Jamie wasn't certain of the point in time when he realized that he was taller than Jack. When he was young, the winter spirit always seemed so big. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Jack's feet rarely touched the ground. He was either floating on the wind or balancing on his staff. And when he did stand up straight, Jamie had always several inches shorter.

He had always been a pretty small boy, but hit a growth spurt in his late teens that suddenly shot him upwards, leaving him towering awkwardly over the other kids his age. Now, Jamie was an adult and had filled out just enough for his height to look natural. However, it seemed like his kids had inherited the short gene. Sammy, the oldest, was barely five feet tall at age twelve, and his three younger siblings (Emmy, Benjamin, and Matthew) weren't fairing much better. All four of them were twigs, too.

Jamie was sitting outside watching his children play in the snow with Jack, who had taken on the role of a big brother/babysitter, just as he had when Jamie was young. As five-year-old Mattie dumped a handful of snow over ten-year-old Emmy's messy blonde hair, the thought came out of nowhere that Jack wasn't much taller than any of them.

Well, he still had a quite a few good inches on Ben and Mattie, but the point still stood.

Jamie had been noticing this for a while, actually. He'd taken note of the fact that he now had to look down to see the winter spirit eye-to-eye, and Jack looked about half his weight. Jack wasn't even average height for someone who claimed to be seventeen. He was less than five and a half feet tall, that was for sure and probably weighed less than a hundred and ten pounds. All in all, he wasn't very big. Jack was downright small.

He wondered why this was. Well, Jack's date of birth was 1694. People back then were smaller, weren't they? But the males surely weren't that tiny. Jamie shook his head, confused, not even distracted by Emmy's indignant shriek as her brothers pushed her into a snowbank. Why was he even thinking about this so much?

"You know, if you frown too much, your face will end up stuck like that," Jamie heard someone say. He looked up to see Jack leaning casually on his staff, looking down on him amusedly.

"What do I do when that happens?" the man replied conversationally. "I'd hate for my face to be stuck like that forever."

Jack just shrugged. "I dunno. I'm not an expert on unfreezing things." He plopped down on the porch next to his friend. "Seriously though, what are you thinking about?"

"Nothing much in particular. Just spacing out." Jamie had a feeling that Jack would make fun of him if he broached the real subject, and wisely decided to keep his mouth shut.

The winter spirit snorted. "Yeah, you do that a lot. And here I thought adults were supposed to be the level-headed ones. Well, I'm not an expert on you people either, so I'll let it go."

"'You people,'" Jamie laughed. "I see how it is."

"Good." Jack stood and brushed off his pants. "Hey, your daughter's over there getting ready to plow the boys into the ground. Wanna help out?"

Jamie sighed. "No, I'd better go break it up." He stood as well and stretched his arms. "They need to be more careful."

As they walked back to the section of the yard where Emmy was burying Sammy's face into the ground, it occurred to him that he used to be the one that went along with altercations like this, and Jack was the one who would tell him and Sophie to be careful.

Apparently height wasn't the only thing that had changed between them. Jamie couldn't help but wonder when he switched places with Jack as the more mature one. Well, maybe not more mature (Jack did have a good three and a half centuries on him in terms of age) but more... level-headed, as the winter spirit had put it.

Then again, Jamie was an adult who still believed in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny, so he wasn't really one to talk.