The Shattered Snow Globe
Disclaimer: I do not own Fred Claus or any of the characters there within.
It was round.
Or it used to be.
But that's no place to start—that's the end of the story.
It really began one winter in a faraway land when a chill wind blew and thick snowflakes fell silently from the gray sky; when a new family had moved into the forest. They were a quiet people, who came down from the far North, not all together secluded from the small, humble forest community, but neither were they sociable. For you see, the new family had come from a modest background in a place where snow always fell and the people there were always in their heaviest coats and thickest boots, and the nearest neighbor was a mountain away. The families in this winter bound land depended greatly on themselves for company, so what a surprise it was to have friends so close and warm in this new community.
The small family had a single child. A little red-headed girl with striking sky-blue eyes, rosy cheeks and a button nose. Her name was Annette. She was exotic because she came from some distant land with a different culture, different traditions, and an interesting way of living. Because of her novelty, she became very popular. Most everyone took to calling her Ann.
That winter, the family settled into their woodcutter's cottage and little Ann went to school with the other children of the forest. She wore fur-lined coats and boots and the prettiest red mittens anyone had ever seen.
It was in school that Nicolas met the quiet and shy girl from the North, and this small school was terribly unassuming since the class was composed of only ten children, but being the kindly gentleman that he was, he took it upon himself to introduce her to everyone and they took an instant liking towards each other. Nicolas also made it a habit to walk Annette home from school, carrying her books on top of his own, and because Nicolas was not yet old enough to walk the woods by himself, Frederick always had to escort them both. At first, Frederick thought the entire notion rather tedious, he had to walk the extra distance with heavy books and Annette was shy, she hardly spoke unless spoken to. But soon the boys found common interests with her and Ann became a talkative, bubbling wellspring of discussion. Fred presently learned to enjoy the little walks with his brother and the new girl after school. He was always terribly tempted to tug at Annette's bobbed red hair and then count how many springs it would make before settling again, especially since he sat behind her in class and his fingers itched for a quick tug. He knew he would be scolded by his teacher, but here in the woods were no one could see…He did pull her hair once.
She promptly threw a snowball in his face.
He never tried again.
Regardless, (or perhaps because of the incident), the three of them became fast friends and often got into snowball wars, sometimes in massive teams that involved all the children in the neighborhood and other times where individual glory could not be beaten for sheer victory. There were sledding races and snow cave building, ice-skating and finding-the-largest-icicle games that the children played well through the season.
But as winter slowly melted into spring and the snows thinned and the trees grew back their leaves and the flowers budded from their slumber in the ground, something too changed in the new family.
Frederick and Nicolas came home from school one day, directly after class ended. Annette had not been present to walk home.
"You boys are home early," their mother said from the kitchen.
"Annette wasn't there today." Fred shouted after dropping all of his belongings—coat, books, bag and all—on the floor. "What are you making?" he asked walking to the stove his mother worked over, having smelled the sweet gingerbread from outside. Nicolas picked up his brother's things, so his mother would not have to, and put them away properly in the closet.
"I'm making gingerbread cookies. They're for poor little Annette, she's sick." She said.
"Sick?" The two brothers asked together. News spread like wildfire in the little forest community, it was shocking the brothers had been the last to hear.
"From what?" Nicolas asked.
"Flu?" said Fred.
"Cold?" said Nick.
"I'm not quite sure," their mother said, patting her hands on her pale tan apron, the flour from her hands smelling sweet and spicy. "But these cookies are for her and her family, so don't you go eating them." She slapped Fred on the wrist as he reached for one of the gingerbread men. Fred cradled his struck hand with the other and made a sour face and stomped over to a chair in the den, grumbling: "I want one too."
"They should be ready in about an hour, you can help decorate them if you want." She said and turned back to the oven to check on the next batch. Nicolas helped his mother to decorate the cookies and even Fred got over his initial outburst to help Nick with the frosting and gumdrops. Out of the dozen for Annette and her family, one mysteriously disappeared and the two brothers searched for it. Fred left gingerbread crumbs on everything he touched and licked white frosting from the corner of his lips as he looked, but the missing cookie could not be found. Oh well, eleven would have to do.
At last, Fred, Nick, and their mother all went to the woodcutter's cottage over the stream in the next glen to deliver the homemade dessert. The two brothers raced up the familiar path and knocked competitively on the beautifully carved door, leaving their mother to walk the winding path herself as Annette's mother answered the door. She was a slender, sweet woman of average height, red bobbed hair that bounced when she walked, and rosy cheeks, just like her daughter, with a disarming smile.
