The Christmas Chronicles by Tim Slover

In their hearts and in the hardihood of their bodies, they seemed age-proof. If they had one sorrow, it was that no children of their own had come to them. But then, as Klaus often said, and Anna agreed, it tempts fate (“Heaven,” Father Goswin corrected them) for two happy people to have all they desire, and surely they felt a stake in the lives of hundreds of children throughout the villages of the Black Forest.
    Life went on like this pleasantly for years and years and still more years.
    And then something extraordinary happened.
    One summer Rolf Eckhof turned up at the retirement home. Certainly he had reached retirement age, and he was not a widower only because he had never married. Some thirty-one years had passed since his mischief with the toys—which Klaus had never revealed to anyone butAnna—and no sequel had followed. But no one expected to see him standing at the door with his possessions in a cart behind him.
    “I have a right to be here,” he barked at the Guild member who answered the door. “I have worked hard all my life.”
    Well, how could he be refused? As Father Goswin noted, even the uncharitable have a claim on charity. He had made his life a lonely, bitter one, but still his loneliness was real. “Rolf Eckhof may share my room,” said one of the kinder widowers, “until he builds his own.”
    Which Rolf Eckhof soon did. And if it was not as skillfully made as some others in the winding old house, no one was tactless enough to comment on it. And certainly Rolf Eckhof seemed to be a new man in retirement. He did not actually smile, nor did he ever do much talking, but he did help. Having cooked and cleaned for himself all his life—which few in the house had done—he made himself useful all around the place, but specially around the cookstove. And anyone who cooks will always find some welcome wherever he goes.
    Soon even Klaus and Anna reconciled with their old enemy. And though their doing so has been much criticized in the court of historical opinion, I have alwaysmaintained that, despite what happened later, they did right to forgive him.
    On the Christmas Eve after Rolf Eckhof came to the retirement house, Klaus readied himself for a long night of deliveries. The very last village in the Black Forest had been added to his rounds at the Saint Bartholomew’s Fair that summer, and so he would be traveling farther than ever. In his enormous toy bag—now a dozen flour sacks stitched together and embroidered all over by Anna with likenesses of Roman emperors and mythical beasts and constellations major and minor—were over six hundred toys. This year’s new item was a puzzle box made of white pine and ash that opened if one pushed and pulled sliding panels in just the right way. Inside each was a flower seed, so that the children could look forward through the winter to planting it in the spring and seeing what kind of vegetable or flower it would be.
    Klaus heaved the huge sack into the sleigh. Dasher stamped the snow, eager to be off, as impatient as ever. For though the weight he pulled had grown steadily over the years due to the increase in the number of toys and the belt size of their maker, it was still a trifle to him. Klaus hesitated. A corner of his heart was heavy. Anna was not coming with him, and it was the first time this had happened.
    “I’m just feeling under the weather, Klaus. It’s nothing to worry about,” she had said.
    “I won’t go. It’s just one year.”
    “Not go! What utter nonsense. You are responsible for our children. If you don’t bring them toys, their parents will make up any number of reasons why they don’t deserve them.”
    “But, Anna, if you’re ill and need looking after—”
    She had fixed him with her bright blue eyes. “Do not presume, carpenter, that because you are the handsomest man in the Black Forest, you know anything about leechcraft. I will be fine. I have made a broth. Master Eckhof has brought me the herbs.” Then she