Father Christmas

"It's red," Walter maintained firmly. "I was closer to it, for longer than you. It's an incredibly dark red, with the brighter red pinstripes. You didn't notice because you were too busy drooling over him overall."

"I only drool over you, darling."

"Thank you. Then you were drooling over him on behalf of Samantha."

"Oh yes, for sure!" Marie laughed. "It is odd that he went for the Santa look to meet the parents," she added.

"Are we sure that this is a meet the parents? Not something else?" Walter asked plaintively. Marie just looked at him.

Walter continued to mutter about putting a suit on his day off, but he took great care as he dressed. Walter was not getting shown up by this guy in the wardrobe department, even if he had no suit quite that finely made.

Marie took forever to put her face together, and Walter took advantage of her delay to stay upstairs himself and stew about the man.

The worst of it was, it was hard to work up much suspicion or animosity toward Chris. He came across as magnificently genuine.

When Marie was ready, and, Walter thought smugly, looking utterly fabulous they went back down, to find Chris and Samantha talking softly to each other near the door.

"Oh Dad, that is a nice tie," Samantha said with a wink. She should say it. It was a very nice tie. She had given it to him last Christmas. It wasn't as nice a Chris's...

"And you look nearly as radiant as your daughter," Chris said smoothly to Marie.

"I like him," Marie said to Samantha. "Two birds with one stone with that comment."

"Shall we, then?" Walter gruffly asked. Might as well get on the road... He felt like his daughter still had something else up her sleeve.

The Mercedes was huge, the largest SUV the Germans made, and Walter saw that it was the G63 AMG version. So it was a hot rod, in hulking, boxy form. And it was red. Of course. "Nice car," he observed, as he got into the front passenger seat beside Chris. Samantha had commandeered the back seat with her mother.

Hadn't the SUV been green?

"So what do you do, Chris?" Walter asked once they were underway on the road. He looked at the man Samantha had produced. He might look like the world's most handsome mall Santa, but mall Santas didn't drive Mercedes.

"I'm in manufacturing, logistics, and distribution," the large man said with a smile, responsibly keeping his eyes on the road as he drove northward, exceeding the speed limit by what was probably the minimum amount this car was capable of. Another characteristic Walter was forced to like...

"That's a lot, young man," Walter observed.

Chris looked over at him wordlessly at that remark. He rumbled a quiet, "Ho ho ho."

Ho ho ho? The man literally laughed with a ho ho ho. It even sounded natural coming from him. Walter rolled his eyes. "Yes, 'young man'. You may be grayer than I am, but the rest of you says that that is either a genetic condition, or a thousand-dollar dye job," Walter laughed in return.

"It is a very fine look, regardless," Marie added from the back seat, before subsiding back to her quiet quizzing of Samantha.

Chris turned his head enough to wink at Walter.

Walter shook his head slightly, narrowing his eyes. "And what do you manufacture?"

"Toys, mostly. Also clothing and bicycles. Other things as well."

"Oh, come on!" Walter burst out, unable to contain himself. The guy's schtick was really too much, even though Walter could not help but smile at the lengths to which Chris would go for the bit. "That's too ridiculous..."

There was just the tiniest moment of disorientation, and Walter found that the luxurious leather seat he had been relaxing in was suddenly a wooden bench with a seat cushion. Impossibly, it was even more comfortable than before. The metal box of the SUV was gone, and he found himself sitting in a huge, open... sleigh? There were eight huge deer attached to the front and they were working hard to pull this behemoth. It was August, months from any snow, yet the sleigh moved swiftly and smoothly, probably because it was flying.

Marie laughed delightedly in the back seat. Walter just took it all in and...

"Nice to meet you, Santa Claus," Walter said drily, turning to offer his hand once more.

"Ho ho ho!" Santa boomed and shook it firmly.

"You two are taking this a lot more in stride than I did," Samantha observed, almost jealous at her parents' sang-froid.

"Well, unless your mother and I just had simultaneous, identical, psychotic breaks, this is real. And if everything I see is real, then this character you've brought to meet us is Santa Claus..." Walter said, a little shocked at his own calm. It helped that he had always loved Christmas to bits, and found that he happily wanted to believe.

"I have so many questions," Marie burbled from the back seat. Samantha laughed.

"So do I," Walter said, speculatively. "Starting with, are you the only Santa, or are you just the latest in a long line?"