"Ah, I thought it was the Claus Brothers." She smiled and stepped to one side. "Annette's in the den, but don't be too loud, all right?" The boys had already rushed past her and into the house the instant they knew of Annette's location and the woman shook her head lightly, turning and greeting Mrs. Claus with a warm hello and hug.
"Hi, Annette!" Fred said in a shout, as he pushed his way through the door. Nicolas came up beside him more quietly and then Fred remembered to lower his voice. "We heard you were sick."
"How are you feeling?" Nicolas said.
Annette smiled up at them both, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes red, and she was covered in a thick blue blanket. Her red hair had lost much of its tightly curling bobs and now only waved down past her shoulders. She sniffled once and shifted lightly beneath the blanket. When she spoke, her voice had a rasp to it and that particular accent only the sick have.
"Still sick." She said simply and gave them a weak smile.
"What happened? Is it a cold?" Fred asked.
"Flu?" Piped Nicolas.
Annette shook her head; her red hair falling prettily over her shoulders.
"I dohn know." She sniffled again, her voice oddly nasal. Fred wanted to laugh at how awkward she sounded, but managed to poorly cover his laugh with a cough.
"We have cookies for you." Nicolas said cheerfully, just as his and Annette's mother came into the den with the wrapped plate of decorated desserts. Fred leapt up and quickly took the plate from his mother, careful not to drop it, and brought it back to the sick girl.
"Oh, thas so nice." She giggled and hiccupped shyly, hiding her mouth and nose behind the blanket in embarrassment. Fred had already unwrapped the delicately wrapped cookies by this time and was showing her his artwork.
"I did this one." He said, holding up a gingerbread man that had ribbed cuff and ankle frills, a polka-dot suit complete with tie, and gumdrop eyes.
"And I did this one." Nicolas held up his own masterpiece of a gingerbread man in a white-trimmed suit with a big white beard and removable red felt hat, with purple gumdrop eyeballs.
Back and forth the boys went until all of the gingerbread men were accounted for and a detailed description of what their professions were told.
The boys handed their handmade creations to Annette who gingerly took them.
"Oh, buh now I dohn wanu ea them. You word so hard." She said around her stuffy nose.
"I'll eat them." Fred offered helpfully and promptly stuffed one of Nicolas' gingerbread men into his mouth. Both Nicolas and Annette laughed so hard that Nicolas fell onto the ground kicking and holding his stomach and Annette started coughing.
"All right boys, I think you've excited Annette enough," Mrs. Claus said, as Annette's mother rushed over to her daughter to calm her. Knowing they had caused some upset, the two brothers moved obediently out of the room, still hearing the young girl trapped in her coughing fit. Mrs. Claus ushered her children outside and lingered long enough for Annette's mother to return in the silence to be sure she had not caused some damage to the little girl by bringing her two boys with her. The other woman denied any fault, thanking Mrs. Claus for the considerate gesture and saw them to the door.
On the quiet walk back, Nicolas looked up at his mother.
"What's wrong with her, mother?"
"No doubt about it. She's homesick, the poor dear."
"Home-sick?" Fred repeated skeptically. "But she is home."
"Not this home," his mother corrected, smiling softly, a knowing smile, "she misses the North. It's always snowing up there and what with our snow melting here, she's realized just how far from her other home she is."
They walked in silence for a moment.
"Will she ever get better?" Nicolas asked, looking up at his mother with wide, worried eyes.
"With time. She just needs a little more of it to adjust, that's all." Mrs. Claus said, placing a placating hand on her son's head. "Now, let's hurry home. It may not be winter, but it certainly is chilly out."
And the Claus family returned to their home in silence.
Nicolas did not feel the cookies had been enough for Annette, though he loved his sweets, Annette deserved something more…something special. He thought again about what his mother had said about the snow in the North and he wondered how he could give Annette something that would snow, anytime she wanted it to snow. But how would he do such a thing? Nicolas thought long and hard for many days, ever spurred towards this gift idea every time he went to school and saw Annette's empty chair. He had just about given up on the idea when he was walking home from school one day (without Annette), holding a special glass of hot cider his teacher had made for the class that day, as it was still rather cold. Suddenly, he lifted the glass to his lips and he discovered a leaf at its bottom.
Of all the places to land, he thought, it had to be my…
But then Nicolas studied the leaf in the golden liquid, thinking. He stirred the glass in circular motions and the leaf rose and danced in the glass.
