The Grump Who Stole Christmas: Kringle Family Christmas Book One

by S Doyle

  He looked older than I remembered, which was odd. Same long white ponytail, same round belly, same chest-length beard. But there was something in his eyes. A weariness, maybe. Which of course had to be a result of breaking his leg.

  “Princess! I was getting worried about you.”

  “Hi Dad,” I said, as I leaned in to gently kiss his cheek. “You should be in bed.”

  “Ha! When my daughter’s not home and snow is picking up, I don’t think so. Where’ve you been?”

  “I got a flat tire and this…hmmm, would I call you a gentleman when you briefly considered abandoning me on the side of the road?”

  “Probably not,” Paul admitted.

  “Anyway, he couldn’t manage to change the tire so he drove me home instead. Thanks, again. See you around. Or not.”

  “Paul,” my dad barked at him. And that’s when I realized my dad knew my knight personally. “What’s that? You couldn’t change a tire?”

  “The lug nuts were crazy tight! And speaking of crazy…”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said, cutting him off. I didn’t want my dad to know what Paul thought of me. My dad was under the delusion I was the most perfect creature who had ever walked the Earth. While that was fundamentally not true, I did my best to maintain the illusion around him.

  “Well, you’re home now. Both of you. Come on in and we can get some hot chocolate into you and warm you up.”

  “Oh, Dad. I’m sure Paul has better places to be. Like his home. Bye Paul!”

  “What are you talking about?” my dad said, looking at me funny.

  “Uh, yeah, about that,” Paul said with a twisted smile I could just make out through his beard. “This is my home.”

  “What?” I asked, not understanding.

  “I told you about him, honey. Paul’s the new tree farm manager. Started this fall. Didn’t make any sense for him to have some apartment in town, so he’s staying with me in the big house until he can fix up the cabin on the back ten acres.”

  “Guess we’ll be having more interactions after all,” Paul said and stepped inside the house with my suitcase in his hand as he followed my dad’s awkward progress.

  I looked at the empty doorway and tried to process the information I’d been handed.

  I was going to spend the next few weeks living with Paul?

  “I probably should have been nicer to him,” I said aloud.

  Paul suddenly stepped back into the doorway. “Are you talking to yourself again?”

  Yeah. This was not going to be fun.

  2

  The Next Morning

  Kristen

  I was barely awake as I made my way down the steps. To say I was not a morning person was an understatement. I didn’t think, speak, or even breathe that hard before I had my morning coffee. My father knew this about me; my brothers knew this about me.

  Stepping into the kitchen, I made a beeline for where I knew the coffee pot would be.

  “Morning, princess,” my dad said from the kitchen table.

  “Mmblemm,” I muttered.

  I opened the cabinet above the counter and reached for my mug. My special boss lady mug. The mug my mom got me for Christmas the year I was promoted to vice president at Hart’s. The mug she kept here for me, so I would always have my mug when I came home to visit.

  Which hadn’t been as often as it should have been over the years, I could acknowledge that. But that didn’t mean it still shouldn’t be in the spot I always left it. However, patting my hand around the shelf, I could feel there was a space where my mug should be.

  “Morning, princess!”

  I turned at the sound of the voice that had literally haunted my dreams last night. There was Paul, the non-tire-changing tree-farmer knight, sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee from my BOSS LADY mug.

  “That’s my mug,” I said, in a tone that meant business.

  “Now, sweetie,” my dad said. “There are other mugs.”

  “This one’s got a nice weight to it,” Paul said and took another sip of coffee.

  “I know,” I growled.

  I pulled down another mug and filled it. I didn’t wait to sit down before taking multiple sips. It was hot. It was black. It was oddly delicious, which was unlike my dad’s coffee. I sat down at the kitchen table where I was certain there would be some sort of breakfast food. My dad was a big believer in breakfast being the most important meal of the day.

  “Good,” I grunted, as I continued to slurp the coffee.

  “It’s a special blend, I like. Plus, I add a little salt in the filter,” Paul said. “That really does the trick. I saw it once on some food channel show and I was, like, that cannot be good, but then I tried it and it was life changing.”

  I glared at him. “Are you still talking?”

  “Not a morning person?”

  I made another grunting sound and he got the picture.

  “She’s always been like this,” my father told him. “Can’t get a coherent thought out of her until she’s had her coffee. Here, sweetie. Let me get you a plate so you can eat.”

  I reached my hand out and put it on my dad’s arm. “No. Sit. You need to stay off your feet. I’m here to take care of you, remember?”

  “I told your brother, Ethan, and I’ll tell you. I can take care of myself. I don’t need a nursemaid.”

  “Obviously you do or you wouldn’t have fallen off the ladder to begin with,” I said. “You broke your leg in two places, Ethan told me. That’s serious, Dad.”

  “Bones heal.”

  “Yes, but they heal faster when rested properly.” I took another gulp of coffee, it really was pretty good, and stood up. I got a plate and then took the time to actually look at the spread. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast.