"There is only and always me."

"So, 'young man', that makes you, what? Two hundred years old?"

"I'll be six hundred in a couple of decades," he admitted, almost sheepishly. Marie gasped at that.

Walter's mind raced at what to ask next. Something silly, but still a test... Ah...

"Radio Flyer sled," Santa said matter-of-factly.

"What?" Walter stuttered, knowing what.

"The last present you actually received from me, as a good little boy," Santa laughed. "It was that Cabbage Patch doll for you, Marie," he added over his shoulder. Then he turned back to look at her with a surprised smile, "And you actually still have it," he added in delighted surprise, the laugh lines in his face creasing joyfully.

Marie laughed, but then sobered instantly. "Can you read our daughter's mind like that?" she asked with a snap.

"No," Santa said, looking into her eyes calmly. "And that is very important."

"I should think so," Marie said with an iron firmness. Then her face grew excited again. "Are there really elves?"

"Oh Mom, there are so many elves," Samantha said.

"And we are going to see them?" Marie went on excitedly.

"I thought you might like to see the place," Santa said simply, not elaborating. He turned back to the reins and flicked them, causing the sleigh to bank slightly and accelerate even more.

"So Chris, aren't you supposed to be married?" Walter asked, new challenges in his mind.

Santa looked at him with a gentle smile, but with deep pain buried away far beneath. "Eleanor passed away a year and a half ago." He sighed. "The North Pole has not been the same without her. I was not the same. I will never be quite the same, actually."

Samantha reached forward and gently caressed Santa's shoulder.

"I am honestly surprised women didn't come out of the woodwork after you, the moment she passed," Marie said in amusement.

"What?" Santa asked in surprise.

"Oh come on. There is a special magic in the world, where every time a good-looking successful older man loses his wife, women descend on him, friends and strangers alike, 'just to make sure he is okay, and does he need anything.'"

"Ho ho ho! I had no idea what was happening, but I assure you, that magic is as real as the Magic of Christmas," Santa chortled.

"Last Christmas Eve was apparently a pretty unique ride," Samantha added with dry amusement.

Walter found himself laughing. "Had to spend the night delivering presents and dodging scantily clad women who wanted to give you more than milk and cookies?" He chortled.

Santa blushed. Hard.

"Some of them weren't clad at all," Samantha teased. "And you didn't dodge all of them either, did you, Santa?"

Marie laughed in the back seat, but Santa was trying to avoid the piebald gaze Walter was giving him.

"And was my daughter one of those that caught you on Christmas Eve?" Walter asked just a little heatedly. Then he jerked in remembrance. "Samantha, you were home last Christmas. Did she catch you in my house?" he demanded, turning back to Santa.

"Your daughter was not one of those women, on Christmas Eve or otherwise," Santa said with the firmness of a mountainside. He looked back at Marie with a smile. "I thought she was at first, or rather, I really, terribly hoped that she was. But no, she was just a wonderful person, sitting in a Miami Beach bar, across from me."

"Miami?" Walter said, mind still a little unsteady at the concept of his interrogating Santa Claus, but damned sure intending to continue doing so. "Samantha was only just in Miami. I thought she was still there! You've known my daughter two days?"

"Five days, eleven hours, and thirty-six minutes," Santa rumbled. "And she has already made great contributions to sorting out the chaos the North Pole has been in lately. Thousands of good little boys and girls will have a better Christmas this year than they would have had without her.

Walter looked at Marie, then back at Santa. "This is all about you hiring our daughter as a management consultant?!?"

"Oh ho ho, no!" Santa laughed. Then he let the reins go slack and turned fully in his seat to look seriously at Walter and Marie. "This is about setting your minds sufficiently at ease that you will give me permission to ask Samantha to marry me."

"Marry?" Marie asked softly. Walter just looked at Santa, hard.

"I told him that I don't need your permission, Dad, for him to ask me that, or for me to say yes," Samantha said, rather pointedly, though the tart nature of her tone seemed aimed more at the sleigh's driver than at her parents. Santa just looked back at her father.

Walter held his face non-committal, but he could not help but like Santa's style.

He pointedly changed the subject. "So you manage to ride this sleigh around the world and deliver a million presents in one night?"