"Nick, you have a leaf in your cider." Fred said with one eyebrow raised, wondering why his little brother was so transfixed by this rather ordinary phenomenon.
Nicolas' eyes lit up.
"That's it!" he shouted excitedly.
"What's it?" Fred asked irritably to be frightened by his younger brother's shout.
"My gift for Annette!"
And Nicolas ran home. Fred watched him go.
Unbeknownst to Nick, Fred had also made Annette a gift. It was a construction paper mosaic he had been working on all week of a winged reindeer pulling a sleigh across a starry, moonlit sky. In the sleigh were two figures; a young boy sitting with a red-haired girl. And knowing Nicolas, the younger boy would make some stupendous gift of great and innovative proportions, something that would make Fred's gift common, unimaginative, conventional.
Boring.
Fred's eyes narrowed as he followed his brother home.
It had taken Nicolas all night, but he had finally put it all together.
He poured water into a clear, spherical glass that was mostly hollowed and sprinkled a small amount of tiny, white sand granules into the liquid. He had already fired a modestly decorated stand in the kiln for the base and above it he had attached a silver metal heart. The heart was very special. He had asked his father, who had dabbled in metallurgy a few years back, to make the specifications to his design. It was a heart within a heart and at its center was set a very small ruby, the size of a needle eye. He sealed the sphere over the stand with a rubber lining, trimming away the excess and then quickly turned the glass upright.
The sand sprinkled over the heart like a powder of fresh falling snow.
He would call it a snow globe.
Nicolas placed the globe in a small box and wrapped his gift up that morning in shimmering green paper and red ribbons and topped the present with a tag he had painstakingly written her name on in intricate, flowering letters. He had rehearsed over and over what he would say to her until he had it memorized, and he practiced even as he walked around the house. He had given gifts before, but this time was different; he couldn't say why, his only clue was a strange feeling that fluttered in his stomach. Passing the fireplace on the way to get his coat, Nicolas did not see the construction paper mosaic crumpled and burnt among the ashes.
Nicolas opened the door and set out to Annette's house.
It had snowed the previous night and there was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground, not very high, since the winter season had reached its end and this was an early spring snow, but there was enough of it to make a good supply of snowballs for a snowball war.
Or perhaps even a single snowball for an angry brother.
Nicolas had been halfway to Annette's cottage when something cold and hard smacked fiercely against his head. He was so startled by the stinging strike from the unseen attacker, that he fell face first into the snow. Stunned, Nicolas lay there a moment when he remembered his gift. His hands were empty above his head. Oh no.
Lifting his head up from the ground, Nicolas rubbed his face free of the freezing snow and saw his gift a few feet ahead of him. The bottom edges of the box were discolored. Soaking.
He stared at the sorry box for a long moment, before he realized there was a pair of legs directly after it.
Raising his eyes, he followed the sharply contrasting red stocking legs against the white snow, to the red ruffled skirt, up to the red and gold button blouse, to the curly red hair. Brilliant sky blue eyes stared down at him. His mouth went dry. All of his carefully practiced lines were dashed from his mind like a snowball splattered against a tree trunk. Even a simple greeting was beyond him at the moment. He swallowed.
"Are you all right?" Annette asked softly. She no longer had that pallid, sickly look to her face and the red marring her cheeks was more from chill than illness. "I just saw your brother go running from up there," she pointed above and behind him, but Nicolas did not turn to see. There was a halo of light around Annette's brilliant red hair, shining all manner of sparkling reds, oranges, and yellows down at him, and Nicolas' heart was beating fiercely in his throat. He had never noticed just how beautiful she was. He was as uselessly frozen on the ground as a fallen icicle.
She bent down suddenly, reaching for the small gift and Nicolas snapped out of his trance. He struggled to get to his feet, but his weight did not make that easy for him, and she had already picked up the gift and was closing the distance between them.
"You dropped…" her voice trailed off as she read the tidy scrawl on the small white tag. "Is this for me?" she looked up at him and Nicolas was struck dumb again by the shock blue of her eyes. His mouth disengaged but no words came out and so he simply nodded. Carefully, Annette untied the ribbon and tore back the wrappings until the box was uncovered and she opened that too. Gazing into the box, her forehead furrowed faintly. Nicolas rushed forward. "I think it's broken." She mumbled, not quite sure what the gift was.
