I remember sunlight, but not what it feels like. I know it was warm on my face. Up at the 'Shop, the Sun edged down beneath the horizon by October, and then it was dark, and it's dark tonight and always will be dark.
Cities pass below me, broad swathes of light splayed out along the coastlines or plains. Closer, I see street grids, blocks of houses, blocks of roofs. And chimneys, the world is full of them. In the most modern cities, houses with central heating nevertheless sport chimneys.

Underneath the roofs and chimneys are families. Children. I know which roofs cover children. Small children, the right kind. There's a list. They believe in me. That's what keeps me at my work. Little children and their simple faith prevent me from stopping, ever.

If you have a chimney, and you have a child, a small child, a child who believes, I'll know, and I will come tonight and visit.

My great bag is full of things. Not for everybody, not for you unless you're very small and only if you believe in your heart. Really believe, not just pretend believe. And if you're a young child who believes, and you live under a roof with a chimney, keep your eyes open, stay awake when you should be sleeping, and you may meet me face-to-face.

I've seen wonder and fear and everything except disappointment on a million small faces. They've seen . . . me.
Believe in me and you get a thing from my bag. Gift, I mean, my great bag is full of gifts. A forever gift, a secret thing. Magic.

It hurts me, going down the chimney, every time. Whether it's a six-inch clay tube or vast industrial structure, passing through it is a spasm of rending crushing pain, maybe like giving birth or like being born, and like either it isn't a choice but a mercilessly necessary and heedless event.

I once had to drop down a quarter-mile-tall smokestack in Slovenia, emerging through a furnace of white-hot pulverized coal and incandescent gas, because a widowed night-shift worker let his six-year-old daughter come to work with him and sleep on an office sofa. Their home was probably a block of flats with no chimneys; there his little girl could have slept the night untouched. I found her and drew her gift from my bag. A gift for every child, and a child for every gift. I left it in her little hand, melting into her like a marshmallow in cocoa.

Here's a house, here's a chimney's oblong pit, and here I go, squeezing down in darkness, delivered into the unlit fireplace, then I'm standing in the half-lit living room.

There's usually a tree, often lights. The poorer the house, the more likely the lights are of many colors, like a spilt bag of hard candy. The lights here glow a soft white, shining cleanly on good fabrics and woods, speaking of comfort and privilege. They don't need any gifts they don't already have, but I've no choice.

After so many visits, I move smoothly and silently, unhurried. I could take all night, dawdling before performing my job. I've done it before, long ago tonight when I was new. Later I understood that it doesn't matter, that nothing I do will subtract a particle of what I'm bound to go through tonight.

First things first. Yes -- there's a plate out, with my name on a colorful card. Milk and brownies; well done. If you don't leave me a little something, I might raid your refrigerator. In such a well-equipped home, I just might consume an entire Advent calendar of chocolate and half a bottle of rum, lying in a massaging recliner and pretending to sleep. No grown-up is going to wake up here tonight, and I can steal some time if I like. It's only stealing from myself.

Chewing a fudge brownie, I glance out the window at the house next door. I can see into the other living room; sure enough, another fireplace, with two enormous illuminated plastic candy canes crossed over the mantle like swords, flashing on and off, red and white.

I know there are children over there too, the right kind. So I've already been there tonight or else will be, as the spirit moves me, for I go here and there freely, not bound by geography or time except that I am marooned for always between the 24th and the 25th.

I have been in that house, there's something about the candy cane lights. Long ago tonight, very early in my career. Emerging from the fireplace, still a little shaky in my legs, I looked up and --

And there he is. Me, earlier tonight, and I see now what my arrival looks like, when I pop out of the small brick fireplace, suddenly swelling into view. I'd imagined it must look like a great red flower bursting into bloom, or at least a bearded Jack-in-the-box. But no, it's more like a garish bowling ball issuing abruptly from the ball return.
The younger one, me, his pale face lifts and then our eyes meet for a long silent moment. I know that on the other end of that gaze, he is -- I am -- more than startled, I'm shocked. Yes, that was very early in my work. He's young, so much black in the beard, so much life still in the face. I remember, I remember looking across to the old, very old fat man, round and rosy and terrible, with his great flow of white beard blanketing the ample slope of chest and belly like a snowy hill. A wrenching pang in my own chest and a sense of the earth collapsing beneath me.

Now he falls to one knee on the floor and turns his face away. I spent the rest of tonight, back then, on that spot, sobbing.

Those were my last tears, and I don't have such feelings anymore, it's all gone, but I remember, I remember. I look over my hillock of belly and through the window at my young self, knowing that our other selves, our older or younger brothers, are this second in many thousands of such houses. I pity us, every one. This one, I know, will sit there hopeless and shaking after our little moment of staring. He'll rouse himself to finish the job in that house just as the eastern sky starts to show the faintest cruel hint that there's a bright sun beyond it. That's when the Eight that wait up on the roof will call him back up the chimney and drag him into the sky and through a roaring black void backwards through these much used hours, back to dusk, so the night begins again and he continues the work of chimneys and children and gifts.