"A lot more than a million," Santa replied, making it clear that 'a lot' was a very big lot. "The tricky part is getting them all made. The Ride is hard and requires a lot of effort, but it's wonderful. It's the most fun I've ever had."

"Oh really?" Samantha asked with silky, affectionate menace. Walter recognized that voice, Samantha had learned it from her mother. He found himself wincing in sympathy for Santa.

"Oh," Santa said sheepishly. "Well... I mean... other than..."

Walter needed to change the subject as fast as humanly possible. No father wants to hear, even indirectly, about his daughter having sex. He especially does not want to hear about his daughter having sex with Santa Claus!

"How do you make all those toys, then?" he asked almost desperately. Santa seemed almost as desperate to get off the subject. It was a wordless moment of bonding.

"Elves of course! Right darling?" Marie burbled to Samantha.

"Oh Momma, you are going to love the elves," Samantha replied happily, and the two women fell into a deep, quiet discussion in the back about elves, and cookies, and music, and snow, and Walter lost track.

That left him and Santa Claus at each other's mercy. When things get awkward, talk business...

"So you make millions and millions of toys at little workbenches with little hammers, blurring away at light speed?"

"Ho ho ho," Santa said. "No, we use modern methods. One of my elves came up with the moving assembly line two years before Henry Ford. But to be honest, though they don't like to admit it," Santa said leaning in conspiratorially, laying a finger alongside his nose, "they usually have to reverse engineer most human advances a year or so after they appear down in the regular world. Still, they have beat the rest of the world to several key parts of modern automation."

"Where do you get parts? Or do you just specialize in wooden toys or things like my sled?" Walter wanted to know, and realizing that yes, he was incredibly curious.

"Oh no, we make Xboxes and PlayStations and tablets, too. All kinds of toys, from snow globes to snowmobiles. And we don't source anything. We have a light steel mill, those sorts of facilities. We were several years behind on electronics for a while, but our semiconductor foundry is currently a few nanometers ahead of Intel's best stuff.

Walter looked at him. "And how do you power all this?"

"When the elves first started mechanizing things, and then moreso when electricity came in, we built a huge line of windmills atop the ridge around the valley. They are still there because they are much more beautiful than those hulking aluminum monstrosities that humans build and which are such a pain to dodge around all the time. But they are no longer operational. We now have a modular liquid salt nuclear plant up on the far hillside. I'll fly us over it so you can get a look when we arrive."

Walter looked at him some more.

"Ho there!" Santa suddenly called out to the team of unreasonably large reindeer. They heeled over and Walter was suddenly looking down at New York City at dusk. It zipped by at a terrific rate, but it was an incredible sight.

"We are moving insanely fast to be in New York already, but I can't see how this is nearly fast enough to get around the world in 24 hours, much less with stops," Walter observed.

"Ho ho ho, Samantha wanted me to take it slow at first. I threw her for a pretty big loop when I first took her north. Are you ready to get there?" Santa asked, raising his voice to include Marie.

"Oh, yes please!" Marie called out.

"Let her rip," Santa called, flicking the reins again.

Everything blurred, and then a (comparatively) tiny range of snowy mountains rose up before them, and the sleigh swept in through a pass. They burst out into a starry sky over the twinkling lights of a quaint little village, interspersed with huge warehouses, factories, what looked like a refinery, probably for plastics, and a gleaming nuclear power plant on the far hillside. They circled the valley and Santa pointed out the sights.

"So how did you meet my daughter, if she didn't want to comfort you? Did you just say, 'Hey, Baby! Want to see my recreational-industrial complex?'" Walter asked drily.

"She did think I was a tech billionaire at one point," Santa ho ho hoed.

"Not hardly," Walter mused. "You're a trillionaire, easy."

"Ho ho ho."

"I mean it. You have complete, end-to-end manufacturing supply chains in a broad selection of industries. You have mines and other mineral extraction operations. You have the only full-scale high-temp sodium chloride nuclear reactor on the planet, and it is fully operational. You have a logistical operation that would make Amazon weep. At least in the sense that this is all yours, you are the richest man on the planet. By far."

Santa shrugged. That didn't seem to matter to him. Then he leaned over. "Does this mean you think my prospects are good enough to marry Samantha?"

Walter had to laugh. A deep, rich laugh. But he didn't answer immediately, because he knew how to make a man work for it.

