Christmas Unbound –or– The Pitfalls of a Christmas Foe

Chantal Schaul, 2000

For Borphan the most dreadful time of the year was soon to come. And yet, despite everything, he still loved Christmas. If only he could have a real family and a mother who really loved him. Instead he was an only child. To make matters worse, he was adopted and did not have a father, nor had he ever had any brothers and sisters. His adoptive mother had been a childless widow when she found him, seventeen years ago, by the trunk of a mighty oak tree just outside the village. Rumour had it that she had lost her own child and husband years ago, in a terrible accident. But nobody knew the full story and she had never told anyone.

Barbara – that was her name – called the foundling Borphan, because he was not only an orphan but a bastard child too, which was indicated by a sign pinned to the cloth in which he was wrapped. It said:

‘I am the boy of an unmarried woman. Please take care of me.‘

Barbara nursed him until he was able to toddle and then she made use of him as best as she could. At a young age, Borphy – as he was called then – was forced to clean the floors by crawling over them, clad in a wide, multi-layered and fluffy old cloth that was drenched in Floor-Fairy-liquid. In a similar fashion, Borphy was forced to clean the bathtub and sink, and even the toilet. In order to dust the ceilings, Barbara dressed him in his fluffy cleaning outfit, attached him to a pole and wiped him across.

Borphy had never known any other life style, so it did not bother him too much. As he grew older, his presence in the house became an encumbrance to Barbara. She wanted to have peace and quiet. She could not bear the sound of someone else’s breathing within her four walls. Therefore she moved Borphan, as he was now called, being already thirteen years old, into the adjacent barn. Barbara’s husband had been a farmer. The barn and stable had been empty since his death, but luckily there was still some rotten old straw left in the barn and Borphan could make himself a soft and cosy bedstead out of it.

A few weeks later, Barbara could no longer bear the thought that Borphan was living in idleness. She fed and clad him and gave him a roof over his head but he was just lazing his days away. She decided that now was the time that Borphan should start paying his debts. The barn was transformed into a factory for Easter items and decorations. Borphan was the sole worker. He had to produce chocolate Easter eggs, wooden Easter eggs, marble Easter eggs, golden Easter eggs, cuddly Easter bunny toys, Easter bunny statues, fluffy chickens, wooden chickens, chick stickers, little Jesuses on crosses, cute fluffy lambs, ornamental sacrificial lambs with blood oozing from them, plastic yellow daffodils, and so on and so forth. The items were kept in stock for the whole year and were sold by Borphan before Easter.

Borphan had no problems with this arrangement of labour but he would have preferred to produce Christmas items. He had a secret passion for Christmas and everything it involved. Barbara had never allowed any Christmas celebrations to go on in the house. She absolutely detested it. Every year when the shops began to display festive items on their shelves and in their windows, she stocked food for two months and locked herself and Borphan into the house. Once, she had mistakenly bought Yuletide flavoured peas instead of plain ones, cooked them and bitten into one of them. She consequently had thrown up for hours, lost three stones of weight and had to stay in bed for three weeks. Since then she had been very careful indeed.

During the first year of Borphan’s new life in the barn, he finally had the freedom to venture out into the village during the festive season. What he saw made his eyes overflow and his heart pound as loud as the church bells. He had never experienced such joy and warmth spreading through his whole being. The sheer beauty of the Christmas trees everywhere made him sob. The special festive sweets in the shops made him shiver all over. The colourful lights that turned the falling snow into silent fireworks bedazzled him. He started eating nothing but dates, oranges, nuts, Turkish delight, orange flavoured chocolate, mini Christmas puddings, mini Christmas logs and mince pies. If he fancied something savoury, it was only turkey he wanted and the only beverage he allowed himself was mulled wine, either comfortingly warm or refreshingly cold.

