Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  Soon they were outside, and cold air helped put out the fire Eric felt inside his swollen mouth.

  “Saint,” Krampus rumbled. Eric could feel hatred reverberate through the iron. “Where now? Where next? Check your list!”

  “Ho ho ho!” Eric heard through the howling wind.

  “Check it twice!”

  “Ho ho ho! Well, right over there! Another naughty one!”

  “Good,” replied Krampus, and they were off.

  “Hey!” Eric mumbled, trying his best to speak through the sun-hot pain. “I want to go home!”

  Eric didn’t know how to describe Krampus’ laughter, but he’d never forget it, as long as he lived—which he decided may not be very long.

  “I’m taking you to hell,” Krampus chuckled, “Where they’ll hurt you. Put things in your mouth and make you stand on things and fall off things. Stay in places and not let you in others. Say things to you or not say anything at all.”

  “Cause I’m not on the list?”

  “Cause you’re not on the list.”

  “Well, what about Bryan Jacobi?”

  “Bryan Jacobi?”

  “Yeah, the real ass! Says mean things ‘bout the sisters when they’re not around. Poisoned a dog earlier this year, but he wasn’t caught. Bragged to all of us about it, though! Beat up a first-grader, too. But he did it behind the dumpsters. Kid told his folks he fell or something. Hell, he even went around the neighborhood breaking mailboxes. Ain’t that a federal crime or something? He on the list?”

  “Where does he live?”

  Eric popped his upper half out of the basket, pointed to a house at the end of the street. “That’s his dad’s house, he’s there on the weekends—and it’s Sunday!”

  Krampus changed course, began to run on his goat legs, almost skipping. “Bryan Jacobi!” he screeched, “I’m coming to take you from people you love! I’m taking you to the place where they hate you!”

  “See that? They got a gate that’s locked. How you getting in?”

  “Simple.”

  Krampus droned off a few words Eric didn’t understand. He blinked and was inside Bryan Jacobi’s living room.

  “Whoa,” whispered Eric.

  “Yes, whoa,” agreed Krampus. “Bryan Jacobi!” he screamed. Krampus tore through the house, knocking over chairs and kicking pictures off of tables. He ripped down stockings and punched holes through walls, running through every room until he reached the last bedroom on the left. Then he stopped, sniffed the air, and began jangling his chains and bells. “Bryaaaaan Jacooooobi?” he sang. “Wheeeere is Bryaaaaan Jacooooobi? Under the beeeeeed, I wageeeeeeer!”

  With only a simple look from Krampus the bed flipped over, revealing Bryan Jacobi, trying his best to dig himself into the solid wooden floor.

  “Hello,” rasped Krampus. He went to work with his chains, breaking Bryan’s feet first, then the rest of his legs. That’s when the screaming really started.

  “Look how fat he is!” yelled Eric over Bryan’s escalating cries. “What a fatty!”

  “He will do well when they starve him and feed him to men that are dogs that are men but snakes.”

  “I ain’t never seen a kid so fat! Or mean-looking!” Eric shouted. “Can you believe it, Krampus? Look how easy his fingers break! What a screamer!”

  Krampus dropped his chains on top of Bryan’s shrieking, broken form. He used his cloven foot to kick Bryan’s ear a few times until it started leaking blood and other things.

  The house fell silent

  “Krampus?” Eric asked quietly.

  “What is it, damned man-boy?”

  “Well, Bryan there is really fat. I don’t know if he’ll fit in this basket with me.”

  “I’ll make him fit. I’ll break his bones, and yours. I’ll smash him until his eyes are gone and his guts are gone and he’s nothing but hair and teeth. Then I’ll take you where the sun never rises and never sets. Where the moon never rises and never sets. Where I laugh.”

  “Krampus?” Eric asked again, softer, “I mean, look at him. He’s really fat. I really think you gotta make up your mind on this one. Me? Or Bryan Jacobi—poisoner of dogs and destroyer of first-graders. I mean, worst I did was steal my sister’s diary, right?”

  Krampus growled, stamped his feet on Bryan’s knees. He reached inside the basket and hurled Eric to the floor.

  “He’s way worse than me!” Eric screamed and braced himself for a goat-leg to the face.

