Jen's Christmas Nightmare

Just like usual, we filed flight plans to a small northern Scotland airfield that had a long enough runway for small jets and, as soon as we were airborne we disappeared from the radar, our flight plans disappeared from the NATS system and all voice recordings and the memories of all the air traffic controllers who had been in contact with us, forgot we had ever existed, as seamlessly as all our trips to and from the North Pole. Our local airfield were used to Junior taking off and landing, using a number of planes, which were all registered in the UK so they never invited any curiosity, and over the past 10 months they had seen me learn how to fly and rack up the in-air hours needed to qualify as a pilot in my own right.

Before we took off, while everyone was settling and stowing their luggage for the weekend, I moved down the gangway to where Stephanie sat with Shane to check on how they were getting on. They were holding hands, which I took as a good sign that their relationship was developing nicely.

"Hi Steph, Shane, how are you both keeping?"

"Oh, we're fine Sis," Stephanie replied with a smile.

Shane also had a smile on his face as he looked up, "We're cool, Mrs N. Steph tells me you're actually flying the plane tonight?"

"Yes, I will be."

"Do you have many flying hours' experience in a plane as powerful and, I might say, as expensive as this?" Shane asked.

"Well I only qualified solo a month ago, but I learned to fly in this plane or another very like it, the one that Junior is flying, so I have a lot of experience and been tested for my pilot's licence in this type of aircraft. You wouldn't believe the amount of instruments and flying by computer aids in an aircraft of this quality, it's safer than a commercial airline. I assure you that you'll be perfectly safe."

"Behave, baby," Stephanie jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. "Junior taught Jen how to fly and he has had years and years of experience flying and he even took me up in his small propeller plane a couple of times when I was working during the school holidays for Mum's ex-husband Mr Webster's company. I am certain that Junior wouldn't trust his bride to fly unless he had every confidence in both her and the plane's abilities."

"Fair enough," Shane replied with a smile, looking directly into my eyes, "I was only making conversation. I looked the plane up on Google and while I'm not exactly sure of which model this is, I know that these planes cost at least £60m each and your father-in-law has two of them. He's definitely not going to be letting anyone other than a first class pilot fly one of these babies, is he?"

"No, my father-in-law definitely wouldn't. But no offence taken, Shane. How are you both doing at college, by the way?"

"Everything's shutting down, all the lectures have moved online, which is why most students have left the campus and gone home to study from there and won't be back until January."

"And you've stayed on in town then, Shane?"

"I wasn't living in the Halls of Residence, which is usually a requirement for first year students, so we never feel isolated. They have now started closing down the halls as student leave. I got dispensation from the rule of Freshmen living in the Halls because I already had my own apartment locally, like Steph has the same dispensation so she can stay at home with her parents. The apartment is actually my parents' place. Did I tell you my father was once from around there? Over the years we came back here from time to time and visited relatives who remained here, so my father invested his savings in local property. I made the town my choice of university and Dad managed to release one of the apartments for me to use."

"Release?"

"He owns the building, and rented apartments furnished or otherwise become available now and then and he kept this furnished one vacant for me for when I,started this autumn."

"Well, enjoy your flight, I'll get the engines started, do the final flight checks and as soon as the tower lets us go we'll be off."

We soon took off in both planes and reappeared in North Pole airspace with me following Junior close behind, and the elf manning the Air Traffic Control Tower, a cheerfully chatty character called Alffin, warmly welcomed us to the magical land of Christmas.

Of course Alffin knew that we were coming, it had been the leading subject of conversation among the community of Elves for the past month. They all knew about the long-abandoned cabins that had been cleaned, furnished and prepared for us, that Gronwynk, the chief house elf of Santa and Mrs Claus, was in charge of both the clean up and the catering for our magical weekend. And they knew why I wanted this for my family and why I welcomed the isolation of where we were staying. The elves were well aware that, if possible, my new mother-in-law Hilde Claus, Mother Christmas, the wife of Father Christmas for almost 100 years, would make my first official Christmas, since my marriage to their only son Junior, a complete nightmare. It was because the elves held Junior in such high regard, they loved him almost as much as I, that they were rooting for me all the way.

