The Christmas Chronicles by Tim Slover Page B

want to do it, and you love each day just for itself. You don’t really care if it’s Tuesday or Friday, and you are freed from the noise and bother of the world so long as your holiday lasts. Well, in the True North, the holiday always lasts.
    And so while Klaus noticed that the chimneys he lettoys down were beginning to be made of brick and this made his job longer and trickier, and while Anna noted that her batches of maple sugar cookies, enjoyed by one and all at Castle Noël, were growing ever larger, and while Dasher made meticulous mental notes of all the new places they were visiting and, with the help of cartographer Elves, converted his observations into more and more maps and flight charts, none of them could tell you exactly how many years had passed since the founding of the True North, nor could any tell you exactly what year it was as reckoned by earthly calendars. They were, you see, all on holiday.
    B ut now, brooding in his sleigh on this particular Christmas Eve some years later, Klaus felt that all his happiness had evaporated. The dawn was coming. Man and beast could feel it—the chill wind blowing up, the dark beginning to thin into gray just at the horizon’s edge. And though he was too far away to hear it, he knew the matins bell would soon be ringing out in his little former village, signaling the end of Christmas Eve—and the end of the blessing Father Goswin had invoked all those years ago on toys delivered on this special night. He looked behind himin the sleigh and saw amid all the empty sacks the one still half-filled with toys for what was intended to be the last village of the night—and the first where the children spoke an entirely different language. Now those children would be disappointed. He had stretched his route too far. It was now impossible, even for a flying Saint, to make all his deliveries on Christmas Eve. He had failed.
    Klaus sighed. He reached for the reins to turn the team back toward the Straight Road when from the front of the line he heard a word.
    “Try” was the word. Klaus looked up from his brooding. Dasher was looking hard at him. “Try,” the reindeer said again. “It is not yet dawn, Klaus. Remember what Saint Nicholas said. There may still be more for us to discover. Try.”
    Well. There was never harm in trying. In fact, come to think of it, Klaus thought, trying was itself a kind of Magic. All right. He would try, despite the gray turning into rose just at the eastern horizon’s edge behind him. “Very well!” he shouted. “On, Dasher! On, Dancer! And, oh, on, everyone!” The Eight Flyers sprang up, filling the air with the silver jingle of their harness bells as they flew away.
    Maybe,
hoped Klaus as the wind whistled through his beard,
if I don’t look behind me, I can pretend the sun isn’trising. If I just keep going, perhaps I can—somehow—get to that foreign village before it’s too late.
He shut his eyes tight against the morning light he feared was coming. (Luckily, Dasher was carrying a good map of Europe in his head, so Klaus didn’t need to steer.)
If only the dawn wouldn’t come!
Klaus wished. And then he said aloud with all his heart, “If only Time would stop!”
    Except that he didn’t say that, at all. The sleigh was just at that moment shooting over the border into the new country and so what Klaus actually said was,
“Si seulement le Temps s’arrêterait!”
It so astonished him to find himself speaking another language that he opened his eyes.
    And then he wished he had not. For looming up suddenly in front of the sleigh was a vast wall of what looked like ice, all sapphire and emerald and amethyst.
“Attention!”
shouted Klaus. But it was no good. The wall had appeared so fast that Dasher in the lead knew he couldn’t avoid crashing into it. He braced for a collision that he knew would break all their bones and shatter the sleigh to pieces. The team hit the wall with the speed of a comet and—simply passed