  Krampus continued to stamp, threw his arms in the air. He grabbed one of his horns, cracked it and threw it across the room. “Very well, Eric Errichson! The naughty, mighty Jacobi is mine!”

  Eric scrambled for the door, looked over his shoulder in time to see Krampus stuffing the twisted, torn remnants of screaming Bryan Jacobi into his iron basket.

  “Merry Christmas, Krampus!” Eric called.

  “Merry Christmas,” replied the thing that crawled out of Eric Errichson’s fireplace on Christmas Eve. He hoisted the basket securely on his back. “Merry Christmas.”

  And then Krampus was gone.

  Anton Chekhov

  VANKA

  NINE-YEAR-OLD Vanka Zhukov, who was apprenticed three months ago to the shoemaker Alyakhin, did not go to bed on Christmas Eve. He waited till the master and mistress and the more senior apprentices had gone to the early service, and then he took a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib from his master’s cupboard, and began to write on a crumpled sheet of paper spread out in front of him. Before tracing the shape of the first letter, he looked several times fearfully in the direction of the doors and windows, and then he gazed up at the dark icon, flanked on either side by shelves filled with cobbler’s lasts, and then he heaved a broken sigh. With the paper spread over the bench, Vanka knelt on the floor beside it.

  “Dear Grandfather Konstantin Makarich,” he wrote. “I am writing a letter to you. I wish you a Merry Christmas and all good things from the Lord God. I have no father and mother, and you are all I have left.”

  Vanka raised his eyes to the dark windowpane, on which there gleamed the reflection of a candle flame, and in his vivid imagination he saw his grandfather Konstantin Makarich standing there. His grandfather was a night watchman on the estate of some gentlefolk called Zhivaryov, a small, thin, unusually lively and nimble old man of about sixty-five, his face always crinkling with laughter, and his eyes bleary from drink. In the daytime the old man slept in the servants’ kitchen or cracked jokes with the cooks. At night, wrapped in an ample sheepskin coat, he made the rounds of the estate, shaking his clapper. Two dogs followed him with drooping heads—one was the old bitch Brownie, the other was called Eel from his black coat and long weaselly body. Eel always seemed to be extraordinarily respectful and endearing, gazing with the same fond eyes on friends and strangers alike; yet no one trusted him. His deference and humility concealed a most jesuitical malice. No one knew better how to creep stealthily behind someone and take a nip at his leg, or how to crawl into the icehouse, or how to scamper off with a peasant’s chicken. More than once they just about broke his hind legs, twice a noose was put round his neck, and every week he was beaten until he was only half alive, yet he always managed to survive.

  At this very moment Grandfather was probably standing by the gates, screwing up his eyes at the bright red windows of the village church, stamping about in his felt boots and cracking jokes with the servants. His clapper hung from his belt. He would be throwing out his arms and then hugging himself against the cold, and, hiccoughing as old men do, he would be pinching one of the servant girls or one of the cooks.

  “What about a pinch of snuff, eh?” he would say, holding out his snuffbox to the women.

  Then the women would take a pinch and sneeze, and the old man would be overcome with indescribable ecstasies, laughing joyously and exclaiming: “Fine for frozen noses, eh!”

  The dogs, too, were given snuff. Brownie would sneeze, shake her head, and walk away looking offended, while Eel, too polite t
o sneeze, only wagged his tail. The weather was glorious. The air was still, transparently clear, and fresh. The night was very dark, but the whole white-roofed village with its snowdrifts and trees silvered with hoarfrost and smoke streaming from the chimneys could be seen clearly. The heavens were sprinkled with gay, glinting stars, and the Milky Way stood out as clearly as if it had been washed and scrubbed with snow for the holidays.

  Vanka sighed, dipped his pen in the ink, and went on writing:

  “Yesterday I was given a thrashing. The master dragged me by the hair into the yard and gave me a beating with a stirrup strap because when I was rocking the baby in the cradle, I misfortunately fell asleep. And then last week the mistress ordered me to gut a herring, and because I began with the tail, she took the head of the herring and rubbed it all over my face. The other apprentices made fun of me, sent me to the tavern for vodka, and made me steal the master’s cucumbers for them, and then the master beat me with the first thing that came to hand. And there’s nothing to eat. In the morning they give me bread, there is porridge for dinner, and in the evening only bread again. They never give me tea or cabbage soup—they gobble it all up themselves. They make me sleep in the passageway, and when their baby cries, I don’t get any sleep at all because I have to rock the cradle. Dear Grandfather, please for God’s sake take me away from here, take me to the village, it’s more than I can bear.… I kneel down before you. I’ll pray to God to keep you forever, but take me away from here, or I shall die.”

