Father Christmas

I started writing this story for an entirely different audience. It is a sweet little love story about Santa Claus. But the things Santa started getting up to as I was writing this means that it is here for you lot instead...

It is slow burn on the sex, and a slower burn on the romance, but I think it is pretty fun on its own. Just be aware of the word count and be ready.

The language is a little stylized, as in an old-time children's story, and you would not believe how hard it is to write hot sex without one use of profanity... Enjoy my effort.

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Father Christmas

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A massive storm raged over the North Pole that February afternoon. But below, in the wide sheltered valley that should not exist, could not exist in that location (but which most certainly did), it made for only an ordinarily magical, beautiful snowfall.

The multitude of workshops, which never fell silent except on Christmas Day itself, were silent this day, as the multitude of elves who worked there were gathered in a silent throng around something unique, and new... and terrible in Christmas Village: a grave.

Beside it, a tall, silver-haired man knelt, with a full but neat beard of a matching salt and pepper adorning his face. His ruggedly handsome face, lined subtly with wrinkles that conformed to habitual mirth, was marred by an unaccustomed grief.

Santa quietly wept.

The magic of Christmas had never been as strong in her as it was in him, of course. How could it have been? It somehow sprang from him, after all. But he had shared it with her to the full, all their long life together.

Then somehow, less than thirty years ago, she had lost her grip on the magic after centuries, or it had lost its grip on her. Neither was ever able to tell which it was, or why. With horror, Santa and Mrs. Claus realized that she was... aging. With the terrible swiftness of mere decades, she had grown old. One Christmas she was the same, sweet, beautiful, achingly, achingly sexy woman of apparent early middle age that she, like Santa, had been for centuries. The next year, lines began to deepen in her face. Her hair progressed from a lustrous silver to white and brittle with each season. Her health failed and her luxuriant body withered. For the last ten years, she had been truly old, while Santa clung to her, eternal as always.

And now, less than a month after her last Christmas, he laid her to rest, in her favorite field. This was where they had built snowmen, and fought snowball battles with the elves, in and out of snow fortresses. As she had seen this day approach, Mrs. Claus had chosen this spot, then spent at least a portion of each day thereafter making dire threats to every elf she met, ensuring the field would remain a place of joy and play, despite her eternal presence.

Then Santa spoke the only words of the gathering, "Goodbye, my love."

With a sigh, he rose to his feet. He turned to gaze at the elves surrounding him and Mrs. Claus' resting place. The unquenchable fire of joy that defined him was banked, overlaid with a thin layer of utter loss. But the affection and camaraderie he felt for his diminutive workers was as strong as ever.

"Let's get back to work, lads and lassies," he said heavily, but with a smile. There were less than eleven months until the big night came again, after all. He sighed, suddenly uncertain. "I... I will be in our home... for a bit," he said softly and slumped away toward the modest little cottage where he lived, on its small, snowy lot, in the heart of the sprawling complex of workshops, factories, and warehouses that filled Santa's Village. His tall, powerful figure unaccustomedly bent as he retreated to solitude. The multitude of elves watched him leave, parting the way silently to allow his passage. Their eyes were filled with apprehension for the mission, but especially concern for Santa himself. Then they dispersed to work extra hard. They would need to.

He remained hidden away for six whole days, processing his loss. He experienced anguish, and even flashes of anger, emotions previously quite forgotten for this man whose existence was defined by joy, responsibility, and industry.

On the seventh morning, he rose when he woke, moving to the restroom. Despite being nearly six hundred years old, and a being of mind-flinching power, Santa was still, of course, just a man, and the human bladder has no patience for grief.

His immediate need relieved, Santa stared at himself in the mirror. Perhaps a cup of cocoa before he returned to bed? He stopped and plucked at the elegant cotton pajamas he wore.

Suddenly, he snorted, and laughed at his reflection. "Ho ho ho! You are a right sight, Chris," he said to himself out loud, his rich baritone voice stabilizing in a single sentence after a week of disuse. "She would kick your behind for slacking off like this." He shook his head and reached for the razor. For even his pain at the loss of his wife of half a millennium was not enough to keep away the happiness and the need to give that defined Santa. He was needed, especially without her steady hand and loving support for the elves.