"Oh no," Nicolas moaned, seeing the broken glass and spilled liquid and sand within the box. "After I worked so hard. I wanted to make you something special, since my mother said you were home-sick and that you probably missed the snow, so I thought for days and days and I finally got this idea that I could make you a snow globe and I—"
"A snow globe?" she repeated slowly, and this seemed to really bring home that the uncommon, special gift Nicolas had made her was destroyed beyond repair. He looked up into her brilliant blue eyes as she tried to understand him and he quickly looked away. Tears were welling up in his eyes.
"Yeah," he sniffled and rubbed his nose across his arm. "You would shake it and it would snow inside. So you could always have snow. No matter what season it was. It would be like…like you were home again."
There was nothing but silence in the forest as snowflakes continued to fall, the quiet falling angels of the sky their only vigil.
"Nicolas," Annette said softly and there was something new in her voice that he could not identify, some strange new intensity that made his heart throb again in his chest. He looked up at her once more and saw that her blue eyes were shimmering with unspent tears. She moved closer to him. "Nicolas, I am home."
She pressed her rosy lips to one of his ruddy cheeks and his heart fluttered in his chest. He was weightless as a bird, as a butterfly, and felt as though he had spun in a circle twenty times.
"Ho, ho." He laughed breathlessly.
When he looked at her again, her cheeks were more flushed than before and she wore a shy smile and he promised in that instant to fashion her the largest, most greatest snow globe the world had ever seen.
And he was true to his word.
He salvaged the dual heart from the first snow globe and gave it to Annette on a chain, which she wore always, even well after their wedding and into their marriage years. He showered Annette with gifts and affection and they did eventually move back to the North where his wife was most at home. Many gathered at the Claus residence, drawn by Nicolas inherent kindness, and soon a town had been built around them full of glowing lights and warm families. Among the number was a nation of elves, who ritually followed Nick's example of compassion in the gift of giving. And Nicolas, who had long ago been sainted for his acts of kindness, built the greatest snow globe the world had ever seen. It was the size of an aquarium with swirling white snows inside that never ceased to dance and churn within the glass sphere. The elves had a hand in the making it so the snow was eternally snowing inside the sphere and yet another feature not possible without their help, to see in on loved ones with a single spoken command of name and location.
He presented it to Annette the morning after the 24th of December and the day in itself became a holiday across the world, where Saint Nicolas gave gifts to children.
Annette had squealed happily at the magnificent gift and leapt into Nicolas arms with happy kisses and gibberish words of joy, and it was a long time before she settled back into a more coherent state when she could kiss her husband more calmly.
They were arm in arm facing one another when Annette reached up and tugged lightly on the chain around her neck which revealed a dual heart with a tiny ruby at its center.
"Do you remember when you gave me this?" she murmured.
"Very clearly," he said, then paused, glancing up and to the left. "Ice skating."
Annette rolled her eyes.
"No."
"No? During a snowball war? At the dance? Family dinner?"
Annette punched him lightly in the shoulder. They both knew he was teasing.
"Of course I remember, how could I forget?" he chuckled.
"You wanted to give me a memory of home." She said.
"And here we are at last. As far North as you could ever possibly get before you start heading south again. Although technically, the planet is at a tilt and due North is still a few degrees from here, but that's beside the point. Now you can never be homesick again, right?"
Annette sighed and embraced her husband and waited until he had wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on her head. After all these years, he had misunderstood her.
"Oh Nicolas, wherever you are, I'm home."
A/N: There we have it, my fuzzy, warm-hearted Christmas story for the year that has a happy ending to it; though not for Fred I guess. Oh well.
This is the only Fred Claus fanfiction I think, in existence, (I have looked) I didn't think the movie was all that bad. It wasn't the best thing I've ever seen, but it wasn't terrible. Miranda Richardson as Mrs. Annette Claus is just genius! And lucky ol' mother-in-law Claus knows how to make gingerbread because apparently Annette doesn't. (Poke around for the "Gingerbread for Dummies" image, it's really cute!) I highly enjoyed MJR's performance, as usual, and I wanted to write her story (again). So here we have it.
Setting, yes I wanted to mention setting. In the movie the narrator said something along the lines that sainthood grants immortality and this extends to the family and spouse and everything--so I actually set the story a little pre-20th century. Far enough back that snow globes aren't in circulation for trade (remote as a place they lived), or even to where Old Saint Nick patented the idea himself. I apologize if the timeframe is not terribly obvious.
I must thank my beta reader, whom if I were without, my story would have vacuum like vacuoles of matter (a.k.a. plot holes) that make no sense: Eric Blair. Thanks for all the help Eric!
I deeply appreciate reviews (especially since this isn't the most ground-breaking movie everyone has seen and adored)! Do your good deed for the season!
Blackfire 18