  Vanka grimaced, rubbed his eyes with his black fists, and sobbed.

  “I’ll grind your snuff for you,” he went on. “I will pray to God to keep you, and if I ever do anything wrong, you can flog me all you like. If you think there’s no place for me, then I’ll ask the manager for Christ’s sake to let me clean boots or take Fedya’s place as a shepherd boy. Dear Grandfather, it’s more than I can bear, it will be the death of me. I thought of running away to the village, but I haven’t any boots, and I am afraid of the ice. If you’ll do this for me, I’ll feed you when I grow up, and won’t let anyone harm you, and when you die I’ll pray for the repose of your soul, just like I do for my mother, Pelageya.

  “Moscow is such a big city. There are so many houses belonging to the gentry, so many horses, but no sheep anywhere, and the dogs aren’t vicious. The boys don’t go about with the Star of Christmas, and they don’t let you sing in the choir, and once I saw fishhooks in the shopwindow with the fishing lines for every kind of fish, very fine ones, even one hook which would hold a skate fish weighing forty pounds. I’ve seen shops selling guns which are just like the master’s at home, and each one must cost a hundred rubles. In the butcher shops they have woodcocks and partridges and hares, but the people in the shop won’t tell you where they were shot.

  “Dear Grandfather, when they put up the Christmas tree at the big house, please take down a golden walnut for me and hide it in the green chest. Ask the young mistress, Olga Ignatyevna, and say it is for Vanka.”

  Vanka heaved a convulsive sigh, and once more he gazed in the direction of the window. He remembered it was Grandfather who always went to the forest to cut down a Christmas tree for the gentry, taking his grandson with him. They had a wonderful time together. Grandfather chuckled, the frost crackled, and Vanka, not to be outdone, clucked away cheerfully. Before chopping down the fir tree Grandfather would smoke a pipe, take a long pinch of snuff, and make fun of Vanka, who was shivering in the cold. The young fir trees, garlanded with hoarfrost, stood perfectly still, waiting to see which of them would die.… Suddenly out of nowhere a hare came springing across the snowdrifts, quick as an arrow, and Grandfather would be unable to prevent himself from shouting: “Hold him! Hold him! Hold that bobtailed devil, eh!”

  When the tree had been chopped down, Grandfather would drag it to the big house and they would start decorating it. The young mistress, Olga Ignatyevna, Vanka’s favorite, was the busiest of all. While Vanka’s mother, Pelageya, was alive, serving as a chambermaid, Olga Ignatyevna used to stuff him with sugar candy, and it amused her to teach him to read and write, to count up to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. But when Pelageya died, they relegated the orphan Vanka to the servants’ kitchen to be with his Grandfather, and from there he went to Moscow to the shoemaker Alyakhin.…

  “Come to me, dear Grandfather,” Vanka went on. “I beseech you for Christ’s sake, take me away from here! Have pity on me, a poor orphan, they are always beating me, and I am terribly hungry, and so miserable I can’t tell you, and I’m always crying. The other day the master hit me on the head with a last, and I fell down and thought I would never get up again. It’s worse than a dog’s life, and so miserable. I send greetings to Alyona, to one-eyed Yegor, and to the coachman, and don’t give my harmonica away. I remain your grandson Ivan Zhukov, dear Grandfather, and come soon!”

  Vanka twice folded the sheet of paper and then he put it in an envelope bought the previous day for a kopeck. He reflected for a while, dipped the pen in ink, and wrote the address:

  To Grandfather in the Village

  Then he scratched his head and thought for a while, and added the words: Konstantin Makarich. Pleased because no one interrupted him when he was writing, he threw on his cap, and without troubling to put on a coat, he ran out into the street in his shirt sleeves.

