I’ve always liked Christmas, almost despite myself. There are so many aspects of it that felt over-commercialized, or weirdly religious, or just otherwise off, but yet somehow all of the trappings and traditions never failed to melt my heart into a gooey mess. It probably dates back to my childhood, back when I still believed in flying reindeer and Santa Claus and a family that wouldn’t disown me for being queer. Even today, with a more healthily developed adult sense of cynicism, the whole holiday season couldn’t help but just be magic in some ineffable way that I loved, full of limitless possibility and the hope that other people were nice and good, if only for a season.

That’s why this year I had been looking forward to December for months, especially when my boyfriend suggested that we spend the holidays together with his family. Unlike me, Zach still had his classically perfect nuclear family, and from what he said, his Christmases had always been right out of a storybook, with stockings over the fireplace and presents under the tree and a big family meal on the actual day. It sounded so wonderful and nice.

At least until I had to go and ruin everything because of who I was.

That sounds like a dramatic, way-too-angsty exaggeration, but no, literally. I just had to finally come to a realization about myself, after months of internal identity crisis. Thanks to some remarkably specific websites, a lot of wholesome gender-focused wish-fulfillment fiction, and the help of one very patient online author who helped talk me through my feelings, I finally admitted it to myself: I wanted to be a girl. I was a girl already, even. And that part was great! It helped to explain so much of my life and struggles in retrospect.

At least until I realized that I would have to tell my boyfriend, Zach.

Sure, maybe I could have tried to keep quiet until December was over. But I had the sneaking suspicion that I would just be a nervous wreck for a full month, and then wind up blurting out ‘I’M A GIRL’ in the middle of Zach’s dad trying to carve the Christmas turkey, and then he would slip and cut off a finger or something and there would be blood everywhere and everyone would be screaming and Zach would tell me he never wanted to see me again and the police and the ambulance would arrive and I’d go to double ultra mega jail or something. Okay, also, it might be relevant that I have sort of a runaway imagination, at least as it comes to theoretical catastrophes.

Instead of all that, I figured it would be better for everyone if I just came out to Zach immediately, so that way he could dump me and have a nice Christmas alone with his family. Everyone else could be happy, at least. And keep all their fingers.

That’s why I told him straight out. I sat him down for a serious conversation, and then… well, then after several minutes of nervously trying to figure out the words while he grew increasingly worried, I just said it. I told him I was transgender. I was a girl.

That’s when I expected him to dump me. But… instead, he just stared at me, blinking like he had seen a ghost. He finally asked what name and pronouns I wanted to use, and I told him she/her and ‘Holly’—yes, yes, I know but it’s not a Christmas thing, I swear, it’s just a nice name—and he stared at me, not saying anything. I was just getting ready to flee, or burst into tears, or spontaneously combust, when he finally shook himself, nodded, and said the last thing I’d ever expected to hear:

“Hey, do you want to go to the mall?”

* * *

That’s how I wound up in the back seat of Zach’s car as we drove to the local mall. It was the back seat because Zach was driving and his sister Madison had claimed the front passenger side before I could say anything about it. She was still in high school and honestly was kind of terrifying, the exact kind of effortlessly cool and self-absorbed teen girl who always always made me uncomfortable because— ...wait a second.

Huh.

Because I always felt jealous and wished that could be me. Like I said, a lot of my life started making more sense once I figured out the gender stuff.

But that didn’t change the fact that Zach’s sister always slightly worried me. Usually she was nice enough, but today she was acting particularly frosty, her eyes glued to her cell phone as she texted her friends or looked at… whatever app it was that the teens used these days. Either something new and completely inscrutable or they had gone retro and were talking to each other on ebay listings. Oh God, if I didn’t even know what the kids were into, that meant I was old now, wasn’t I?

Madison was the reason for the mall trip, supposedly. Zach said she had been bugging him to take her Christmas shopping, and this would be a good opportunity for us to look for gifts as well.

But I knew there had to be something he wasn’t telling me. He was nervous. I knew him well enough to be able to see it in the little things, the way he kept humming to himself along with the song on the radio as he drove. He only did that when he had too much energy and was worried about something. Or when it was a really good song, which ‘Little Drummer Boy’ most assuredly wasn’t. And if he was worried, that meant that I should be worried. It made me nervous enough that I wanted to just get it over with and talk more about things, but… Well. His sister.

