as imagined by daughter Sharman Burson Ramsey

 picture: Elf on stool reading letters

Alliwishus perched on a high stool in the Reading Room at Santa's Workshop in the uncharted regions of the North Pole.  Usually the frigid air didn't faze him, but that day he felt cold right down to his very bones.  His chubby little elf cheeks and the tip of his long, turned up nose were reddened with the bite of the frost.  But, it wasn't the weather that was the most chilling; it was the despair in the letters he read. 

December 20, 1944

Dear Santa,

                   All I  want is my Daddy home for Christmas.

 

Sincerely,

Randolph

 

The letters came in English, French, German, Russian, Italian . . . nearly every language spoken on the face of the earth.  Yet the message was the same.  Daddies and brothers were on the killing fields. Those who loved them wanted a miracle.

 He'd served hundreds of years as a Messenger in the Warrior Branch of the Guardian Angels.  But, no matter how many buckets of rain he lifted, he could not get strong enough to throw a lightning bolt.  He was way too little to be a Warrior Angel like he really wanted to be.  He'd only gotten laughed at when he showed up for the tryouts.  They were very loving laughs, to be sure.  Fond chuckles, perhaps.   After all, these were heavenly beings.  It was embarrassing all the same.

But when The Master had approved the idea of everyone giving to others on His birthday and had set up Santa Service to help carry this out, Alliwishus saw his opportunity.   It was the job of all the elves to plant in the hearts of parents and fellow men the desire to fulfill the wishes and prayers of little children, the most vulnerable of all human beings.  Alliwishus had worked hard in Santa Service ever since that branch of the Guardian Angels had opened several hundred years ago.  And he did get to wear the coveted green cap of Santa's Helpers.  

But the previous night, it had seemed the prayers of all his charges reached him with such a force it reminded him of the last time Halley's Comet had passed the earth.  They struck him like a typhoon with a vortex so empty it threatened to suck all the hope from the world.  Reluctantly, he had passed the prayers on to the Master.  Alliwishus knew the pain the Master felt at the evil in the hearts of men that brought the children such suffering.

Enough was enough.  He had sat there on the stool long enough.  Alliwishus slid down the leg of his stool clutching a sheaf of letters tightly in his fist, flipped the white tassel on the end of his cap out of his eyes,  and marched determinedly to the Main Office. The bells on the end of his turned up shoes jingled with false cheer.  Once again he wished he were bigger, more imposing.  Who would believe a tiny little thing like he was could really make a difference?  He just knew he had to try!  At his timid knock, a muffled voice bade him enter. 

Insert picture of Santa and Alliwishus

            Santa, wearing work jeans and a flannel shirt instead of his dress velvet and fur, sat upon a worn overstuffed wing chair on a dais in the center of the control room.  Around him were hundreds of video monitors that scanned the world.  Santa's usually cheery countenance today matched Alliwishus' mournful look.  The kindness and compassion that gleamed from Santa's warm brown eyes under his shaggy white brows encouraged Alliwishus so he straightened himself to his full six inch height and cleared his throat.  
    
    "Sir, I know the Warrior Angels told us to stay out of the War Zone.  But my charges need me.  I know their voices like no other.  Doing something . . . anything . . . is better than sitting around doing nothing!"

"Alliwishus, surely you realize how important your work is right here.  The Master needs you to quicken within humans the desire to love their fellow man.  It is the most important work that can possibly be done."

"Yes, sir, I realize that, but long distance is not my style," said Alliwishus, puffing out his chest.  "It's been such a long time since I made my rounds in that part of the world, sir."

Santa stared at the monitor focused on the Ardennes Forest of Belgium near Luxembourg.  "War is the great cancer of the world.  So much suffering . . . and yet they waste their talents and their resources inventing even more horrible weapons."

As Santa indicated the monitor he had been watching,  Alliwishus saw many of his charges of every nation fighting one another.   Above them, unseen by the earthly combatants,  Alliwishus watched ferocious spiritual warriors, the forces of Good and Evil.  Alliwishus knew only the prayers of the godly would shift the direction of the battle.

Something compelled him toward that war zone.  He would not, could not, back down.  Alliwishus clenched his fist.  "I simply must go, sir."

He could see that Santa was about to say "no" when a light started flashing on the headpiece Santa wore.  Santa put his finger to his earpiece and nodded.  With a look of surprise, he turned to Alliwishus and said, "Permission is granted.  The Master has called you to special duty."  Then with a nod of his head and with a twinkle of affection in his eye, Santa dismissed Alliwishus.  

        When the door closed behind the tiny elf, Santa mumbled to himself, "Such a great spirit for such a little being."

Alliwishus sighed in relief and then hurried back to the Reading Room where he grabbed his green quilted cape and carefully pulled his wings through the slits.  Then he rode the escalator up to the Telekinetic Teleport on the roof of the remodeled Workshop.  Before you could say "Rudolph" he was transported to the site of the German counterattack against the American troops. 

Insert picture of angels battling around Alliwishus and lightning bolt striking him down from the sky

The sight was so distressing that he did not notice the thunderbolt thrown by an Angel of Darkness that caught him in the left wing hurling him through the air.  Alliwishus tumbled down into the snow, his wing hanging uselessly behind him.  So this is pain, he thought.  This is what human beings fear so.  He winced.  In spite of the pain he felt closer than ever to those he'd come to serve.  Now he realized why the Master had felt he had to come to Earth as a man.