  When he talked to the clerks in the butcher shop the previous day, they told him that letters were dropped in boxes, and from these boxes they were carried all over the world on mail coaches drawn by three horses and driven by drunken drivers, while the bells jingled. Vanka ran to the nearest mailbox and thrust his precious letter into the slot.

  An hour later, lulled by sweetest hopes, he was fast asleep. He dreamed of a stove. His grandfather was sitting on the stove, bare feet dangling down, while he read the letter aloud to the cooks. Eel was walking round the stove, wagging his tail.

  Natasha Cabot

  TIMMY, THE BIPOLAR ELF

  THE SNOW BASHED into the windows and the wind screamed at the top of its lungs. The sky was black, like smoker’s lungs. The noise in the workshop was high, chipper. Peals of laughter rang through the room. Timmy was in the corner, working on a train. The wheels wouldn’t go on straight. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes - each attempt a futile one. The right eye overfowed and a stream ran down his rosy cheek. The points of his ears sagged as he realized he was a failure.

  Timmy’s moods ran a zig-zag course, serpentining between delight and depression. Today was a bad day, a very bad day. Christmas always did this to him. Making toys for spoiled, overweight children who would just end up breaking them. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of this? Timmy asked himself.

  He had no family to spend the holidays with, his parents were gone. He was alone, like always. Surrounding him were bubbly, happy elves with no cares in the world. No, they were completely happy to make toys for an old, fat white man and his smelly fying deer. What the hell am I doing here? I hate all of these people. They all suck. My life is meaningless. Please God, just let me die.

  Timmy knew death would never come – elves never died. They eventually froze and became garden gnomes. Oh he’d be alive and aware but he’d never be able to move. This is all I have to look forward to. Being in some housefrau’s garden being pooped upon by large birds and peed upon by wild and domesticated animals. God, why? Why?

  Bertie, another elf, walked passed Timmy—staring at him.

  “Turn that frown upside down, my friend! It’s Christmas! The snow is falling and everyone is happy!!”

  Timmy looked back at Bertie and imagined plunging a sharp screwdriver into the base of his skull. Knowing it wouldn’t kill him but cause him a lot of pain seemed to lift Timmy’s mood slightly.

  “Shut up, Bertie. Just shut up. I don’t want to turn my frown upside down I just want to be left alone so I can do my job, okay? So go to hell,” Timmy barked.

  Bertie’s lip quivered and then he started to weep. “That’s no way
to talk to a fellow elf, Timmy. Why are you so mean? You’re always so moody. Get help.”

  “Yeah, Bertie I will. I’ll stomp my way outside and talk things over with Rudolph because he too is treated like shit. Oh, I forgot. He was treated like shit. Now that his nose shines up like a Hiroshima bomb EVERYONE loves him. Get the hell away from me.”

  Timmy threw one of the train tires onto the foor.

  “I hate you all!” he screamed.

  The other elves looked at him and slowly shook their heads.

  “Timmy,” Gezelda – the head elf – said. “May I see you in my offce?” The room fell silent and Timmy made his way into his boss’s offce, the bells on his shoes tinkling mournfully.

  “Sit down, Timmy, and tell me what’s wrong. You’ve been moody all week. All the other elves are walking on unicorn egg shells trying not to anger you. What’s wrong, my friend?” she asked.

  “Nothing is wrong. I just want to be left alone. I hate this time of year. I hate my job. I hate my life. I don’t see how all of you can be so stupidly content making toys year-round for annoying kids for some fat man who only pays us in glitter and stockings. Really? Stockings? Have you gone shopping in the North Pole? Do you know how expensive things are? Very. The man isn’t living in reality and neither are any of you. Throughout the year we do this, this making of toys bullshit. I’ve had it. God, I can’t believe I was born into this life. I wish my parents never pulled me out of the

  basket of sunshine. I should have stayed there and melted,” he wailed.

  “Timmy, we are elves. We don’t have any cares in the world. Why do you make it so complicated?” Gezelda asked.

  “Life is complicated. I’m complicated. Sorry I’m not easy enough for you. I just want more out of my life than what I’m getting. I want to be someone. Not a drone. Not unappreciated. And I just want all of you to leave me alone. You all are so goddamned perky and I hate it. Life’s tough, you know? And you all just sit there with grins plastered on your pink faces and enjoy every damned minute of it. You all make me sick.”