their way up to bed.

  I knew they might look in on me, so I acted as if I was fast asleep.

  ‘Goodnight, little man,’ my father whispered, as he gently moved my head back on to the pillow and pulled the covers up to keep me warm. Then I smelled my mother’s perfume as she gave me a kiss. The door closed, and I heard their footsteps crossing the landing to their bedroom.

  I lay still, listening in the darkness. After what felt like the longest time, I decided it was safe enough to half-open one eye. My bedside clock showed a quarter to twelve. I had never, ever been awake that late before, and I wondered for a moment if, when it struck midnight, I would be turned to stone, like a child in a fairy tale.

  I pulled back the covers, swung my feet down on to the rug and tiptoed to the window. Outside, the window ledge was covered in snow. The moon was thin but bright, and in our neighbour’s garden a fox picked its way across the white lawn. Above me, the blue-black sky was scattered with stars and little wisps of cloud. Nothing moved. No shooting stars, no satellites, not even a trundling planet. And definitely no reindeer-drawn sleigh.

  I slunk back into bed. Using both pillows, together with one of the cushions from the chair, I made a sort of bed-throne, so that I could sit up and watch the open sky. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to wait until Father Christmas came.

  It was the bells I heard first. I had expected jingle bells, like the ones in the song, but these sounded more like Alpine cowbells. I ran to the window. The sky was empty, just as before. Way off in the distance I heard the bells stop and start, growing a little louder each time. Little by little, they grew closer, and my excitement mounted. Then, finally, when they were at their loudest, there was a huge bang, followed by a loud grinding and sliding, and the whole ceiling shook. I’d always thought Father Christmas arrived quietly, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. No wonder he has to wait until everyone is fast asleep!

  A fox picked its way across the white lawn.

  Quick as a flash, I pulled on my dressing gown, slid my feet into my slippers, snatched up my toy rabbit and ran downstairs. Bold as you like, I burst through the sitting-room door and rushed to the fireplace. Lumps of soot fell into the cold grate. Father Christmas was coming!

  Or, at least, he was trying to. The soot kept falling, and up in the chimney there were the muffled sounds of a struggle.

  ‘Urggghhh,’ I heard him say. ‘You’d think one person would clean their chimney on Christmas Eve, but, oh, no.’

  There was a shout, followed by a falling noise, followed by a someone-getting-stuck-in-a-chimney noise. There was the sound of wriggling and muttering, and then a tiny figure fell into the fireplace.

  I had always imagined Father Christmas to be a giant, but the creature in front of me was minute. He had a bit of a tummy, though he wasn’t what you’d call fat. He wore an old-fashioned red velvet jacket, embroidered with green, with matching red velvet trousers and dark-brown leather boots. He also had pointy ears and a turned-up nose, with short curly white hair stuffed under a red velvet cap. Suddenly it struck me. Father Christmas wasn’t a person at all. He was an elf!

  ‘Oh!’ I shouted, in shock.

  ‘Ah!’ shouted Father Christmas, and jumped in fright, knocking over the fire irons, stumbling backwards and landing flat on his bottom in the fireplace.

  ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘My ankle! I think I’ve twisted it.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, feeling very guilty. ‘It’s my fault for scaring you. Let me help you up.’

  I took him by the arm and helped him to his feet.

  ‘Ouch!’ he said.
‘I can’t put any weight on it, look.’

  He tried to stand but was obviously in quite a lot of pain, so I lifted him by his armpits and sat him in my father’s armchair.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, trying to compose himself as he took me in with his bright blue eyes. ‘Umm . . . I’m a . . . chimney inspector. From the council. And I’ve been told to inspect this chimney. I’ve had a look, and it’s fine, so I’m going now. Thank you so much for your help.’

  ‘A chimney inspector?’ I asked, pointing at a box of Lego that was poking out of his sack. ‘Are you sure?’ He quickly pushed the Lego back inside the sack and looked at me defiantly.

  ‘That?’ he said. ‘That’s my Lego. Lots of grown-ups do Lego. It’s a thing.’