The elves knew they could very little about that situation but they all seemed to want to make sure that our Pre-Christmas event for me, my friends and my family would be awesome. Apparently, this event had never been contemplated my any previous Mother-Christmas-to-be and the fact that this year it meant that two Christmases would be celebrated, the Elves thought that was such a great idea that the number of volunteers to take part, any small part, took on proportions close to 100% of the elf population, and the Santa relatives of my immediate acquaintance all loved the idea too.

So on Friday night we all managed to squeeze into the last log cabin the other side of our stables, where the elves had maximised the use of the kitchen to feed us all, had the adults sitting around a long table, made up of several tables ingeniously butted together and adjusted to make the same height, and had the children sitting separately on bean bags in a circle with the older children helping serve the younger ones.

It was a relaxed setting and enormous fun, with people changing places to chat to different people, giving us a continual background hum of conversation and laughter. Naturally, we invited Old Nick and Georgianna along to our first meal of the weekend, and encouraged them to bring Uncle Henry and Beata along, who happily agreed to join the new friends they had made a few weeks earlier.

Being a duplicate celebration of Christmas, we had evergreen trees to select from a range the woodman elves had chosen for us, and they cheerfully helped bring them in and securely mount on stands for us. We decorated them before dinner, with individual trees in each family cabin and several main ones in the dining and sitting rooms of the large hall-like 8th cabin in the little hamlet, which we all had a hand in decorating. The lights were all lit up in all the cabins and the main dining room, making such a splendid spectacle that we fooled ourselves into thinking it was really Christmas. There were crackers and silly hats, cracker jokes to read out and sing the praises of in unison to all the wonderful Christmas food, all in front of blazing Yule log fires.

After dinner, while it was still early evening, we sang Christmas carols and told our favourite Christmas stories. Uncle Henry was marvellous with the kids, a dear sweet man, maybe a little overweight and naturally jovial in spirit and attitude, in no time at all he was making balloon animals with enormous skill and funny banter, drawing all the children across the spectrum of their ages into his fun and games.

I am sure I saw Beata regard Henry with an amused look of pleasure on her face and hungry eyes. If only Uncle Henry wasn't so blind to the adulation heaped upon him by the children and, I suspected, a very beautiful unattached young lady. I know Georgianna and I exchanged glances, both of us thinking the same and wondering how to get Henry over his shyness, that only seemed to evaporate when in company with the children.

As Henry was the younger brother of Young Nick, I couldn't help thinking that only by an accident of the order of birth of Old Nick's children that we had lost the ideal person to have been a brilliant Santa Claus.

But that would've meant that Junior wouldn't have even got a shot at doing the job, and therefore there would've been any need for St Nick to select me as Junior's soulmate, we both would have been left to our own devices.

I realised with a shudder what that might have meant, trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage to Scott that would almost certainly not have survived long, leaving my life full of regrets and empty of happiness. Now that I have found love with a simply gorgeous and loving man who has reciprocated with a loving warmth I once hadn't thought possible, I am even more steeled to endure the training process with Hilde for the next month.

After the children were put to bed, in shifts according to their ages, the elves helping to babysit and also to begin to bond with them, knowing that these kids were part of the next Santa family and all the time they were growing up they would be coming here several times a year and relationships between awe-struck humans and friendly respectful elves were being forged to last for human lifetimes.

Elves are hardworking, sweet, naturally cheerful and generous people, who feel good about helping us humans when they know we need help, and they are especially good with children or adults with life difficulties. They are so willing to serve that it would be easy, no, lazy and disrespectful, to regard them as servants. Any 'them and us' relationship between human and elf would be so wrong on so many levels. They are different, of course, but differences are to be celebrated and the ready crossovers of difference provides the most fertile of environments where everyone taking part benefits.

