Don't Call Me Christina Kringle

  Don’t Call Me Christina Kringle

  Chris Grabenstein

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-one

  Seventy-two

  Seventy-three

  Seventy-four

  Seventy-five

  Seventy-six

  Seventy-seven

  Seventy-eight

  Seventy-nine

  Prologue

  There were things people knew a long time ago, before everybody got so much smarter.

  They knew who painted the leaves every autumn and who sugared windowpanes with frost come winter. They knew who could take a pile of wood chips and turn it into a mountain of golden coins.

  When they saw trampled patches in the dewy morning grass, they knew whose tiny feet had been dancing in the moonlight and why they had heard faint fiddle music drifting on the breeze.

  They also knew darker things—like who could make milk curdle or a lake jump its banks to flood a village.

  Everybody knew these things. Kings and queens and even Shakespeare.

  Then, everyone forgot.

  Well, almost everyone. Our story begins with one man who remembered far too much. …

  One

  McCracken was a droopy giant of a Scotsman.

  He stood nearly seven feet tall and had a floppy mop of carrot-orange hair that he wore like a fuzzy slouch cap on top of his head.

  He was so tall he had to duck to avoid doorjambs, lighting fixtures, and the occasional overhead sprinkler spout. As a consequence, McCracken’s spine was permanently bent to the left in a lazy, loopy curve. When he walked, he loped along—slowly lifting one long leg, bending one knobby knee, bringing down one half of his lanky bones onto one size-fifteen foot, and then, repeating it all on the second side. Skulking about like a felonious flamingo, Donald McCracken always looked like he was up to no good, which, in fact, he usually was.

  This particular morning, nearly a month before Christmas, McCracken was loping through a concrete cavern of dusty floors, steel pillars, greasy machinery, and idle conveyor belts. A factory. A candy cane–making factory, to be precise. McCracken had been summoned here on Thanksgiving morning because the factory should have been bustling with activity.

  But it wasn’t.

  It should have been noisy with the clack of cogwheels, the grind of gears, and the sharp thwack of candy being wrapped with clear and crinkly cellophane because Christmas was only thirty days away and Christmas is the number-one candy cane–selling season of the whole year.

  But the factory was silent.

  No machines clanked. No conveyor belts whirred. The grease on the cane-wrapping equipment was cold and lumpy.

  A short, nervous man resembling a pudgy chipmunk in a business suit escorted McCracken across the factory floor. The little man paused to sponge the moisture off his bald dome. He used the tip of his necktie—something he probably should’ve done with a handkerchief. Maybe a towel. Or a mop. But the chipmunk man, who owned the candy-cane factory, was too nervous to do what he should’ve done. If candy canes didn’t start rolling off his assembly line soon, he would be ruined. If he couldn’t churn out candy canes during the peak of the candy cane-selling season, he’d lose everything. His money. His factory. The warehouse. His house. His wife and children, too, because they liked living indoors and eating food and wearing clothes and having cable television, all things that cost money! So even though the factory was chilly (he had long since turned off the heat) the little man had sweat pooling under his arms and trickling down his back. And B.O. The little man was a mess. He pointed to a rolling canvas bin parked at the end of one conveyor belt.

  “Take a look,” he said to Donald McCracken. “No stripes! No red swirls at all! Something’s wrong with the striper machine!”

  McCracken’s thick lips curled up into a sinister grin as he gazed down at a heaping pile of blank candy canes. Curl-tipped walking sticks made out of hard white sugar without any peppermint swirl—hundreds of them pyramiding on top of each other.

  “Nobody wants candy canes without stripes!” the little man stammered. “I’m ruined! Ruined!” He blubbered some more, then blew his nose in the only cloth he had handy. His tie again. Perhaps his wife would give him a new one for Christmas. One that wasn’t green.

  McCracken shook his head and clicked his tongue.

  “Pity,” he said in his thick Scottish brogue. “Terrible pity, indeed.”

  “Terrible? This is horrible! My striping machine is broken and I don’t know how to fix it because the instruction manual is written in German, which I never learned how to read because I was too busy counting my money, the money I made making candy!”

  McCracken smiled. Then he started singing a snatch of his favorite Christmas carol: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat. …”

  Since he didn’t have a hat, just all that orange hair, McCracken held out his hand.

  “I’ll write you a check,” said the frazzled factory owner. “I’ll write you a check right now!” He ripped a check out of his checkbook and scribbled an astronomical sum into the little box.

  McCracken held up the check for a moment, admired the amount of money he was about to make, then tucked the thin slip of pink paper into his pocket.

  “Now don’t ye worry no more, Mr. Kasselhopf,” he said. “Just go home and go to bed.”

  “Bed? How can I sleep?” The factory owner tugged at what little hair he had left, two clumps fringing his ears.