So I sat in silence, chewing on my bottom lip as I grew more and more concerned. It wasn’t that long of a drive, but more than enough time for me to feel my mental condition growing more and more precarious until I was barely hanging by a thread.

And then we were there. I could tell, because one, we pulled into the parking garage, and two, Zach said, “We’re here!” in a voice that was entirely too loud and cheerful.

“Right, so, um…” I got out of the car, looking around for Zach. On most of our dates, he had this weird but endearing habit of always coming around to my side, and then we’d hold hands as we set off to do whatever. But this time he wasn’t there.

“Um!” he said. “I’m… I’ve got to… look for a thing. Why don’t you take Madison with you and we’ll meet up in a bit?”

“But…”

“Great!” he said, and then practically ran away. My heart seemed to have departed with him.

“Oh god, he hates me now,” I muttered to myself.

“Or he wants to buy you a Christmas present,” Madison said, looking up from her phone to narrow her eyes at me. “What’s with the two of you today? Something is… off.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “We’re fine. Why wouldn’t we be fine?” I mean it wasn’t as if I had just told him I was a girl and now couldn’t even bear to be around me alone anymore. My shoulders drooped.

“Uh-huh.” Madison rolled her eyes. “Whatever, let’s go.” And with that, she set off across the parking lot, leaving me to try and catch up.

* * *

The mall was even more crowded than usual. It was one of the holdovers from the golden age of indoor shopping in the 1980s, and even then, it had been the largest shopping mall in the whole state. Now, times were a lot more rough, and the third floor at the top was all closed off, but it still drew enough shoppers to keep the lower two afloat. Plus, the owners had started renting out a lot of the spaces to weirder kinds of stores, so it wasn’t quite as much homogeneous consumerism as a normal mall. The Abercrombie & Fitch sat right between an occult supplies store and a place that did custom Lego kits.

Honestly, I always kind of loved coming here. You could easily spend a whole day walking around, just browsing all the stores or sitting along the promenade to people-watch. Zach and I even had some personal history here, given that this is where we met…

Though that made me sad all over again. At the rate that today was going, our relationship would soon be history, too. I let out another heavy sigh.

“So, what do you need to get?” I asked Madison, trying to keep up with her as she made a beeline through the mall, presumably heading to some fashionable store or another. She ignored me. “Are you Christmas shopping? Or just personal stuff? Or did you just want to see your friends? I know that when I was in high school, all the girls hung out at the mall on the weekend even if they didn’t buy anything. Just as, like, a social thing.”

She abruptly stopped, whirling around, and I almost ran into her. “Hey,” she said. “Is that Santa Claus?” She pointed behind me, and I turned to look.

Actually, there was a Santa Claus there. He must have been off-duty, because he was lurking in the side corridor that led to the mall bathrooms. Though he wasn’t the real one, obviously. I don’t think the real Santa Claus vapes.

“Yeah, uh—”

When I turned around, Madison had vanished. I frantically looked around, searching through the milling crowd of people but she was just... gone. And I wasn’t stupid. She had ditched me. Just like her brother. I really was radioactive today, wasn’t I?

With not much else to do, I wandered through the mall without any real goal other than to try and see if I could come across Zach or Madison again. There were a lot of happy couples today, and every time I saw a girl walking hand-in-hand with her boyfriend, I felt a pang in my heart. If only that could be me…

But no. I might be a girl, but I wasn’t a girl like she was: pretty, and confident, and effortlessly feminine. I don’t know that I ever would be. And then when I tried to distract myself by looking in the windows of shops instead, I kept coming across stores with beautiful dresses or chic outfits or comfy sweaters on display. And that only made my heart hurt more. Maybe I could go in and try something on…? But not alone. Not looking the way I looked now.

At a loss, I sat down on a bench on the second floor, overlooking the plaza at the very center of the mall. Something was going on there. There was some huge thing reaching up to the very ceiling and covered up by long curtains. Was that a Christmas tree? That’s where they usually put one up. But then why wasn’t it out yet?

