Thankfully, I managed to find a store open this late on Christmas morning; I found exactly one
box of envelopes and handed them to the almost certainly underpaid check-out person. They
gave me an odd look when my half-asleep brain decided to tell them I had to send a letter to
Santa, but otherwise the trip home was uneventful.
After I got back, I wrote up a short letter explaining the situation to Santa, and by the time I
finished I had started to wonder if I'd finally snapped and I'd just imagined the whole affair.
Nevertheless, I stuffed the letter into my mailbox and immediately went to bed.
Amazingly, I managed to get to sleep, even with my mind racing at what had happened. I rarely
dreamed, or at least didn’t remember them. However this time I fell into a series of incredibly
vivid dreams of a beautiful woman dressed in all black having the time of her life at parties,
dates, concerts, among other things.
The smell of hot chocolate and gingerbread cookies roused me from my sleep some time later.
As soon as I was awake enough to process the fact I lived alone and food doesn't make itself, I
jumped out of bed and prowled into my small kitchen.
There was a large bearded old man in a red and white suit sitting at my cluttered dinner table.
He was sipping on a steaming mug of what I assumed was the hot cocoa with a tray of
gingerbread men laying in front of him and a second mug containing eggnog.
“Come in, come in, and know me better!” he smiled warmly.
I just stared at the man in utter disbelief for almost a full minute. At some point I regained the
ability to speak and blurted out, "You're Santa.”
"Certainly seems to be the case!” he chuckled.
"Why?""You can't just ask someone why they're Santa," he winked.
"I -- no, I mean why are you here?"
"I'm done with the majority of my work this year and I felt this needed a bit of a personal touch.
You and your friends are going through something Mrs. Claus and I once went through and I try
to help out others like us, time permitting."
"You two had a body swap?"
"Hmm, I suppose you could say that in a sense." He scratched thoughtfully at his beard.
"Although not in the same way your friends have."
"What do you mean?"
"Now where's the fun in peeking at a present before it's time to unwrap it? Speaking of which."
He held out a box about the size of a basketball that appeared in his hands out of thin air. It was
covered in wrapping paper so meticulously you couldn't see the edge of the paper nor any
crease or break in the red and green pattern. The red lace bow wasn't one of those ones with a
sticky bit to attach, but actually was one. The platonic ideal of a present. It was so perfect
nothing in media or real life I'd ever seen could match the beauty of it.
"This took some doing to get, but I feel it's only fitting; after all, it is Christmas, so it's hardly
fitting not to give you a present. Wait until, oh say around noon to open it. A tad unorthodox, but
it will be well worth it."
"But how am I not on the naughty list? I've been a terrible partner, I couldn't help Jesse with her
depression and all I've been doing for months is being a layabout!”
"I do not judge anyone based on the fact they struggle with mental health; actions and the
weight of one's heart are key to deciding where one belongs on my lists, and you, my friend, are
a good person."
I had sense enough not to attempt to argue with fucking Santa Claus about my moral failings
and instead changed the subject.
“Thank you for the present, but what about my friends? Not that I don’t appreciate the gift, but I
wrote to you so you could help them.”
“Did they not like their gifts? I’m usually quite good at picking what people would like.”
“You put them in each other's bodies! Do you realize how hard dealing with the fallout of all this
is going to be?”
“I’ve made sure they’re not left out in the cold, so to say,“ he promised, then raised a fuzzy
eyebrow. “But that wasn't a no.”
“Well, they were upset enough to call me over in the middle of the night.”
“Are you sure upset is the right word?”
“I-I think? Why?”
“It's not my place to say, but think about it and maybe you'll figure out why it was a gift.”
“You won't fix them, then?"
"I was unaware they needed to be fixed."
"Of course they do, they can't just live the rest of their lives in each other's bodies!"
"Why not?"
"Why not?! Because they can't, it's not supposed to be like this. How are they supposed to go
on in life like this? Constantly living in the shadow of the original owner!"
"There can be certain circumstances that can be made difficult by this process, but I'm very
particular about who gets this gift and I am sure your friends won't have many issues with it.
Although that’s beside the point; letting folks make their own decisions about their lives and
giving them the chance to be themselves is."
"But they're literally being each other!"
"Are they, though? Are they acting like each other, or are they being themselves in different
bodies?"
"I mean…" I trailed off, he had a point.
"I’ll ask you this: is all this outrage how you actually feel or is there another reason this upsets
you so much?"
That stopped me in my tracks. I thought back to exact what Jesse and Ian had said throughout
our conversation earlier. Had they actually been upset about the results of their personal Freaky
Friday at all or were they panicking because of the fact that it had happened? More to the point,
why did I feel so empty all of the sudden after it happened?
"Fuck, I don’t know," I sighed after a long pause.
"Now now, language," Santa chided me with a smirk.
"Sorry… I'm just having some trouble processing, well, everything," I said, gesturing wildly at the
entirety of existence.
"I understand, you're going through a lot right now. As much as I’d like to stay, I'm a busy man
and have some more things to wrap up before the day’s done, so a word of advice and I'll get
out of your hair: being yourself is one of the greatest gifts you can ever get, but you have to be
the one to give it. Or that’s what my wife tells me."
"Yeah whatever, Columbo," I muttered under my breath.
"Oh, just one more thing," he said with a wink. "Have a Merry Christmas! Ho ho ho," he laughed
jollily.
Despite my troubled mind I couldn't help but laugh alongside him, the absurdity of the day finally
getting to me. The two people I cared most about in the world swapping bodies? Meeting
freaking Santa Claus and him making a Columbo joke?!?
When the laughter died down, the large man gave me a jolly smile and a wink. Suddenly as
quickly he’d appeared he vanished in a puff of smoke that smelled faintly of gingerbread and I
was left alone once again.
I'm not sure what was the appropriate amount of time to let the fact I’d met Santa sink in before
doing anything else, but I ended up at around three minutes.
I tried the cookies and eggnog while I watched some videos on my phone. They were as perfect
as you would expect.
Paypal
i spent a mo going, " why not a more gothic wrapper?" only to realise that would just look like a large lump of coal with a black bow on it.
The Columbo jokes are gold