The Forgotten King’s Last Christmas

In a desolate little hut, sheltered among a forest of untouched pines, and smothered by an unceasing blizzard, lived a forgotten King. The whole world once knew his name - now it was only heard whispered on the sharp, icy breeze which sliced mountains and chilled deserts as the dreaded moniker of a defeated foe. To adults, mention of it barely jingled a bell of recollection. They learned to forget him. Those who did remember condemned him as a tyrant and a symbol of evil. He was a krampus, a demon of winter. A dark conjuring of ancient magic untamed, priests preached to empty, hushed churches with storerooms laden with Christmas trees untouched for a decade and bin bags filled to bursting by smashed baubles and the cinders of wooden toys. 

They scrubbed his name from history. Books that praised him were reduced to solemn ash and films portraying his visage in positive terms were reviled and cast into the exile of the dustiest back shelves of the world’s last remaining Blockbuster store. Children were lectured in the strongest possible terms that that forgotten King was an ill-conceived myth - a silly story worth nothing but disdain. For some, he was a threat of punishment aimed at the naughtiest children. He was always watching, they said.

But while the whole world consigned him to the annals of unappealing fantasy, he was imprisoned by his remembrance. That was his victorious nemesis' final prize. Every icicle and snowflake that fell from hell above was a fragment of a tapestry telling the story of that fateful final Christmas. It sickened him to his stomach, which languished empty and starved. He ate only when forced to by his wife, herself disheveled and aged by the dual burden of being both refugee and carer. He, once the personification of jollity, now spoke only in hushed and gravelly tones to the four majestic reindeer who pastured loyally outside, patiently awaiting a day of glory that they did not know would never come. His now desperate wife could only cling to her last memory of the optimistic boom that once echoed out from his lungs.

The lost couple had nothing in their wooden sanctuary but a sadly flickering logfire and a simple bed. The walls were stark in their nudity, bearing nothing, especially not a clock or a calendar, and not even a window. There was nothing that offered them even a clue as to the time and date. And, yet, the King always knew. He felt etched into his creaking, ice bitten bones, exactly how many times he had had to venture out into the canvas of pearly white, undisturbed by any footprints but the tortured marks of his rotten boots, to rewatch that day as he gathered food and wood.

He poured an enormous dirty crimson coat, which had once embraced a grand belly of expansive joy, over his diminutive frame, knowing that this particular day would be especially painful. The flakes of speckled white mischief cascaded from the sky of unfeeling grey in a particularly malicious torrent as he feebly peeled ajar the front door, untethering himself from his sanctuary. Stepping out, he was enveloped in the tempest of cackling white. His unkempt beard of filthy, tired silver was by now so long unshaven that it tickled his knees. Yet, even it was painted rapidly with a thick coat of the sparkling winter gold that always took such riotous pleasure in smearing itself over him.

His throneless consort looked as close to flawless as she could. Her hair was perfectly permed and she was adorned with a coat of clean, but washed out, burgundy fur. She insisted, as she did every day, that she could go out in his stead, knowing of the ghosts that awaited him. He, following the closest thing to a Christmas tradition that they had left, simply grunted and shook his lifeless jowls from side to side in rejection. This was his burden to bear. He drew a hood lined with fur dyed a diseased hue of brown up over his receding hair. He then unsheathed a hefty axe wearing the costume of a candy cane from the ground. He mounted a stag with a bulbous nose that flickered with a meek shade of pale rose. He clipped the axe to the side of his saddle, let out a great heave and off they vanished at incredible speed into the dark shadows of the pine sentries. 

The visions always started slowly and built to a tortuous crescendo. Spat insults and muffled howls accompanied brooding flashes of ominous colour brewing on the snow bed’s smooth skin. As the snow kept falling, the sounds gained base and clarity, and the images took shape and form, moving as quickly as the reindeer could carry his master. The proud animal weaved and sliced between trees, the snow crunching under his thundering hooves as he mercilessly carved his path. The King, who once rode regally in his grand sleigh, looked the part of a man crazed. He kept his drooping azure eyes laser focused on the journey, huffing and panting at his steed in a desperate and foolhardy effort to outpace the swirl of chaos now encroaching upon him.

The untrustworthy paintings were now complete as he slowed down at the brow of a frozen creek to find the best tree. The colours rose and twisted as they sprung up from the flat canvas into a vast collection of figures. He shut his eyes tight as he slid off his mount. The forest filled with the sounds of unsettled chants and anguished roars. Two vast armies of snowy potter’s figures, initially pure white but eventually dressed in vibrant technicolour, lined up around him. He could never discern whether this display was real or a vision concocted from the dark corners of his haunted mind.