In but a few minutes, his short but incredibly luxuriant beard was trimmed and curled, the rest of his face and throat were shaven clean, his hair was effortlessly sleek and neat, and the elemental sparkle returned to his eyes. He dressed for the usual workday, in an exquisitely tailored suit of crimson worsted wool, the double-breasted one she had so loved. With it, he sported a flawless white linen shirt with French cuffs and solid gold four-pointed stars for studs and cufflinks, finished off with a lush, green, silk tie. He chose a bow tie, because that day Santa intended to make some toys, and it would stay out of the way.

He looked at himself one more time, a towering athletic figure, handsome and supportive. Then he laughed, "Ho ho ho, why not?" His hand reached out and grabbed one of many long red caps, trimmed with ermine. He seldom wore the iconic hat on days he planned on working indoors, but today he would. And he resolved to wear one every day this year. She had loved them so.

He strode out his front door, his frame already filling with happiness as he burst back among his elves. His arrival caught many by surprise in the small, older workshops that dotted around his cottage, or on the roads in between.

"Santa!" rang out the thin, high cries of happy welcome.

"Ho ho ho! A happy Monday to you, Twinkles," Santa called. "That is a fine collection of bowling balls, Moe. Are we on schedule with those? Good!" he smiled at another elf driving a wagon. "Pixiebelle, you need to get some more sleep. Is the baby still teething?" Babies were extremely rare among the elves, so everyone was always fascinated by the slightest news. Elves were extremely long-lived, even Santa did not know how long. The downside of that was that elf babies grew very, very slowly. Pixibelle's little girl had been teething for going on two years...

Santa knew the names and lives of every elf, and greeted each one he passed, somehow without ever breaking his stride or delaying his arrival at his destination. To celebrate his return to work, Santa was going to put in the day working in the Barbie workshop. Once the initial box-office numbers of that movie had come out, it had not taken the prognostication powers of Morty, the grey-haired elf in Planning and Projections, to know that Santa would need a massive increase in Barbie production.

With a hearty laugh, Santa burst into the barely controlled chaos of the expanded workshop. He strode directly to the left side, slapped Wally the workshop foreman on the shoulder, and stood above the pint-sized but extremely fast plastic injection molding machine. Santa took the controls and began to produce parts for Dream Houses, Dream Cars, and Jetliners at a furious pace, leaving Wally to put out fires elsewhere. The young elf had barely known how to wield a hammer and hand saw when he had first appeared in the village a hundred and fifty years ago. Now, the young elf was a darned sight better mechanical engineer than any graduate product of MIT.

Where did the elves come from? Santa had given up trying to figure that out centuries ago. All he knew was that when he really needed more elves, they appeared. The elves themselves were merrily close-mouthed about their origins.

Santa ran the molding machine for ninety minutes, producing enough parts for 7,000 cars, 5,000 houses, and 2,750 jetliners, plus odd pieces for beach sets, pool sets, and office sets. He wiped his brow and moved on to the assembly benches, beside an older veteran elf and a young rookie who had been in the village for barely twenty years. Santa took the parts he had made and set to assembling them. He always worked faster, and with fewer errors, than even the best elves. It was his magic, after all.

In another two hours, the parts he had made were exhausted, and Santa looked over the 21,000 Dream Cars, 11,000 Dream Houses, fully 9,000 jetliners, and reams of beach sets, office sets, pool sets, and somehow, 75 bicycles, even though he had not made any parts for those.

The magical way there always ended up being far more toys than he had actually made had been the first sign, 500 years ago, to Chris Cringle, Esq. that the magic existed.

Yes, Santa had started life as a lawyer in the Royal Courts of Justice. He had one day been reading hagiographies of the saints, the sort of light reading an educated man of that day indulged in, and he had come across the story of St. Nicholas. It had inspired him to whip together a few toys for the children of a suddenly destitute client who had been ill-used in the court, despite Master Cringle's best efforts. He had done the same the next year, this time for several families--anonymously, of course. The third year, he had made ten dolls and seventeen wooden wagons, surprising himself at how good he was with his hands.