  “Don’t fret, laddy,” said McCracken. “Why tomorrow morning, when you come into your factory, you’ll find mountains of red-and-white candy canes waiting for you; that I promise. Mountains! Every bin full. Now run along, laddy boy. Leave me be. …”

  “But—”

  “Leave me be!”

  Two

  Donald McCracken waited until the terrified (and somewhat smel
ly) little man was gone.

  When he heard the factory doors slide shut, he marched over to where he had stacked his boxes.

  McCracken had only brought six wooden crates tonight, figuring six would be more than enough for the job at hand. The boxes, made of rough pine boards and each with a small barred door at the front, were approximately one foot long, one foot deep, and one foot wide. The side panels were stenciled and stickered with labels: “LIVE PETS.” “HANDLE WITH CARE.” “IMPORT OF SCOTLAND.” “THIS END UP.” “MIND YOUR CREAM.”

  McCracken took the six crates and spaced them out evenly alongside the factory’s main conveyor belt. As he placed the boxes on the floor, he flipped open their tiny doors. Attached to the bars in each door panel was a miniature plastic cup, the kind you’d see in birdcages at the pet store. McCracken filled the miniature containers with heavy cream poured from a thermos bottle he kept stowed in his woolen overcoat.

  While he loped his way down the line of shipping crates, the lanky Scot kept mumbling his favorite holiday song:

  “If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do. If you haven’t got a ha’penny …”

  He paused—just long enough to change a few words:

  “No wee ones for you!”

  Three

  Christina Lucci was ten years old and absolutely, positively hated Christmas.

  She hated the twinkle lights and the stupid songs and the reindeer with their big red schnozzles and the sugar cookies shaped like snowmen, even though it was kind of fun to bite off their hats and chomp on their heads. She hated tinsel on trees, holly wreaths, and angels who were heard on high. She hated eggnog. She wondered what eggnog was. There were certainly no eggs in it and what the heck was a nog, anyway? She suspected eggnog was really cream of mushroom soup disguised with yellow food coloring, then seasoned with nutmeg—and she hated cream of mushroom soup almost as much as she hated Christmas. If she ever had visions of sugarplums dancing in her head, she’d go see a doctor. Maybe a psychiatrist.

  More than anything else about the horrible holiday, she hated Santa Claus. The jolly fat man. Saint Nick. The roly-poly tub of lard. Mr. North Pole. As far as Christina was concerned, Santa was a sham, a scam, and a borderline diabetic (on account of all those cookies he shoveled into his face during one twenty-four-hour Christmas Eve eating binge). Santa was a fat slob with terrible taste in clothes (red fur-lined pajamas, a goofy night cap, rubber boots, and a thick black plastic belt? Who dressed this guy?). Santa was basically a creepy prowler who broke into homes, parked reindeer on roofs (where they probably pooped), swilled milk that had been sitting out for hours, and stuffed ratty old stockings with candy—as if anybody really wanted to eat candy that came out of a sock.

  Santa was the main reason Christina Lucci hated everything else about Christmas.

  She hated Santa first and foremost.

  Hated him, not for anything he had given her but for what he had taken away.

  Four

  On the other hand, Christina’s grandfather, Guiseppe Lucci, loved Christmas.

  No—Guiseppe adored it. He lived for it. He waited all year for Thanksgiving to roll around because it meant he could finally haul out his Christmas crap and decorate his shoe repair shop, a tiny store, barely eight feet wide and maybe twenty feet deep that was squeezed between two bigger buildings in what was probably meant to be the entrance to an alleyway.

  Christina helped out behind the counter at Giuseppe’s Old World Shoe Repair Shop on weekends and school holidays. She didn’t mind working. Helped the holidays seem shorter. Time flies when you’re busy taking claim checks and handing people re-heeled shoes bundled up in string-tied butcher paper.

  But time drags when you’re forced to watch your grandfather drag another plastic figurine up out of the basement and into the shop’s tiny window display. The window covered the four feet of storefront not occupied by the door.

  “I love Rudolph!” Christina’s grandfather said as he plugged in the power cord to yet another light-up statue with a bulb stuck in its belly. This one was a plastic reindeer missing a few antler nubs. “See his nose? You could even say it glows!”

  Guiseppe laughed and Christina rolled her eyes.

  She’d been rolling her eyes all morning long.

  Her grandfather had collected so many Christmas lights and ornaments and doodads over the past fifty years, his storefront sucked down more wattage than most medium-sized cities. The shoe shop’s blazingly illuminated window was guaranteed to stop passing pedestrians. In fact, the window was so amazingly hideous it froze people in their tracks. They couldn’t help gawk—mostly because the decorations were such a congested mish-mash: wise men kneeling in front of reindeer who seemed to be sniffing toy soldiers flanked by gingerbread men who might be lighting a Hanukkah menorah.

  Rudolph glowing, Grandpa turned his attention to two motorized mannequins tucked into the corner in a bed of cotton wool.

  “Ah! The elves! I love the elves!”

  Of course you do, Christina thought.