He wandered, giving each tree careful study, while the several thousand carefully detailed snowmen amassed around him began their charge. Humans tussled with icy monsters. Acrobatic elves smashed gun-toting nutcrackers to pieces with candy canes. Polar bears raged at heavily armored penguins. And there, in the heart of it all, was he, as he was then. Leaving the creek behind him, he found the whole forest immersed in battle. Living sculptures of snow crumbled to nothing and disintegrated into showers of flakes around him as they dealt each other fatal blows. He passed calmly through the morass and chaos, making sure to stamp on as many nutcrackers as he could, a visceral hatred stirring behind the glazed, dead mask that hung over his eyes. A sleigh pulled by twelve reindeer swung past him as two vanished under a flurry of gunshots from the smoking icicle rifles of a nutcracker dressed as a general. He was swiftly flattened with a particularly vicious snap under the heels of the King’s boots.

By the time he found a tree perfect to log, the forest was re-immersed in eerie silence. The floor was littered with broken bodies that soon faded back into the snow. There was nothing for a time but the sounds of furious slashing of the lonely King’s blade against the hardened bark shield of the pine. No armies, no battlefield. It was just a man who had had it all chopping down a tree on what would have once been, in a more innocent and myopic time, Christmas Day.

Once the tree had collapsed to Earth with a calamitous crash, he began sloppily dicing it into smaller chunks. His throat burned and his breath wheezed and croaked as it squeezed out of his broken and collapsing body. The snow beneath his feet stirred once more, contorting and stretching to form a cavernous structure around him which seemed to swallow up the forest. Intricate carvings, grand statues, and immaculate detailing carved themselves. It was like he was really there, in that workshop that he’d once known so well. Beneath him rose a familiar throne of immense comfort.

Under his gaze grew a scene that he missed with a deep resentment. A thousand elves with sharpened ears and ginger locks rocketed around in a great kaleidoscope of energy and activity. A flush of colour swept from the tips of his fingers which rested on the arm of his snowy throne. The clinical clean white of it all was bathed in all of the tones and shades of palatial living and Christmas joy. Green and red and golden brown curled and whipped around him as he watched the details sharpen on the face of each elf, every single one of whom he could still have named to that day.

Stepping up out of his seat and down from the dias on which it stood, he wandered down into the heart of the action. Gone were the sounds of war, replaced with the innocence of elven laughter and the serious unseriousness with which he was always determined to run his operation. His little helpers, dressed proudly in smart suits of green and red, were the least focused workforce in the world. They played games. Ate sweets. Told cracker jokes. But through it all, they worked with incredible efficiency. That was always one of the perks of magical employees. Judging by the big plastic hoops that they wove with golden sparks from nothing but air and a sprinkle of unicorn hair, this must have been the build up to Christmas 1958. The little elves dashed around him like he wasn’t there, firing hula hoops and wooden toys into boxes and packing the bottomless sack, branded with a little depiction of a wrapped gift, that rested back up on the platform by his throne. 

He blinked and the palace-come-workshop began crumbling into dust along with his elves, dressed in his very last vision of them in hefty armour. Great columns of crumbling, slushy snow began to rain down upon him as he dragged a crushed little cloth bag from his pocket and filled it with as many logs as he could and took back to his mount. Together, they galloped through the fraying walls and into the sinister clutches of that pine forest, not daring to look back as everything he had ever treasured crumbled to nothing behind him yet again. 

Homes sprung up around them. Snowy children played in faux streets and hurried inside as he came raging through. A hearty cry of “HO HO HO!” filled the dreary skies and packages rained down through chimneys from on high. Children excitedly burst back out from behind wreath mounted doors excited to show off the new bikes, skateboards, and other gifts with which they had been showered. A sleigh pulled by familiar reindeer swerved and swirled and danced over rooftops and vanished into eternity in a great swirling ball of auburn sparkles. The world of snow around the King gradually collapsed and changed. The children grew into adults. Fun t-shirts were replaced by suits, toys with laptops and paperwork. There were no more wreaths and the care-free giggling was silenced. There was now only the ice and snow that swirled around a joyless mass of high rise office blocks full of people. An endless boulevard of glass behemoths devoid of life and character, faceless and corporate, stretched out beyond him. They were all fully staffed on this Christmas Day.

And then there was nothing. The offices were gone and the sanctuary of the hut was in sight. But his foe was not finished with him yet, because there he stood. The King and his reindeer halted in an instant. Eight-foot tall, with a crooked, creepy smile curled across his frostbitten cheeks. He had icicles for hands and a blizzard for hair and nothing but two lumps of unfeeling black coal for eyes. A narrow, razor sharp sword stretched out from his chilling, bony talons and rested its cold touch against the throat of a man that the King knew and yet did not recognise. He had his face, and his beard, and his coat, but on him all of these things carried a distant air of grandeur. He had a twinkle in his eyes and a grandiose build that had long since been lost. Jack Frost laughed maniacally as the old image of the King before him sunk to his knees and begged for his life. He glared with hatred at the Winter Prince, the tormentor of children, the forever bringer of snow and the destroyer of Christmas.