After thus wandering alone through the festive season, the first one in his life, Borphan pondered the whole following year about the spirit of Christmas. He decided that he wanted to turn his passion into his hobby and, alongside producing the various Easter products for his adoptive mother, he secretly constructed Christmas decorations and hid them in a vault that he dug under the barn with his own hands. He covered it with a heavy iron lid that in appearance looked just like the wooden floor that covered the entire barn. Occasionally he had to enlarge the vault, because it had become too small to hold all his Christmas treasures. Every time he opened it during the night, he was overwhelmed by the beauty that lay therein. He was enfolded by the dazzling lights of a thousand fairy lights reflecting in a million golden and silver bells and baubles, stars and snowflakes and miniature angels, bunches of tinsel and shimmering wreaths. The shining mass was inhabited by figurines of little Jesuses in straw, Josephs, Maries, oxen, donkeys, shepherds and sheep, kings and stars. Mangers of all sizes and architectural styles offered an abode to the homeless multitudes. Pine branches and whole trees lent their deeper shade of green to the colourful accumulation.

Touching just one piece of the silent conglomeration set its parts into motion and made all the ‘Touch my belly-Jesuses’ wail heartbreakingly, all the bells ring harmoniously, all the stars twinkle dottily, all the Maries whisper “Oh my darling little boy!”, all the Josephs add: “He will be a great one!”, all the sheep bleet endearingly, all the donkeys hee-haw in agreement, all the shepherds proudly blow their horns, all the angels flutter their wings and sing in sweet voices: “Our saviour is born!”, and all the music boxes alias mangers start playing every Christmas carol in existence. The vault underneath the barn came alive at night and Borphan had finally found a reason to live. He was exceedingly happy.

Borphan had taken care to soundproof the whole barn and the vault, so that no one in the village, especially Barbara, could hear any noises from the inside. In this way, the years passed and Barbara became a rich woman. The Easter business was flourishing and Borphan was not allowed to keep any money of his own. The only thing he received in exchange for his toil was food, shelter and clothing.

When Borphan was nineteen years old, he decided that he could no longer fit a single Christmas item into his, by now, massive vault. He did not want to abandon his cherished hobby, though, and therefore decided that he had to somehow empty the vault. By some fortunate scheduling of destiny, it happened to be Christmas Eve. Borphan disguised as an old woman and filled a wheelbarrow with a heap of Christmas items, which he covered with a dirty old throw. He then walked from house to house in the middle of the night and left the most artful decorations in front of each door.

The following morning saw the village inhabitants full of joy at the unexpected gifts. The only one who had not received a present was Barbara. She was glad and jealous at the same time. Evil plans took root in her mind and developed into vengeful conspiracy theories. She knew that she had to react to this preposterous gift giving!

When, the following morning, the village was in tears, she had an entire day of celebrations. All the Christmas trees had mysteriously lost their needles. All the decorations had been broken and were lying dispersed on the floors of the houses. What overflowing joy there had been on the previous day was now subverted into bitter feelings of disappointment and disillusionment. Despair and puzzlement were the prevailing emotions in each villager. And yet nothing suspicious had been observed during the night and no one understood how this disaster could have come about.

Borphan heard of the terrible event when he went to the local shop to buy lamb chops for his adoptive mother. His heart was torn in two and he had to regain his balance after almost tumbling to the ground. He had not yet recovered from this terrible shock, when he had to face another perturbation of his soul. A new shop assistant had just approached him to help him with his queries. She was so ravishingly beautiful and had such a Christmas air about her that Borphan had to gasp three times. Her hair was so bright that it looked like multi-layered tinsel. Her skin was so impeccable and white that it resembled the surface of a silver bauble. Her eyes shone in such a way that they could have been mistaken for fairy lights. Her eyebrows were of the same colour as her hair and echoed artistically shaped miniature Christmas wreaths. Her nose paralleled a finely sculptured silver bell, so attuned it was with the rest of her face. Her mouth was just like a concatenation of juicy blood red holly berries. Her whole figure mirrored that of an angel.

According to the festive season, she was clad in a fluffy white dress. The only thing that was missing was a pair of angel wings, but Borphan was so moved by the apparition that he could almost see them fluttering lightly on her back. He could almost make her out lifting up from the ground; her fine bare feet levelling with ever higher shelves, her divine head reaching the ceiling with its neon light tubes. And then she was gone, right through the ceiling, had flown off to a fluffy cloud, coloured crimson by the setting sun, lay down to rest, indulging in white creamy cheese.