But he had found that when he was done working, he had eighteen dolls... and 35 wooden wagons.

As he worked on putting together the parts of Dream Houses, Santa kept an eye on the industrious group of elves sitting at sergers and sewing machines, making Barbie, Ken, and their friends's fabulous outfits. Bobby and Tish were spending as much time mooning over each other as they were making clothes. That was a new, budding romance. Santa smiled, but made a note to have Twinksie, the head of textiles, move one or the other to a different workshop. She was probably already working on that, he realized, but without Mrs. Claus staying on top of that sort of thing (by her ceaseless, joyful meddling), he needed to double-check.

He had no interest or desire to break the two up, whether this was just a brief fling that might only last a year or so, or something lasting. With only eleven hour days, a few less than Santa himself put in, elves had plenty of time for dancing and romancing. Santa just needed them on task at work. It was barely the second week of February, and Santa already knew they were behind.

He grimaced inwardly, but with a rueful ho ho ho, thinking that it was good he had a few more hours available each day, now there would be no more dancing and romancing for himself and Mrs. Claus under the various furs on the floor before their fireplace.

*

The year progressed about as Santa Claus had projected, of course. The elves' eleven hour shifts were intended to allow a two-hour downtime period where elves on one shift could still hang out with their friends on the other. The schedule also left some slack for the inevitable overtime that came every December. In bad years, that overtime might show up as early as November.

This year, Santa had caught various crews taking overtime here and there as early as July, to keep themselves within shouting distance of on pace for their goals.

As Mrs. Claus had declined, Santa had mostly prepared himself for the hole she would leave in his heart. That preparation had not made him any less anguished, but it had helped him steel himself for the need to persevere. What even he had not realized was her importance to the elves and their work. She had always known their needs, and cared for them, and made sure they worked well together.

The elves had known, of course, and had likewise steeled themselves for her loss. However, being aware that the gears were about to run out of grease did not make them run any smoother when they did. Mrs. Claus had always made the trains run on time.

Literally.

The small steam engines that chuffed along the winding rail line throughout Santa's Village, hauling parts and toys hither and yon, were routinely now forty minutes to an hour late by the end of many shifts.

Santa and his magic were up to the challenge, of course. Over the course of any given year, Santa usually spent the equivalent of fifty days in various workshops, actually making toys, and helping elves make up the inevitable shortfalls. Elves are amazing, but no one in the world makes toys like Santa does.

This year, Santa was on pace to spend the equivalent of eighty of his days making toys.

And not a week passed when Santa did not have to drop whatever he was doing and get the trains unsnarled, often more than once.

And for the first time in his life, Santa had to deal with lots of meetings. Complex decisions that Mrs. Claus used to facilitate effortlessly, over a plate of fresh-baked cookies during a coffee break, now required scheduled meetups, agendas, and time. So much time.

And while these meetings certainly diluted the joy of Christmas that permeated Santa's Village to the core, their real cost was in that time. Santa's magic was powerful, perhaps all-powerful, but it was not unlimited. And neither was the time he and the elves had each year to get ready for The Ride.

All this, the meetings, and the trains, and the extra toy making, and the continued teething problems with the CPU line in the semiconductor workshop, bled time away from Santa's biggest job, the year round: The List.

The List was the largest, longest, simplest yet most complex spreadsheet in the world. It was only three columns wide, but it sometimes approached several hundred million entries long. The columns were Name, Home, and of course Naughty Or Nice.

The List was self-populating, thankfully, with names appearing and disappearing from it automatically, with the passage of years. Even Santa would have had a hard time researching it every year. But he did like to check it, twice when possible. He found it especially important to give special attention to the entries in gray, which meant the little boy or girl sometimes was not completely nice, or did some things that were not really so naughty. When The Ride got close, Santa would often manually override The List and change a child's designation. He marked naughty children as Nice far more often than the reverse.

Santa was a big old softy.

But this year, with all the extra toy-making, Santa barely had time to check the gray names, and most of them only once. The ones in solid black, he let stand unexamined. It would not matter. The List was magical, after all, and very good at its job all on its own.