“Psssst,” a voice said from nearby.

I blinked.

“Pssssssst, hey you!” it said again. I looked over at a planter close to the wall, where a bush was shaking gently.

I inched away a bit, looking around. But this was a quiet corner, and everyone else walking around was on their way to somewhere else. “Me?”

“Yeah! C’mere.” The bush shook a bit more. And… jingled softly?

“I… I’m not going to talk to a bush,” I said.

And then someone undeniably strange popped their head up from behind the bush. She wore a green cap, festooned with little silver bells, and she had… pointy ears? She gestured me over, urgently. “I’m incognito! On a mission from…” Her voice dropped to a stage whisper. “The North Pole.”

My eyes went wide. “Okay, um. I don’t know who you are, but—”

“I’m Kristen!” she chirped. And then she jumped out from behind the bush, throwing her hands up and wiggling her fingers. She was tall, wearing some kind of goofy costume that had a green skirt and top with bright red trim. And it had even more tiny bells on it than jingled as she moved. “Kristen, the Christmas elf!” she announced. And then she must have realized that she was supposed to be incognito, because she ducked behind the bush again.

I wasn’t sure whether I should humor this weirdo or not, but she seemed harmless enough, and I couldn’t help it: I was incredibly curious as to what was going on. So I very tentatively approached... only for her to reach out to grab my hand and pull me back behind the bush. “Aaah!”

“Okay!” she declared, grinning at me with the kind of intensity usually reserved for serial killers. “So, the good news: I’ve got a list with your name on it. And it’s the Nice one!”

I stared back at her. “I seriously doubt you have my name on any list.”

“Wanna bet?” The way her eyes lit up and her smile shifted into a smirk made me worried. She started digging through a pocket, eventually coming up with a crumpled sheet of paper.

“Santa writes out his lists on college-ruled notebook paper?” I said doubtfully.

“Just look at it.”

I flattened out the sheet, and tried to make out the scrawled handwriting. Sure enough, at the top of the page, the words ‘NICE LIST (TOP SECRET)’ were printed in big block letters. And further down, between ‘Laura Jane Grace’ and ‘Elliot Page’ was my name.

My real name: Holly Jacobsen.

I stared at Kristen the supposed elf. And then at the paper. And then at her again. “H-h-how did you get this?” I said, a little bit frantically.

“I toldja. Santa gave it to me.”

My mouth opened and closed again, as my eyes practically burned a hole through the paper. It was there. I wasn’t hallucinating. How? Why?

“See, the North Pole is a pretty well-run operation, but there’s a whole lot of kids in the world, and so sometimes something falls through the cracks. And wouldn’t you know it: for some reason we had your letters to Santa filed under the wrong name for the longest time. We only just got the paperwork through to start remediation on past requests.”

I blinked at her. “Past… requests…?”

“Yup! You know, the stuff you wished for most deeply in your heart when you were young. Let’s say… early puberty-ish?” She grinned.

What had I even wanted at that age? It wasn’t like I needed a bunch of kid’s toys any more. But even then, I had never been that invested in action figures or dirt bikes or whatever. If anything, the thing I had really wanted was…

“No,” I said, feeling suddenly out of breath. “Really?”

“Yup!” Kristen chirped. She bounced up and down on her heels, sending all of her bells jingling.

I can’t remember ever sitting down to write a letter to Santa directly, but… could I have? Could I have asked to be a girl then? Could… could my wish be coming true?

“It’s a good thing we’re at a mall, so we can get started right away!” Kristen grabbed ahold of my hand. “On Bashful, on Donner, on Grumpy and Blitzen! Let’s get this girl dressed up to look like a vixen!”

“Wait, I think a couple of those are dwarves, not reindee— aaa!”

And with that, I was being dragged through the mall by an elf on a mission.

SecretTransWritingLair

Rooibos Chai writes trans fiction in the romantic comedy genre. Her most popular work is Trolls and Tribulations, which follows the world's most oblivious and ineffectual misanthrope as they try to help out a trans girl and wind up entangled in gender feelings of their own. You can find her stories on Scribblehub and download ebook versions at rooibos-chai.itch.io