The first heavy snow came in early November, casting a blanket of startling white over the general drabness. Leaving for work that morning, Mattie discovered two freshly made snowmen in the park. These carrot-nosed, many-buttoned personages wore top hats and bright wool scarves and their twiggy arms held old hockey sticks. She knew her elves would want to see them. The North Pole’s songs and stories borrowed heavily from the “Snowmanslandia” saga, which recounted the history and terrible extinction of the original snowmen.
Clever Snowmansland had made its coinage out of ice. So no one hoarded money that would only disappear in the spring thaw. Instead, snowmen bought things or started factories to churn out goods for themselves and for export. As they prospered, they built the sub-tundra railroad to carry their wares down to Fort Churchill (whose name came from the ice cathedral they erected there) and beyond. But then cold Phrygia, Snowmansland’s northern neighbor, invaded, defeating the snowman army and driving the country’s inhabitants southward to below the tree line, never to been seen again.
The elves were very eager to come back with Mattie and took pictures to send home. They enjoyed seeing the snowmen so much she didn’t have the heart to tell them that coming out the next morning she’d found nothing but two naked stumps of snow in the park.
They were very busy at the office now. The naughty-or-nice reports were due in by the first Friday in December, so the North Pole’s packaging and labeling department could do their work. This information was a deeply guarded secret. Children must never know that after that date they could be bad and Santa would be none the wiser.
Busy or not, elves always took Sundays off. But Toronto was a hard place to find things to do on a Sunday. The city’s blue laws closed down all movie houses and beverage rooms, as beer taverns were called. Sometimes Mattie took them to the Royal Ontario Museum, which the law judged more educational than recreational.
But mostly they all spent Sunday afternoons in the office listening to Hopkin, the scholar elf among them, reading out loud from books like Mysterious Phrygia: Dark Tales From a Darker Land. Phrygia was ruled by the House of Fröst, descendants of Vikings who’d convinced its simple people that kings and queens were the up-to-date way of running a country. The elves hissed when Hopkin came to the part where Phrygia’s King Jack XII invaded Snowmansland. Mattie hissed along with them, too, but for her own reasons. Phrygia’s current ruler, Queen Alicia, had stolen her husband.
And the elves cheered loudly at King Jack’s terrible demise. An amateur alchemist, he was working one night in his palace laboratory, adding a pinch of this and a pinch of that to the pot, hoping to find the legendary universal solvent, that which could dissolve everything. Suddenly the bottom dropped out of the pot. Its contents spread in a circle on the floor, which also dissolved. King Jack and his accidental discovery fell into the basement. (It never occurred to him that if he ever found what he was looking for, he wouldn’t have anything to keep it in.) From there king and solvent worked their way through the earth’s crust to the magma beneath and hundreds of years later emerged on the other side of the world, causing the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, which shot them both off into outer space. It was only after this event that astronomers observed the galactic phenomena called black holes.
One evening in the first week in December, a snowy Inspector Wilfred Chin of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police came to Mattie’s office with the final naughty-or-nice figures for his country. Afterward, Chin, a Canadian of Chinese extraction, stayed on to chat. Smiling, he told her his relatives in China were thinking of moving to Canada, which his parents had described to them as a land of opportunity where you could buy a silver sailboat for a dime. Mattie smiled back. She knew the joke. The Canadian ten-cent piece had an image of the famous Maritime schooner The Bluenose on its back. She also knew Chin had lingered hoping she’d reveal whether Canadian boys and girls were nicer than American boys and girls this year. But Mattie’d promised a Mr. Hoover at the F.B.I. she’d tell the American figures to no one. He, in turn, had promised an improvement in next year’s numbers. Only the French seemed to relish their many naughty boys and girls. (“Oolala,” as Nutkin would say, having been naughty-or-nice liaison with the French Sûreté before the war.)
After Chin left and the elves had bedded down, Mattie switched off the office lights and went to the window on Queen to watch the snow fall, noticing for the first time the little movie house, the Regent, catty-corner across the street. Mattie’s North Pole work had included finding children’s books suitable for her husband to leave under the tree. The Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame had been one of her favorites and she’d started a correspondence with the author, who was living in Toronto at the time. In one of her letters Montgomery wrote that she’d gone to the Regent in 1925 to see the silent movie version of that book. The neighborhood must have been more respectable then.
As it happened, 1925 was the year Mattie’d gotten a job with Al Claussin, a San Francisco private eye, as his doll-face, their term for receptionist. She’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks her first day on the job when he came into the office and skimmed his hat across the room onto the hat rack without even looking to see if he’d made a ringer, because he always did.
Claussin proposed five years later, the night he won the big poker pot at the Roscoe and Fedora Club, the private-eye social club everybody called The Gat and the Hat. “‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,’ Doll-Face,” Claussin recited. Poetry, his secret vice, wasn’t a private-eye kind of thing. Once, losing to a pair of red aces, he’d shouted, “Out, out damned spots!” A chilly silence fell over the card table. Private eyes may shun poetry, but they knew it when they heard it. After that, Claussin spent so much time in fistfights with his peers to prove his manhood and recovering — Mattie kept beefsteaks in the office icebox — that business suffered. By the time he won the big pot, he was ready for another line of work.
Among that night’s losers were his friends Sam Trowel and Miles Bowman, who’d naughty-or-niced the whole state of California that year, no small contract indeed. But Kris Kringle was dragging his feet paying up. As a favor, Claussin took the bill for what they were owed instead of their IOU. What better honeymoon than a collection trip to the North Pole, combining business with pleasure.
But the newlyweds found Kringle in a very bad way. Under Saint Nicholas, his predecessor, Christmas presents had been of a devotional nature — prayer books, edifying tracts, rosary beads. Back then, there were very few good little boys and girls. Kringle urged the elves to draw more children to goodness with pleasanter rewards. He suggested they build a toy works, financing it by the sale of kriskringlite. This rare ore, which Kringle, an amateur geologist, had discovered beneath the North Pole, was the principal ingredient in Christmas tinsel. And so the elves did. But kriskringlite prices tanked with the stock market crash of 1929. In hard times, people saved their tinsel, picking it off the tree to reuse next year.