His vision vanished when he saw that her shoes, little red slippers with snowflakes embroidered on each of them, were still in touch with the ground. He regained his senses and looked at her. She remained silent. Then she took a little note from her pocket on which he read: “Sorry, I am mute. How can I help?” He felt so sorry for her that he nearly erupted in tears. He got his feelings under control and answered: “Could I have three lamb chops, please?” She led him towards the meat counter and wrapped the three chops in paper for him. When handing over the required merchandise, her white digit came into touch with Borphan’s thumb and sent an electric shock right through him. There could be no more doubt: he had just helplessly and irreversibly fallen in love with the Christmassy creature. He would have loved to know her name, but there was no point in asking, as she could not speak. Instead he asked the old shopkeeper on his way out. The croaky answer was: “Eloquia. Don’t know anything about her. She just came and asked for a job. She works for almost nothing; that’s why I took her on.” He uttered a short mercantily triumphant laugh, betraying the satisfaction with his human resource profit.

Borphan delivered the chops to his adoptive mother, who had bolted herself into her house again because of the time of year. He noticed the untypically high spirits that she was in, but did not give them much thought as he was still wrapped up in his thoughts about Eloquia. After closing hour he waited for her outside the shop and asked her if she fancied watching the stars from his barn window. She nodded and accompanied him home. Borphan had prepared a lavish Christmas dinner for the two of them. It consisted of turkey, roast potatoes, Brussel sprouts and for dessert there was Christmas cake and Christmas pudding, which was drenched in brandy butter and brightly flamed up. For drinks they had mulled wine and sherry. As a little nibble for later, Borphan had prepared miniature shaped reindeer chocolate.

Borphan and Eloquia would have talked until late into the night if only she had possessed the power of speech. Instead they enjoyed the meal in silence and indulged in the visual pleasures that the stars in the clear night sky offered them. While sharing this spectacle, they suddenly heard the unbolting of the front door of Barbara’s house. Borphan expected a burglar. But how surprised was he when he realized it was only a barber who left the house. He decided that he had to follow him just to check if he had stolen anything. He gestured towards Eloquia and she noiselessly followed him. The mysterious barber walked to the neighbouring village, nonchalantly broke into the houses of the villagers and approached their resplendently decorated Christmas trees. Then he uttered a magic spell thus:

“Pluck and tweeze!
Pull and squeeze!
No Christmas trees!
Evermore, please!”

The tweezers came alive at these words and jumped from branch to branch with such velocity that they could no longer be perceived, got hold of every single needle and extracted it from its native branch. Within seconds, the Christmas tree was stark naked. All the decorations had fallen off by the whirlwind action of the animated tweezers and lay broken on the floor. The barber repeated his evil deeds in every house and did not refrain from inflicting the same torture to the outdoors Christmas trees. He then stole back to Barbara’s house once again, still followed by Borphan and Eloquia.

The creepy barber let himself in, for he was in possession of the key. Borphan and Eloquia peeped trough the slots in the blinds of the windows and observed something truly blood-curling. The barber washed his face, took off his clothes and turned out to be Barbara in disguise! Borphan whispered a quick explanation into Eloquia’s ear, for she looked like a ghost. Barbara triumphantly laughed to herself and lovingly caressed the magic spell book that she had inherited from her great-great-great-grand-mother. “I knew you would be of some use one day,” she said.

Borphan had seen enough. He bid Eloquia to come into the barn with him once more. Then he disclosed his vault to her eyes, inundating her with its blissful brilliance and sparkling splendour. She stood there for a long time, just watching. Then she touched the tiny face of a fluffy sheep and instantly the vault came alive. The magic of Christmas that had been created by Borphan’s own hand overwhelmed her to such a high degree that she could grasp the essence of him as a being and could not banish a feeling of deep love that she immediately developed for him. She slid into his arms and both of them fell into a bottomless embrace that lasted for what seemed an eternity. When Borphan had recovered his senses, he remembered what he had planned to do in response to Barbara’s evil deeds.