“You may have it, if that you desire,” he sneered, his voice high and not afraid to quiver with notes of pantomime villainy. “But you will pay for it. You will live, but you will never forget what you had, and what you have lost, and what I took from you. May you look back on this, the last ever Christmas, from your isolation as a forgotten King, and may you wallow in the glorious shadow of my victory. I shall take more satisfaction from that life, than from your death.”

A single tear rolled down the scarlet red cheeks of the King - both now and then - as the actors of snow crumbled away and that very same voice hissed in his ear “I hope you enjoyed the show. See you again tomorrow,” as it did every day. And every day he insisted he would be numb to it by now. Those events were yet another day further off, and yet their sting was as great as ever.

Steeling himself and dismissing it all, feebly, in his mind as flashbacks to a time long since passed, he completed the ride back to his front door. He dismounted loyal Rudolph but something felt off to him as he approached the door. It was now dressed in a voluptuous wreath of leafy green and berry crimson, and through it passed words sounding vaguely of relief and excitement. Wary, he pushed the door carefully ajar. His Queen was waiting there for him as usual, but something was different. Was she… smiling? He’d forgotten what that looked like.

“Oh darling,” she crooned from the bed, her words soaked in a wonder that was deeply discomforting to him after so many years of monotonous loss. His eyes were drawn to the floor beside her. Standing there was a little man with pointy ears and hair of sunset orange, wearing armour of glorious blushing cardinal and verdant emerald, his sweet, pale face clean shaven and dotted with a million freckles.

“Merry Christmas, your majesty,” he squeaked with pure delight.

“Not anymore,” he croaked. His wife’s jaw dropped, as she heard her husband’s voice for the first time in well over a decade.

“You will always be my King, Sire.”

“What are you doing here, Bingo?” he sighed, striking a note short of relief as he threw his arms wide and embraced the elf.

“I was bringing your post, Sir.”

“Post?”

“Look, over here,” the Queen said, pointing to a familiar sack with a frayed drawing of a present stamped in onyx black on the front.

“What’s that doing here?” he asked, with a mix of wonderment and horror.

The Elf told in great detail the story of how he and hundreds of others had spent every day since that last Christmas searching for him, until finally they felt the magical traces in Rudolph’s nose and tracked them down. He beseeched him to lead a new war to take back power from Jack Frost.

“No,” he sighed simply. “This is my life now. I gave everything for Christmas, for the children, and I have nothing left to give.”

“King Frost has power over life and death. He has frozen the world. He has ended Christmas and stripped kindness from the human heart, leaving only misery and hate!”

“And what do they think of me?”

“Sire…”

“They spit on my name, if they know of it at all.”

“Your Majesty, please, look in the bag.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been intercepting post for you for years.”

“Who’s sending me post?”

“The children, Sire.”

“What children?”

“The children of Earth.”

He cautiously trod over to the sack, and, with a roboticism rooted in recalcitrance, tipped it upside down. A great tsunami of letters, his name scrawled in childish writing on the front of each, was called forth. With an immense ripple of paper, they carried on until all but a miniscule corner of the cabin had been swallowed by envelopes, each covered in the delightfully simple musings and drawings that had sprung from childhood innocence and crayon-based experiments.

“There are many more in there Sire, and another sixteen sacks.”

“Sixteen?”

“They filled that one.”

“But it’s an endless sack!”

“It seems they found its limits… sixteen times over,” his wife chuckled.

The King cautiously tore open the one closest to him and carefully cast his eyes across it. His eyes bulged and watered. Then he opened another and another. A thick layer of tears now welled and first trickled, and then poured, down his face. I hope you read this, read one. My parents say you’re not real, but I don’t believe them. I want you to be real. I need you to be real. I know you are real, said the next. My dad tells me to grow up and get real, but if that means not believing in Christmas then I don’t want to! 

“Where would we even start?” he sighed, emotion breaking through the tired grunt in his throat.

“There are elves awaiting your command, Sire.”

“What will you do?” his Queen asked, wrapping her arms tight around his shrunken shoulders. For the first time in years, he didn’t shrug her off.

“You did everything for the children, Sire, but they still need you. So, Santa, can they count on you again?”

Santa turned to Bingo, his plump lips twitching into a rare smile, his eyes scarlet and stinging under love’s tearful kiss, and said…

“Come Rudolph, Come Dancer, Come Prancer, Come Blitzen! We ride again for Christmas!”