After that incident of my youthful career, I made a habit of not looking out windows. Until this house; but that had to be, so that this moment could be. If I hadn't been careless this time, I wouldn't have learned my lesson, so long ago. At the 'Shop, they gave me to know that this would happen, that it didn't matter. I would pass through this night, not once but again and again, dropping down and giving gifts, house after house, child after child until my boots wore ruts across these same weary hours, thousands of nights in a night. Until I grew old, older, unknowably old, fat and ruddy-cheeked; until I finished the night's work. Until my great bag, so heavy at first that it bent me down to the ground, would ever so slowly lighten as I took things out, until the time came when I arrived at a certain house, stood before one particular child and, reaching into the bag's depths, found just a single thing remaining. A gift like no other.

That's not this house; I'd know. Suddenly wanting to finish and be on my way, I slip into the child's bedroom. A little girl, dark-haired; she's dreaming and smiles in her sleep. I reach in the bag and find her gift. It's oily to the touch and restlessly folds and unfolds itself in ways that hurt the eye, its pieces sliding against one another with a slurred whisper. I place it in her soft hand, which immediately closes around it, into a tight little fist, and for a moment her pale face is drawn into a mask of fear. Then her hand opens again; it is empty. Her face smoothes into slack, dreamless stupor.

What happens to her tomorrow, and in what role will she carry my gift in the world? I've not got a clue. Anyway she won't have to do my job.

Back out, up into the cold windy night sky, drawn on taut cables behind the eight, straight up until the air is too thin to sustain life. The first trip, I felt such fear at having such a maw of space beneath me.

The fear -- the many fears -- burned off me long ago, but I still have the memory of a boy who was me, before I did this work, a six-year-old boy. Both too serious and too fanciful, living in his childish half-real world, lifetimes ago. A year ago tonight, as calendars would have it.

He -- I -- stayed up later than I ever had, too excited to sleep. I knew he'd come, and if I let myself sleep for even a minute, I'd miss him because he was magically quick.

I am magically quick. Magic is a real thing, a wondrous thing. "Wondrous" does not mean "good".

So I fought hard to stay awake, not knowing I'd already had my last night's sleep. And I won the fight, and I knew when he arrived, the way you know things sometimes. Through the open door of my bedroom, I saw his great round shape silhouetted in front of the tree's twinkling colored lights. I was out of bed and halfway down the hall, where I stopped and watched him approach, and then I could make out the spread of white beard, the expanse of red and white, all fur from his head to his feet, white eyebrows under the fur cap, and boots that made no sound.

My heart was pounding. That moment, for the last time, I was happy. Then I saw his eyes, and I felt the fear that children know, until they forget, the fear grown-ups hide from all their lives in churches and in drugs and in each other.

He slung his bag off his shoulder and reached into it, and then he smiled. When he smiled I wanted to turn and run, wanted to cry. I couldn't. He spoke, and his voice was like an old wheezing bellows. "Just one left."
He pulled out a thing that glittered and spun, and he pressed it to my heart. It whirred and clicked under his big hand, pressing it hard, rubbing it in like a balm. It's in me still.

He lifted me and dropped me into the bag, and in it was black, black inside and empty, and I tumbled down and was engulfed in its folds, cold and fleshy. I lay paralyzed with sick fear through uncounted minutes or hours of sightless vertigo.

Finally the bag opened and I could look out. We were up at the 'Shop. The Eight, used up by their long night flight, were already asleep in their traces. Next to me on the seat was a mass of red and white fur holding a crumbling jumble of dusty bones.

I looked around me, I saw the Ones who toil at the 'Shop, the Ones are all sharp points, they aren't really there, they stick into the world like needles in your eyes, you can't look at them. If you want you can imagine pointy noses, pointy ears, pointy shoes.

The Ones fashion gifts all the time, the 'Shop is never quiet. They can make anything, and they remade me and showed me things and taught me things. The stars swung in circles overhead and eventually the Sun came into view but brought no comfort, and when it was done stalking the horizon and slid down again, I didn't miss it.
Then the night came, the Eve, tonight, and I was grown strong enough to lift the great bag, and grown into the red and white furs and the boots, and able to do what was required. All done in a year. It was a magical thing. It was wondrous.

Now we are plummeting, from a height so great that I can almost see the blush of dawn. I already feel the next house ten miles below, and even know that, improbably, it is a trailer house with a chimney built onto it. No matter, as long as the child under the aluminum roof believes in me.

Not this house, not the next house, but sometime tonight there will be a house where my great bag is at last emptied, and then filled again with my successor. Whoever he is, he doesn't deserve this. Nobody in a hundred years of sinning could earn this. It doesn't matter; the gift can't be turned away. The final house, the final child.

Then I can die.

That's what I want for Christmas.

'Twas the night, the night, the night, the night.