  My dad liked breakfast, but he shouldn’t have been doing all this. I would have been fine with toast.

  “Dad, did you cook all this?”

  “Nope. Paul likes to treat me on the weekends,” he said.

  “It’s Monday,” I pointed out.

  “Weekends and special guests,” Paul said.

  “I’m not a guest. I’m his daughter,” I said, like I was making an important point. I loaded my plate with the eggs, and allowed myself one piece of bacon and half a piece of toast.

  The coffee, the eggs, the bacon. “Mmm. Good. You can’t change a tire, but you make decent eggs.”

  Paul glared at me across the table. “They were machine-screwed-on lug nuts.”

  “If that’s the story you’re sticking to,” I mumbled.

  “You do know your hair looks like a rat slept in it last night.”

  “I don’t worry about hair until after coffee,” I told him.

  I wouldn’t be hair shamed. Not by the likes of him. Although I did reach a hand up to pat it. Yep, pretty bad. I had thick, curly brown hair that, on its best day, was usually out of control. First thing in the morning, it had a will of its own.

  “Okay, Pops,” Paul said, as he stood up from the table. “I’m off to the farm. You need any chores done before I go?”

  I raised my eyebrow over my lame coffee mug. “You call him Pops?”

  “Everyone calls him Pops.”

  People in town did, but still. “You live in my house, you call my dad Pops. What are you, angling for adoption?”

  “That depends. How much did your parents let your brothers get away with picking on you?”

  “I’m the oldest. And the best at revenge. My brothers knew not to mess with me.”

  “Hmm. I’ll make a note. You’re going to clean up since I did the cooking?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Then I plan to head over to the inn. Check things out.”

  “Why?” my dad asked. “There’s nothing that needs to be done over there I can’t handle.”

  “Dad, are you kidding? We’re coming into Christmas season. It’s our busiest time of the year. There’s no way you can handle the inn on one leg.”

  “I’ve been doing just
fine,” he said, clearly irritated with me.

  “What do you mean you’ve been doing? What about Rhonda?”

  Rhonda was the woman who basically ran the show. She worked the check-in desk, ordered all the supplies, kept tabs on the cleaning staff. She basically was the Kringle Inn.

  “She quit.”

  “What?” I asked, suddenly very awake.

  “Said she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren. I said I wouldn’t know about grandchildren seeing as I don’t have any…”

  “Geezus, Dad. Not now,” I groaned. “And not in front of company.”

  “Paul’s not company, he runs the tree farm. He’s part of the family business now. Best get used to it.”

  My dad looked like he was about to get up, and Paul was immediately there with the crutches. Like a routine the two of them had already established. It bothered me I hadn’t acted faster.

  “You clean up, princess, and then you can head over to the inn. You’ll see everything is fine. A young lady named Tiffani is helping us out when I can’t do it myself. Ethan hired her. Now I best get to work.”

  My dad left the room and I felt Paul was watching me, even as I was watching my dad.

  “What?” I asked him. “You want to make a comment about my childless state too?”

  “No. Don’t be ridiculous. I would never do that with someone I just met. I was just going to point out your pajama top is on inside out.”

  I felt for the tag at my neck. Yep, it was sticking out.

  “Anything else?”

  He walked over and dumped the remains of his coffee in the sink, and then placed my mug on the counter next to it. “Can you make sure you wash this mug by hand? I don’t like it to go through the dishwasher.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice pitched dark and low. “I’ll get right on that.”

  Little did he know, he was never going to see my mug again.

  Forty minutes later, my hair properly tamed into a braid, my clothes on correctly, I made my way down the path that led from the main house to the inn. I could see it had already been shoveled and I suppose I had to thank Paul for that, as well.

  How did I not know my dad had someone living in the house with him? He said he’d told me, but that seemed like something I would remember.

  I grimaced. Unless I hadn’t been paying attention. If I’d spoken to my dad while I was at work, there was a good chance I’d been multitasking, which I knew really meant I was busy reading emails and probably not focused on what he was saying.

  Damn, I could be a shitty kid to an amazing father sometimes.

  The path led directly to the inn’s front steps. Like my parents’ house, it was a traditional two-story white clapboard house with a big wraparound porch with a swing where people could huddle up and take in the mountain views. There were rooms both upstairs and downstairs available in the main house, and then a series of private cabins neatly lined up behind it for a more rustic experience.

  Beyond that was the big red barn that no farm should be without, but for a while now had mostly been used for storage.

  The inn served a continental breakfast each morning and there were traditionally always baked goods scattered about the house where people could snuggle into a comfortable chair with a good book and a cupcake or a cookie.

  Immediately after Thanksgiving, the Christmas decorations would go up and the place would like a winter wonderland nestled in the mountains of Colorado.

  The Kringle Inn.

  Except when I stopped to look up at the house and the decorations, I was again struck by that sense that something was off. The lights and holly were the same. The plastic elves and reindeer, also the same. It just felt a little off.

  Did the place look less magical than it usually did or was I just seeing it a little more clearly now as an adult?