  The two elves had faded felt caps and scraggly beards that used to be white but now were kind of sooty, smoggy grey, the color of gutter slush, because they were at least thirty years old. When plugged in, their tiny motors humming, one elf would hammer the same nail over and over into a shoe; the other elf would paint the same red stripe over and over on a candy cane. Before they could go to work, however, Grandpa had to jam their plugs into the extension cord, which was plugged into another extension cord (for the hundreds of lights—big and small, white and multi-colored, blinking and still), which was plugged into a three-way outlet deal, which was plugged into the wall and connected to all the other extension cords snaking through the shoe shop.

  They’d definitely blow about two-dozen fuses before December 25.

  Oh, and Grandpa always dressed for the annual store-decorating event: a bright red sweater with prancing reindeer knitted all over it. The sweater Christina’s father had given Guiseppe ten years earlier—when Christina was born. When Christina’s mother died.

  Seeing the sweater made her remember all that and that made her even sadder. So, she snapped on the little radio they kept under the counter—hoping for a traffic report or a weather bulletin or a meteor attack, anything loud enough to drown out Grandpa’s cheery carol humming.

  “It’s the day after Thanksgiving,” said a voice even cheerier than Grandpa’s. “Black Friday. You know what that means—shop ’til you drop!”

  The deejay jangled his jingle bells and Ho-Ho-Hoed and Christina heard the twanging guitar that signaled the introduction to the one song that more or less summed up the whole holiday: “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

  “I love this song!” exclaimed Grandpa, who always thought the singer was, somehow, talking about him.

  Christina turned to a framed photograph sitting next to the cash register. A fireman with rosy cheeks and a broad smile that illuminated his whole happy face.

  “I gotta tell you, Dad,” she whispered to the picture, “I really, really hate Christmas.”

  Grandpa climbed out of the window and stood in the middle of the store snapping his fingers and singing along with the radio. It was horrible.

  Christina snapped the radio off.

  “Hey!” Grandpa shouted playfully, his left leg bent in what must have been a move from some sort of Prancer-and-Dancer dance he thought went along with the reindeer song. Frozen in his pose, he looked poised to punt the aluminum Christmas tree planted in a pot near the front window. If he did give the skinny tree a swift kick, its velvet balls would bounce off the cardboard nativity characters taped all over the walls and take out a ceramic angel or two, too.

  “It’s lunch time,” said Christina. “We have turkey leftovers and—”

  “Soon, Christina. Soon. But, first, we must put the shoes on the tree!”

  “Right,” Christina said sarcastically. “What’s a shoe repair shop without a shoe tree?”

  “Exactly!”<
br />
  Guiseppe placed a pair of bronze baby shoes on a spindly aluminum branch.

  Christina rolled her eyes again. Then she sighed.

  Man, she hated Christmas.

  Five

  Just about everybody else in the city where Christina and her grandfather lived loved Christmas.

  Especially the shopkeepers.

  Especially the shopkeepers who owned shops on the other, swankier side of town. Over where they swept their sidewalks every morning and vacuumed the red carpets rolled out in front of their gleaming brass-handled doors. Over where people had so much money coming out of their noses they were always looking for shiny new things to throw it at. Their money. Not their noses.

  At Mister Fred’s Fine and Fancy Footwearerie (which really wasn’t a word but Mister Fred, the owner, who wasn’t French but wished he was, thought it sounded French and, therefore, high-class—like menagerie or rotisserie our oui-oui), women in wolfish fur coats were whacking one another with alligator handbags as they fought over pumps and puttees, flats and flip-flops, Wallabees, wellingtons, and wafflestompers.

  These were not simply shoes.

  These were Shoes, darling. Splendiferously exquisite masterpieces that cost more money than most flat-screen high-definition TVs—and worth every penny, or so the ladies duking it out in the aisles thought. These one-of-a-kind designer shoes were well worth a well-placed elbow to a fellow shopper’s ribs if it meant getting the plush purple pair she snatched before you could snag them. A good kidney punch would pop them out of her paws and teach her a good Christmas lesson, too!

  That lesson? It is better to give up one’s shoes than to receive a punch in one’s kidneys.

  At King Tony’s Toy Castle, over-caffeinated parents pushing strollers and dragging toddlers were lined up around the block, begging for a chance to squeeze inside the jam-packed store and pay several hundred dollars for the year’s “must-have” toy.

  Rumor had it, the two giant teddy bears guarding the front door could be bought. The teddy bears were actually out-of-work actors wearing costumes that made them look like the more militaristic members of an enchanted forest’s high-school marching band. They wore stovepipe hats with feathered plumes and slanty visors, riding breeches and tasseled shoulder streamers. They also wore big goofy smiles on their faces because the cartoon bear heads were molded that way. Rumor also had it that the guard bears preferred bribes that involved cold cash and colder beverages because it was a constant ninety-five degrees inside their giant plastic heads.