Santa could not help with the final push to complete all the presents in the final week before Christmas Eve this year. He never did, as this was the time he and his logistics team spent planning his route.

Less than a year after Cray built his first supercomputer, the elves had whipped up their own and had been building new ones regularly ever since. Wobbles and Quincy were already making noises about replacing the current model, which was only two years old. The computer was used to calculate the first draft of Santa's route, and always did a very good job. Santa still could always find a few improvements, but the computerized first draft sped the process oh so much.

Santa had almost total control over time, during The Ride, but having control over something and being able to ignore it are two very different things. Modern human scientists glibly believe that Time, like the three spatial dimensions, has no innate direction. They are wrong. Time has a very definite, and incredibly powerful flow. Santa could easily stop it in small eddies around himself, as when he entered a home to leave his present and maybe enjoy the snacks left for him. He could also slow it massively as he and his team rode from home to home. But jumping backward in time, which almost always had to happen once or twice during a Ride, was exhausting, and made Santa need even more cookies.

They worked the route very hard to keep those jumps to a minimum.

But as the hours until Christmas Eve wound down, Santa and the elves found that they were ready... barely, but ready. The overtime had been vast, but through determination, joy, and the Magic of Christmas, all the presents were made, wrapped, and packed, The List was set, and Santa was ready.

They all took a moment together, outside the stables, to mourn Mrs. Claus one more time.

But just a moment. This was Christmas Eve, and not a time to be sad.

"Ho ho ho!" Santa cried with joy as he sprang into the huge, deep green, wooden sleigh. He adjusted The Bag, and cried out, "On Dasher! On Dancer! On Prancer and Vixen! On Comet! On Cupid! On Donder unt Blitzen!" His team looked back over their shoulders at him as he cried out, magical grins on snouts not designed to smile in nature. As Santa flicked the reins, they leapt into the air and the sleigh rose lightly after. Santa took them in a showy circle around the valley, waving to his elves, then shot out through one of the narrow passes in the mountains surrounding the hidden village.

Santa could miss Mrs. Claus when he got back home... when she was not there to cuddle and refresh him from his efforts on the wonderfully grueling Ride.

They burst into the open frigidity of the North Pole, and Santa wrapped his ermine-lined, next-generation synthetic outer shell riding cloak tight around him. Beneath, he wore an elegantly trim jacket, a cable-knit sweater with Christmas trees worked into the design, and a spider-silk turtleneck that was warm or cool as needed. Millions of good little boys and girls lived near or below the equator. Layers were important on Christmas Eve...

The truly cold air lasted but the blink of an eye as Santa accelerated the team to an impossible rate down toward an island east of Japan, the first stop on this year's journey.

From home to home they flew, with Santa leaping energetically from sleigh to living room, leaving gifts under the tree, and dumping some extra goodies into stockings already filled by loving parents. Then out he went, and on to the next home, time flowing around him in a paradoxical dance.

Even with his abilities concerning time, Santa seldom paused. Christmas Eve was a challenge. A challenge he always met. But pause he did, from time to time.

In a Tokyo apartment building, as Santa left a beautiful dress for Aiko and a scooter for young Toyo, he looked at the snacks that had been left for him. He always took a courtesy bite, to show the children that he had been there, but then there were the really good ones... This family had left out two perfect little wagashi, and a glass of sake! Santa gobbled them up, feeling his energy rise with their love. The sake was far too fine to need heating, and Santa drained the generous glass happily. It warmed his stomach and his soul.

In Perth, little Tommy had laid out eight imperfectly peeled carrots. Santa, currently down to his shirtsleeves in the Australian summer heat, paused to feed one to each reindeer on the roof before they leapt away, Donder still crunching on his.

Santa was of course very good about getting in and out unseen... but there were millions of homes. Young Roshon was marked as a sound sleeper, and Santa let himself be a little rushed when he reached the large house in Hyderabad. But the boy had risen to a call of nature. Santa was sliding a beautifully wrapped fire engine under the tree when he heard a gasp behind him. He stiffened, then turned with a smile to see the five-year-old boy standing in the entryway behind him, eyes and mouth wide as saucers.