He dressed up as old woman once again, and disguised Eloquia as a Christmas tree. Thus they strode through the streets of both villages pulling their wheelbarrow behind them, distributing Christmas trees and decorations, mangers, figurines and Christmas crackers in front of each house. When the morning dawned, the first sign of life from each house was an outburst of woe at the sight of the nakedness of their tree, which was soon followed by an outbreak of utter joy at the find of a new tree and additional artful goodies. Borphan and Eloquia heard all these verbal manifestations from the barn window and felt united in accomplishment as well as in love.

When Eloquia had left for work, Borphan remembered that he had never found out where she lived or where she came from. But before he would solve this mystery, he had to know Barbara’s motivation for her barbarous deed from last night, and, so he assumed, from the previous night also. He rang her front door bell until she grudgingly let him in. Then he burst out without delay: “I saw you last night and followed you. Why did you do that?” The woman’s features hardened and her face took on a pallid hue, but she remained silent, apart from gnashing her teeth. Borphan continued: “I will burn the barn down with all the Easter products in it and I will plant pine trees on the site!” This was too much to bear for Barbara and she gave in. She sat down and recounted in a limp voice:

“When I was a young woman I celebrated Christmas every year. I even liked it. Then I got married and had my little daughter just three months before Christmas that year. My husband went to the forest to cut a tree and I went along with Silencia, our baby, to gather some pine twigs for further decorative needs. I left her leaning against a tree trunk for an instant, wrapped in her warm woollen blankets, so that I had my two hands free to cut the twigs. But my fool of a husband did not notice her bundle lying there, in the snow, and swung his axe against the tree trunk, cutting her little throat. When the snow started colouring, he saw what he had done. I grabbed the axe from him and butchered him down to his last fibre. It is this event that has implanted in me a deep hatred of Christmas.”

Borphan understood the extent of her traumatic experience, although he did not agree with her reaction towards her husband. Before he could utter a word in response, however, Barbara had grabbed a kitchen knife from the table and hissed at him: “Did you think I would let you go on living with this knowledge? I have no other choice now than to butcher you down, too.” But a second voice broke into the room: “We sold you turkey chops instead of lamb chops yesterday. I am terribly sorry, but you will have to pay up the difference.” It was the shopkeeper. Barbara’s face was terror-stricken. Disgust and nausea mirrored in her face. She threw up violently, in front of her visitor’s feet. She emptied herself so radically that she almost fainted from sheer weakness. Borphan took advantage of the moment to call the police.

When Barbara had recovered her wits and her strength it was too late. A policeman was already handcuffing her. But Barbara would not have it. She was so furious and upset that, with all her might, she jumped high up in the air, simultaneously ejected a terrible cry, which froze everyone’s bone marrow, parted her legs as wide as she could before landing again on the kitchen floor and, through this very well co-ordinated action and thrust of forces, managed to rip herself in two. But this was not the only consequence of her harsh acrobatic act. She had hit the floor with such impact that the foundations of the house, weakened by the huge Christmas vault that lay underneath, gave way and collapsed. The whole house fell apart and tumbled into the depths of the vault, while an enormous Christmas gold and silver rush swelled and billowed upwards into the sky, catapulted from its depths by the plummeting house debris. The sparkling cloud faltered in the air for a few seconds, then sagged and slowly snowed down on the whole village, clothing it in glossy icing.

The second before she died, Barbara saw the effusion of the dazzling and beaming mass, took it for a real treasure without noticing its Christmas essence and screamed: “I was sitting on a treasure my whole life without knowing!” But before she could notice her error, the tear in her body had moved with the speed of lighting up towards her heart and finally ripped it apart, saving her thus from a sure death by drowning in Christmas items.