Elves work and make toys and help our lives become happier because it gives them so much pleasure to do so. Gronwynk tells me that before St Nick's time the days and nights at the North Pole were sinister and dark. Now though, even in the dead of midwinter, the days of work seem light, and the nights are bright with lanterns, song and dance and the elves are blissfully happy.

Gronwynk helped to raise Junior during his early formative years and there is a special bond between them that I am fortunate enough to be reaping the benefit from, and she has become instrumental in helping me to enjoy all my visits to Junior's home base. Elves live a long time, we are talking about thousands of years, and they enjoy working long hours and there exists a great sense of community and respect between them and the Claus family that is at the very heart of how the Magic of Christmas really functions.

Our pretend Christmas morning on the Saturday started early, especially in those log cabins that had children in them. We had insisted that this pre-Christmas wouldn't be excessive and take away any of the magic of the real Christmas to come a month later. All the gifts had to be small, to fit into the stockings that the elves had lovingly made and embroidered for us, each with our names on, and were to be limited to simple hand-made or hand-decorated gifts. Even though the presents were low-key, the children just loved them because they were so personal to the person receiving them and we were soon all celebrating together in the dining room enjoying our breakfast and showing off our little personal presents.

We followed this with the outdoors fun of making snowmen, which naturally led to snowball fights which erupted all over the place, which was so much fun. In the afternoon we took a convoy of reindeer sleighs into Elf Town of the North Pole, where our elf helpers introduced us to their families and we saw the workshops busy turning out toys and tinsel for the real Christmas to come. After that we went around the wrapping rooms and the stables. Everywhere we were welcomed and all the elves wanted to be introduced to everyone in my family and my friends.

Kerron particularly loved the stables and she renewed her friendship with stable elves and reindeer and was in her element in company with Frandyn, the reindeer doctor, and Noknee, the flight master whose job it was to teach the reindeer how to fly and land in tight places whilst dragging a heavily laden sleigh. The children simply loved their time in the stables.

I don't know what ordinary wild reindeer are like, but the North Pole flying reindeer are really delightful, they are affectionate, they seem very intelligent, expert in apparently knowing what we are thinking, and were patient and tolerant of even the youngest child wanting to play with them and seemed perfectly happy giving rides to the children, even if we did insist that they stayed firmly on the ground.

***

So much to write about in my journal, while Junior had an afternoon nap. Such a wonderful day and not looking forward to tonight. So, these last two pages were scribbled rather quickly and hoping Wylenmast can make head or tail of the tale.

I'm off for a quick snuggle with Junior, he's so warm and cuddly!

CHAPTER 6 PRE-CHRISTMAS BALL

Come the Saturday evening and we all prepared for the Ball put on by Father and Mother Christmas in the Main Hall within their residence.

All my family and friend Sati's family thought that Junior's father Santa and Junior's mother Hilde were utterly charming when a line of us guests at the Ball were presented to them. All expressed to me when I circulated among them that the Claus's conversations were full of wit and charm throughout the evening, and no-one believed me when I privately called them the Grumpies. Sati particularly thought I was being extremely unfair after meeting them twice in their two visits here and being utterly overcome by Father and Mother Christmas's practised charm offensive.

Even my mother, Lisa, who had been there last year, when Mr and Mrs Santa were demonstrably less than happy about our wedding taking place in front of their own disapproving eyes, thought that Hilde was a delightful Mother Christmas.

There was a sit-down meal first before the actual Ball, held in the same large dining hall I remembered from Christmas morning breakfast last year.

After dinner we moved through to the ballroom where, for the first couple of hours the elf band played mostly music from recent children's movies and encouraged the children to get up and dance until they were too exhausted to go on and the elf nannies took charge of them and took them all off to bed, leaving the rest of us to enjoy more traditional fun dancing like the "gay Gordon's" as well as waltzes and more formal ballroom dancing.