*

Of course, Walter would say yes eventually, Santa knew. He was enjoying not looking into Walter's heart to see how to accelerate the process. Samantha's father was clearly relishing making him stew, and Santa honestly didn't hate stewing. He found that he liked Walter quite a lot, even if he was the first adult in centuries that intimidated him even a little. Walter was welcome to have his fun, but his problem was that he was playing a waiting game with a six hundred year-old man.

The next afternoon, Santa and Samantha were walking through the village toward the guest cottage the elves had 'made up'. It was across town, which seemed odd to Santa, but he supposed that demolition work in the height of toy season to make room for a new building would have been a bad idea.

"You know you can actually go ahead and ask him about me again," Samantha said, leaning happily on Santa's arm as they walked. "I imagine he's wrapped his head around a Yes by now, hasn't he?"

"I have deliberately not looked," Santa told her, placing a soft kiss on Samantha's head. A passing elf pumped his fist at them and muttered, "Right on!" The couple smiled.

"But Walter is enjoying making me wait. I can indulge him."

"Oh, can you?" Samantha said, poking Santa gently. "Don't forget that you are also therefore making me wait! What if I meet someone else in the meantime?"

"Ho ho ho!"

They passed another turn and found themselves walking several paces behind Walter and Marie, who were also walking arm-in-arm toward the cottage. They were intent upon each other, and did not look back to recognize that they were being followed.

"Will you go ahead and say yes, already?" Marie said to Walter, in between bites of whatever she was snacking on.

"I'm enjoying making him wait," Walter said.

"Quit trying to torture Santa Claus, of all people, dear. And don't forget you are torturing your daughter as collateral damage." Samantha nudged Santa significantly, as if to say, 'See?'

"It's a big decision," Walter said defensively.

"Nonsense, Water. The richest man in creation is offering her damned near eternal life, unparalleled professional fulfillment, the sweetest existence imaginable, his ridiculously rocking body, not to mention these cookies," Marie added, brandishing the ginger snap she had been enjoying. "Let the girl get on with it!"

"I guess you are kind of a catch," Samantha whispered.

"No more than you," Santa replied, without a trace of ho ho ho in his voice.

Then he raised his voice. "Ho ho ho! Tell me Walter, have you thought on my request?" Marie turned and blushed crimson as she realized Samantha, and especially Santa Claus himself had been right behind her when she talked about Santa's ridiculously rocking body. "May I ask Samantha to marry me?" he asked as if he had meant to bring it up all on his own.

Walter was enjoying Marie's discomfort so much, he gave in. He was going to eventually, so right now, with his own bride Marie blushing madly, seemed as good a moment as any. "Yes, Chris. You can marry Samantha... if she'll have you."

Samantha began to pump her fist, just as Santa whirled instantly and knelt in the pristine white snow before her. That caught her off-guard. His clasped empty hands opened, revealing a most exquisite little jewelry box, made of burled walnut, stained elegantly, and engraved with Christmas Trees and eight-pointed stars. His fingers almost trembled as he flipped the box open, revealing, nestled on a tiny cushion of red velvet, a simple golden ring, with a single, utterly perfect diamond, big enough to be eye-opening, but not to the point of being ostentatious.

"Samantha," he said, his massive voice gentle, even entreating, "will you marry me? Will you be... Mother Christmas?"

Samantha smiled brilliantly, and the throng of elves, which out of nowhere had filled every square foot of the streets around them let out a mighty cheer. Marie hugged her husband. Santa grinned goofily.

"I haven't said yes," Samantha said softly.

*

The silence around her was thunderous. All the elves stared at her like she had morphed into some alien creature. Many looked betrayed. Her mother looked poleaxed.

"What?" her father almost shouted.

Santa just knelt there before her. The dear, wonderful man was... hurt, yes, but he was mostly deeply curious.

Oh, thank you, Santa. You are too good for me.

"Can we, um, talk?" Samantha asked in a trembling voice.

"Alone?" Santa said, again wonderfully rolling his eyes at the throng.

"Please," Samantha whispered.

The crowd of elves did not so much part as explode away from their path as Santa rose and took her hand gently in his. They walked slowly, in cooperative, if understandably tense silence, back to his cottage.

They entered, and Santa kissed her gently on the cheek, then ushered her to the one chair by the fire, while he wordlessly took the other.

Ohhh, this chair felt so good. So right. She had never belonged anywhere more than right here.