  ‘You can’t fool me,’ I said. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to keep my cool. I was, after all, in the presence of a global superstar. ‘Everyone does. You’re Father Christmas. Every year children write a Christmas list, with all the presents we’d like, and send it to you at the North Pole. You have a workshop, where your elves make the presents—’

  ‘Woah, woah, woah,’ he said. ‘They aren’t my elves. They’re my employees and they come to the workshop because they want to.’

  ‘Aha!’ I said, with a clap of my hands. ‘So you are Father Christmas!’

  ‘Ah,’ said the elf, looking like he’d been caught out.

  ‘Shall I tell you what else I know about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve a feeling you might,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, on Christmas Eve you load all the presents on to your sleigh and your nine reindeer, Prancer and Dancer, Donner and Blitzen, Comet and Cupid, Dasher and Vixen, plus Rudolph, pull it through the sky.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘At each house, you land your sleigh on the roof and then climb down the chimney to leave the presents by the Christmas tree. Exactly like you’re doing now. So you must be Father Christmas.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘It’s very possible. In fact . . .’ He took a long pause, and looked me right in the eye. ‘You’re right.’

  And then he smiled. It was like someone had turned on a sunlamp. His eyes twinkled with kindness, and I felt a wave of happiness lift me like a toy boat in a bathtub. All my doubts were gone. Father Christmas was real, and here he was, in my very own house.

  ‘You must be Jackson,’ he said. ‘Why are you up so late, when everyone else is sleeping?’

  ‘I was waiting for you,’ I said. ‘I want to ask you a really important question. Can I?’

  ‘Shoot,’ said Father Christmas.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Who am I?’ asked Father Christmas.

  ‘How did all this start? How did you become Father Christmas?’

  Father Christmas nodded slowly, as if my curiosity ever so slightly impressed him. ‘Do you really want to know?’ He smiled.

  ‘More than anything,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you super-triple-sure?’ asked Father Christmas. ‘It might not be the story you are expecting.’

  ‘No good story is,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Father Christmas. ‘That’s very true.’ He poked a finger into a pocket of his waistcoat, and pulled out a silver pocket watch. ‘Well, I am slightly ahead of schedule. I suppose . . .’ Once again, he looked me right in the eye. ‘I suppose, as you’ve been very good, I could tell it to you quickly.’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  Now, one thing you need to know about me is that I have an extraordinary memory. I can remember the dates and times of every single meal I have ever eaten – cheese sandwich, mustard instead of pickle, twelve-thirty p.m. three Wednesdays ago, being one such example – and my memory means that when someone tells me something, I can repeat every single word in exact order, for ever.

  So, when I say that this is what Father Christmas told me, well . . . it’s as good as him telling it to you himself . . .

  Chapter Two

  Once, a very long time ago, there was a town near the North Pole, which was home to most of the world’s elves. For as long as anyone could remember, almost all of them had worked in the town’s shoe factory, which the famous entrepreneurial elf Grimm Grimmsson had built up from scratch.

  Elves, as I’m sure you know, are superb shoemakers, using only the very softest leather, which they cut and stitch completely by hand. They are also very good at magic, so each shoe fitted whoever bought it perfectly.

  For centuries, no human shoemaker could make a shoe even a tenth as well as elves, so Grimm Grimmsson had no competition. But then humans invented machines that could make shoes almost as quickly and almost as well as those the elves made. Of course, the shoes which human machines made didn’t magically fit your foot, but no one cared because they were really, really cheap.

  Over time, humans started to forget all about elf shoes, and only bought ones made by machines. Soon, Grimm Grimmsson found it was costing more to run the factory than he was making from selling the shoes and – in a notorious scandal – he left the town in the middle of the night with his shoemakers’ pension fund.

  All the elves that had worked in the shoe factory suddenly found themselves out of work overnight. With no wages to feed their families, and nothing for them to do, they soon began to lose heart. Eventually there were two kinds of elf in the town: rich and poor. Which brings me to the main character in my story, Torvil Christmas.