Junior was naturally an excellent dancer, having learned most of the traditional ballroom dances during the 1930s and 1940s as a child and throughout his youth, often staying with his grandparents in their Georgian period house in the Cotswolds. Georgianna was also a keen and excellent dancer, while Old Nick was surprisingly nimble on his feet for such a large man and he had the stamina of an ox, still dancing with gusto while younger men faded. Uncle Henry was made of the same ilk and could dance all night. Mind you, dancing with the gorgeous Regency beauty Georgianna would invigorate an Egyptian mummy.

It was after a strenuous string of dances that I sat one dance out while Junior went to get some refreshing fruit sorbets for us, that Hilde walked up approached me with a smile.

"Oh, hello, Hilde, how are you?" I asked.

"I am very vell, daughter," she said with a slight bow to whisper in my ear, "I vunder if you could valk with me for a few moments? I have something I vant to show you and share viz you."

Before I even stood up, she was on her way walking quickly towards the nearest exit from the ballroom. I followed her. To be honest, I still feared her a little and thought I better go with her as asked and that Junior probably wouldn't mind finding me gone and having to eat two ices instead of one.

Although she had never done me any physical harm, other than try and break my and Junior's hearts, by luring her son away from me with the offered charms of the beautiful Beata, but this was her home and this was her domain. The North Pole was like a tiny kingdom of which she was the queen and I was merely a guest here, with an open invitation to come and go merely by dint of being her one and only son's wife, and she probably preferred to treat me as only 'the current wife' of her only son.

Besides, if she was going to be violent towards me, I though that I could take her. I was fit and 30 and she was at least 120, although she did look lean and mean and fit, with a slightly longer reach than I, but hey, I thought I was prepared to take a few blows and ready to fight dirty and was sure I could take her down.

I followed almost by her side, or at most just half a step behind her as she darted down corridors, turning as she did in different directions so that I soon completely lost my bearings. We eventually stopped before a thick, antique-looking door, with door furniture that looked way out of keeping with the rest of the other doors. Slightly breathlessly, she took a key out of some hidden pocket in her sheer silk evening dress and turned the key in the lock, which operated the locking mechanism with a sharp reassuring click.

The door opened to reveal a set of steps going down. She clicked a switch on the wall and the stairway was lit up with an old, low wattage bulb that cast a dusty glow over the rough stone walls and paved risers heading into the blackness below. The overhead light dimly showed up a turn in the steps to the right about a dozen or so steps down. It looked to me like the stairway was leading down to a cellar or basement.

"Where are we going, Hilde?" I asked, "to a wine cellar?"

"Not a vine cellar, although zeez have been used in ze past for storage of all manner of things, but recently ze atmosphere down zere 'as changed and ze elves do not go down here no more."

Hilde led the way and walked down the steep and deep but narrow steps, using a rope fixed to the wall helping her to keep balance. I followed, after pulling my full-length gown up far enough to see where I was putting my feet with one hand and gripping the rough rope fixed to the wall as hard as I could.

"Wow, this must've been a climb for elf legs," I observed.

"I don't know if you know, Jennifer, but ze elves ver here long before St Nick and although zey are happy to serve Christmas in partnership viz us, zey ver once the slave servants of an older race who lived here before us, and zay ver not happy back zen. Zeez cellars ver vunce level with ze ground level und ver vhere ze Old People vunce lived."

We turned the corner on the stairs, leading to a further flight of steps continuing deep down into the gloom. When we reached the bottom, Hilde turned on another light switch and a few old fluorescent tubes spluttered and buzzed and lit up a large chamber, not a completely open space, but with huge arched stone pillars holding up the floor about six or seven metres above our heads, the pillars cast deep shadows, making the area look and, I had to admit, feel very spooky. I kept getting the irrational impression that something malevolent and resentful was lurking behind each dark arch or pillar and getting ready to pounce if we got near enough.

"No vun comes down here any more," Hilde said, her voice echoing in the empty space, "und vhat vos vunce kept down here haz been moved avay, but zis vos vunce ver ze Old People lived before ve came."

"What happened to them?"