Borphan, meanwhile, had gripped the fluff of a life-sized sheep and rode out through the air on its back. He had grabbed the shopkeeper’s and the policeman’s collars and heroically saved their lives. They landed in the middle of the market place, where all the village inhabitants had united in wonderment about the origin of the Christmas discharge. The mystery was soon explained and Borphan saw himself cherished by the whole village population for his gifts. They treated him like a hero. Eloquia rejoined him and without further ado, they called the priest and got married.

After their wedding night, Borphan asked his bride what the reason for her muteness was. Through gestures she indicated that her vocal chords had been involved in some kind of rupture. Borphan had a lot of experience with stitching, as he had sewn all the Christmas fluffy toys by himself, and suggested to Eloquia that he might try and stitch her chords back together. She enthusiastically agreed. Delicately, Borphan inflicted her neck with a minute cut through which he could perceive both ends of the vocal chords. They had been disconnected by a clear cut and would be easy to stitch back together. The task infused him with such delight and was so simple to perform that, for sheer pleasure, Borphan added a miniature embroidery on each chord, displaying snowflakes and stars and reindeers. He chuckled to himself, so endearing was the sight of the tiny artwork. Then, all that was left to do was to close the wound on Eloquia’s neck.

After a few hours’ rest, Eloquia woke up and, to her own delight and that of her husband, she started to sing all the Christmas carols she knew, in such a clear and harmonious voice that all the birds flew in through the window to listen to this aural miracle. Even spiders started to dangle down from the ceiling to get closer to her vocal delights. With growing practice, Eloquia noticed that her chords allowed her to produce multiple voices. She could vocalize three different tunes simultaneously. Whether something had gone wrong with Borphan’s stitching, whether his embroidery’d had a hand in the plural voices, or whether she had simply been born with these multi-layered vocal chords – who was to say? In any case, Eloquia sang for an entire day, sometimes in a single voice, sometimes in a duet or even a canon.

Only during the following night did she start to speak. Borphan grabbed the opportunity to ask her about her origins. She answered thus: “I am an orphan, too. An old charitable woman called Magnolia found me in the forest, not far away from her cabin and took me on. When I had grown up she told me that a man had mistakenly damaged my throat with an axe when cutting a Christmas tree. But the cut was not very deep and only my vocal chords had been disconnected. The flesh wound healed within days. Magnolia raised me in her cabin and gave me the name of Eloquia, to distract attention from my disability, I suppose. Magnolia died three weeks ago and I stumbled upon this village where I got my sales assistant job.”

Borphan was struck by the points of connection in both Eloquia’s story and Barbara’s account. He immediately linked the events and, in his shrewd mind, identified them as a single one. That meant that Barbara had been Eloquia’s mother. He acquainted her with his newly found knowledge and shared his enlightenment with her. Thereupon she asked him about his origins and, as if by magic, could solve the mystery of that, too. Magnolia had told her that she had lost her baby son during a theatre performance, where he had acted as a bastard foundling. Someone had stolen the bundle during a break between the acts. He had never been found. “Hm.” Pondered Borphan, “I would not be surprised in the least if Barbara was the thief and had only made up the oak tree story.” And Borphan was right! Barbara wanted a new baby after she believed her own to be dead, and stole someone else’s bundle of joy. Only when she unwrapped him at home, did she realize that it was a boy and could thus not be a true replacement for her lost daughter. Therefore she treated him like a lump of dirt.

Having found each other through such magical circumstances, Borphan and Eloquia never parted again. They opened an all year twenty-four hour Christmas shop where they sold Borphan’s decorations and mangers and figurines, and Eloquia’s Christmas albums, for which she composed all the music herself and which she sang in her wonderful voices. After some more practice, she had been able to develop them further and divide them into bass, tenor and soprano, while, at the same time, she could vocalize them simultaneously. She composed the most harmonious and tuneful chorus carols and her albums sold like crazy. There were no one hit wonders among them; all of them immediately became classics. Borphan’s and Eloquia’s many children helped creating the Christmas products and some of them inherited their mother’s singing talents, although none of them had multiple voices. They formed a band called ‘The Christmas Family’ and became famous all over the world. Borphan was proud of his little family and their business. Together they multiplied and grew old, without one single grey and Christmas-less day in their lives.