  A very jaded, bitter adult.

  “I’m not going to focus on that now. I’m here in Salt Springs to take care of my dad, make sure he gets rest, and make sure everything is running smoothly while he’s resting. Focus on what’s in front of you and not what’s behind you.”

  I glanced around and was grateful no one had heard that. I climbed the steps up to the porch and opened the door. The front of the house had been converted into a lobby with a check-in desk. Currently unmanned. Also, there was no plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the counter.

  The Kringle Inn at Christmas with no cookies?

  What was happening?

  Actually I knew what was happening. Rhonda quitting was what was happening.

  I stepped behind the front desk and tapped on the keyboard of the computer. It prompted for a password, which I knew was MERRYCHRISTMAS, and once in I could check the software that tracked the bookings.

  Instantly, I was taken aback by what I was seeing. I clicked the calendar forward a few weeks and back a few weeks and tried to make sense of it.

  Confident no one was due for arrival, I went searching for my dad.

  I found him in the kitchen, at least sitting, with a cup of coffee and the paper, his crutches leaning against the table.

  “Dad, the inn is only barely booked and we’re only a few weeks out from Christmas. What’s happening?”

  He looked up from his paper and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. Maybe folks are planning on staying home this year.”

  “Okay, you know that’s bad for business. Like really bad. And where are the cookies we normally have at the front desk?”

  “Rhonda handled all that,” my dad said. “You know. After your mom passed.”

  It was a fact that my mother had been the driving force behind the Kringle Inn’s success. It seemed like every year since the mayor had started the Salt Springs Christmas Jamboree it got a little bigger and my mother had always made sure that the Kringle Inn grew along with it as a Christmas destination.

  From Thanksgiving to New Year’s is when the inn made almost fifty percent of the profits for the year, but only if all the rooms and cabins were booked.

  “Did something change with the Jamboree?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Then this doesn’t make sense unless…”

  Unless the regulars who booked every year had a bad experience at the inn?

  Not possible.

  It was the freaking Kringle Inn for Pete’s sake. There were decorations, there were treats. There was the smell of Christmas trees everywhere.

  This place was Christmas!

  Except the porch decorations seemed a little off. There were no treats to be found. Rhonda was gone and the rooms were only half filled.

  “Now don’t you go making too much of things,” my dad said, even as he patted the cast on his leg. “Everything will work out in the end. You’ll see.”

  My dad was an optimist who believed all things would always work out in the end, where I was much more like my mom. A devoted pragmatist. I looked at a problem and immediately wanted to solve it.

  First thing I needed to do was get caught up to speed on what was happening here.

  Ethan was busy with town business. Rhonda had already quit. I needed someone who was here, day-to-day, who could tell me what was really happening with the inn and my dad.

  I landed on one name and winced.

  It looked like Paul the tree farmer and I were going to need to have another conversation.

  I really should have been nicer to him this morning.

  3

  Later that Morning

  Paul

  Huh. So that was the legendary Kris Kringle Jr. I met last night.

  Pops had told me about the family joke. That he had wanted to pass on his family name to his first child, and when that child was a girl she’d been christened Kristen Kringle Jr.

  She didn’t strike me as the type to be amused by her name, but I found it hilarious.

  I hadn’t known much about Pops’ other two kids.

  Ethan, the middle child, had stayed in town, and was around the place a
lot. In fact, he’d sat in with his father while I was being interviewed for the job. Ethan had done his due diligence with a background check on me, so he knew where I came from. What my story was.

  We shared beers at the local bar on occasion, when the Broncos were playing.

  Ethan was a good guy with a lot on his plate and I had thought he could use his sibling’s help. He was one of those guys who wanted to be all things to all people and it didn’t leave much for himself.

  But Kristen was supposedly a very busy executive VP for an insurance company in New York, and Matt Kringle, well, Matt was the reigning MVP of the National Hockey League. Neither job allowed for them to come home much, according to Ethan.

  But their dad was still their dad, and no matter how busy or important they were, or thought they were, they needed to be here for him.

  Especially now, with things the way they were.

  Not that it was my business, of course. In fact, the reason I was here was to get away from other people’s problems. To not be responsible for what felt like the world anymore.

  The only living creatures that relied on me right now were trees. And I liked it that way.

  “She talks to herself like I talk to you guys,” I said, standing halfway up the ladder, talking to the tree I was currently pruning. “Little does she know you’re way better company. Not grumpy at all in the morning and you don’t even need coffee.”

  The Kringle Christmas Tree Farm was twenty acres of nothing but trees at various stages of growth. There was a mix of Douglas fir and Scotch pine, Douglas fir being more popular and less likely to shed its needles after being cut down. But Scotch pine grew faster and was more drought resistant. However, the pines required regular pruning to create the Christmas tree effect, which was what I was doing now to this beauty.

  Having just come on board in September, I hadn’t had a hand in the planting of a new crop, but I would for next season. The trees were a nice cash crop, but of course took several years to go from seedling to a full height of five to seven feet.