Tonight is the last night of Chanukah, and we just finished putting up our Christmas tree, so it is apparently a good time for my favorite annual winter’s tale. This is the legend of how the Angel came to be at the top of the Christmas Tree:
It was a mighty cold winter that winter up at the North Pole. The wind was howling like a spoiled child and it was colder outside than Ebenezer Scrooge’s heart. The heat was on in Santa’s workshop, however. The elves were sweating, and a roomful of sweaty elves does not create the sweetest odor in the world. Four out of eight reindeer had serious colds, and Santa was deeply worried that it might turn into reindeer flu.
“Reindeer flew” is an expression you want to hear after Christmas, not before it.
Mrs. Claus was upset because Santa was working such long hours, and she was starting to be a bit of a nag about it, quite frankly.
The worst part was, however, that he had mountains of mail from seriously rotten little kids. He knew they’d been horrible, selfish, inconsiderate, lazy little toads throughout the previous twelve months and he knew that they knew that he knew that. Nonetheless, the wretched little miscreants were making demands (Demands, mind you, not requests) for toys and games which were becoming, with each passing year, more complex and harder to build and, because of their bulk, harder to fit on the sleigh.
One evening, at about 3 o’clock in the morning, at the tail end of a 48 hour shift, a little angel came into the workshop with a tree slung over her shoulder and said “Santa Claus, Santa Claus, where do you want me to put this Christmas Tree?”
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