  Torvil was most definitely one of the town’s rich elves. In fact, as owner of its only toyshop, he had done rather well for himself. But whereas most people who make money are happy to share it with their family and friends, Torvil kept his fortune all to himself.

  To be fair, Torvil had no family, and he had no friends. Raised in an orphanage, he’d never known his mother and father, and had never really been close with anyone his whole life. Our story begins when Torvil was five hundred and six, long past the age when most elves settle down and start a family. Torvil, however, was still very much alone.

  (By the way, elves generally live ten times as long as humans. They are considered to be babies until the age of ten, toddlers until the age of thirty, children until they are one hundred and twenty, teenagers until they are two hundred, and grown-ups at the age of three hundred and three.)

  Not that Torvil seemed to mind being alone. Money, he’d discovered, could easily take the place of people. And the great thing about money was that it never let you down. If you counted up your fortune after breakfast, you could be sure that it would still be there when you counted it after lunch, and again when you counted it after supper, and again when you counted it one last time before you went to bed. People might come and go, but money was for ever. All you had to do was make sure you didn’t spend any of it.

  Not spending money was one of Torvil’s favourite hobbies. There were no two ways about it: Torvil was mean. If an elf came into his shop looking to buy his son or daughter a birthday present, and was too poor to afford any of the beautiful toys, Torvil never helped them out by dropping his prices, or by slipping a pack of Star Wars cards into the elf’s satchel when he wasn’t looking.

  ‘Please, Mr Christmas, show some kindness,’ the customer would say, to which Torvil always made the same reply: ‘Kindness, my good sir, doesn’t pay my bills.’

  Now, you might think that having Christmas as his actual surname would have made Torvil a big fan of the festive season, but you’d be wrong. Torvil really didn’t like Christmas at all; he hated it. Every Christmas he could remember had been miserable, spent on his own in his empty, cold house, with no friends or family to visit, and without so much as a single Christmas card, let alone a present. As a result, everything that normal people love about Christmas really got on Torvil’s nerves: Christmas trees, Advent calendars, people being nice to one another on public transport; all of them put him in a very bad mood indeed.

  The only thing that Torvil did like ab
out Christmas was the money he made. In fact – and I’m ashamed to tell you this – when Christmas was coming, and every elf in town was scrimping and saving to buy toys, Torvil would put his prices up! His was the only toyshop in town so no one had any choice but to pay the extra cost. For many of the elf children, whose parents were poor, that meant fewer presents. For some, whose parents were very poor, I’m sorry to say it meant no presents at all.

  And that’s the way things might have stayed, but for a rather extraordinary turn of events. Events that changed Torvil’s life for ever. Events that – as you shall shortly see – changed your life too.

  Chapter Three

  Midwinter is a very special time at the North Pole. If you ever go there – and I recommend you pay it a visit at least once in your life – you will soon discover why. From the beginning of December until the end of January, the sun never rises. It’s always dark, apart from at midday, when something very magical happens. For just a few minutes, the sky turns the most beautiful shade of blue. The elves call it a ‘blue moment’ and it is one of the most wondrous sights a person can see.

  As Christmas approaches, the blue moment gets shorter and shorter, until a week before the big day, when it stops happening altogether. Imagine that! For seven whole days and seven whole nights, everything is pitch black, all the time, and everyone begins to wonder whether they will ever see light again. Then, as if by magic, on Christmas Day, the blue moment returns.

  A whole week of darkness might make a soul gloomy, if not downright depressed, so the elves have done something very clever. Instead of sitting at home, worrying about where the blue moment has gone, they celebrate. The dark days leading up to Christmas become increasingly jolly, and Christmas Eve is the most fun of all.

  Everyone dresses up in their finest red velvet, drinks a special drink called mead, and generally has a high old time.

  Needless to say, grumpy Torvil didn’t care for such merry-making. He wore red velvet because he hated to stand out (and because he had bought a red velvet trouser suit as a young elf and was determined to get plenty of wear out of it), but that was all. He avoided the street parties, and he most definitely didn’t drink mead. As far as he was concerned, the Christmas holiday was just another excuse for lazy elves to take time off work, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.