Lying there in the snow with a broken wing, in the middle of a bomb gutted village in France was not exactly the time to be philosophical, Alliwishus thought to himself.  But there was nothing to do except lie there until the monitors scanned him and help would be sent.

(Alliwishus did not realize that the Master did not rely on monitors.  For the service the Master had called him to, Alliwishus was exactly where he was supposed to be.)
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Jean and Commanding Officer
    Meanwhile, one of the American nurses who had landed at Cherbourg after the D-Day invasion the previous January was having a bad day as well.   Jean Gillis had been immediately assigned to a hospital train that traveled from the front lines back to Paris and then to Cherbourg to deliver injured soldiers to transport ships bound for England or America for more intensive care.  Not the romantic France of her teenage day dreams, she thought as she trudged through the snow back to her quarters after receiving the stiff tongue lashing from her superior.          

She had a few hours off so when an officer, King Kallen,  invited her to go for a ride, she accepted.  A motor cycle!  Being on a battlefield halfway around the world can make a South Alabama girl do things  she would have had sense enough not to do at home.  Even though she was wearing just about every piece of clothing the Army issued its nurses, she was still shivering.   Yet while speeding through the snow covered town,  for a few minutes there's was a  peace in her soul...a while to forget the war, the misery, the mangled men too young to die, and the unnamed heaviness.

They rode through the empty streets of the battle scarred village with the icy wind whipping their faces turning their eyelashes turn into icicles.  She smiled recklessly when King laughed as he booted the speed making her squeal.  "Just hang on tight," he teased.

"Stop this thing!  I want to get off!" she hollered, embarrassing herself with the high pitched squeal that followed.  King just gave a deep macho laugh and went faster.  "Hold on!"  When he turned his attention back to the road, he saw they were right on a puddle.  "Hang on!" he'd yelled as they hit the slush.  The motorcycle went out of control, immediately sending them into a slide.  Jean went flying off the motorcycle.  She tumbled over and over and landed right at the feet of Captain Chadwick, the head of nursing. 

Humiliated, she looked up at her commanding officer, totally unable to get up.  Bound as she was by layers of clothing all she could do was flutter like a turtle flipped on its back.  Captain Chadwick looked down her long patrician nose at her, that country bumpkin nurse under her command.  King rushed over to help while she fluttered helplessly and spun occasionally on the ice at Chadwick's feet.

"Don't touch me!" she'd told King Kallen as he tried to get a grip around her padded body and pull her to her feet.  How dare he get her in that situation just because he had to show off!  The Captain reached down to give her a hand with no trace of amusement or understanding on her face.

"Back to quarters, Lieutenant Gillis," the Captain ordered.  "On foot!"  

Bruised and embarrassed she waddled...waddled!!!...back toward the hotel in which she was quartered with as much dignity as her bruised and extremely well-padded body could muster.  It was because of the bruises and the care she took with her steps that she saw him. 

"Help!" came a tiny voice.  She stopped and looked around, but saw nothing.  "Down here."
            There, only inches from her army issue boots, lay a tiny creature with gossamer wings that shone brightly and then began to flicker.  Jean wiped her eyes, thinking snowflakes and her bumped head were causing her eyes to play tricks on her.  She blinked hard and when she looked back, the creature was still there, his eyes bright with pain.  Curious, she lifted him gently from the snow and brought him close to her face.  Lord help her if he didn't smile as if he knew her and nestle even more trustingly in the palm of her hand.  His eyes fluttered and closed.

What am I doing, she muttered to herself.  Nursing manuals don’t cover elves.  This is crazy.  They don’t cover them because they don’t exist! she reminded herself.  Then what is this warm light in my hand?  She looked around wondering if she looked as foolish as she felt.  Who would believe her if she were to ask for help from someone else?  Captain Callahan would have her committed to the mental ward.  She scurried through the darkness back to the nurses' quarters in the quaint hotel.  There she laid him on the examining table in the dispensary they had set up in one of the conference rooms.  All she could find was a tongue depressor to set his fragile wing.  

 He might not be real, but he certainly felt real in her hands and the pain on his face was real enough to pull at her heart.  "So, where do you come from, little one?"  she asked as he grimaced.  "And how does one tend to a fiction of one's imagination?"  Being in France in the middle of a war zone wasn't exactly the sanest thing she'd ever done any way you looked at it.  Besides, somehow, strange as it was, he seemed almost familiar.

Well, she’d just have to improvise. She grinned to herself.  The nuns, her teachers back at Saint Margaret's Hospital in Montgomery where she had trained in Nursing, had always thought she was crazy.  But even they had never dreamed she would presume to nurse an elf back to health.  He groaned so she crushed a granule of aspirin in a spoon and added a dash of Coke.  He licked his lips and went to sleep.   

What now, she thought?  If she left him and he rolled off the table someone might step on him.  There was nothing to do but carry him to her room.  There she placed him on a pile of gauze in her duffel bag.  She slept little that night worried about her vulnerable, very tiny, new friend.  But, the dull light around him grew brighter as the night wore on.

        The next morning she was supposed to set out for another tour on the hospital train.  She lifted the duffel as carefully as she could, the knot on her head throbbing.  Was she imagining . . . But, there on top of the sheets and towels in the duffel bag, glimmering away on a pile of gauze lay her strange encounter of the night before.  She secured the duffel in the corner of her assigned compartment on the train, which, luckily, she was to occupy alone. 

She did for him what she did for other patients, force fluids and make him as comfortable as possible.  They shared an aspirin.  With an eye dropper she gave him drops of Coca Cola.  He wrinkled his face at the unfamiliar taste, and then licked his lips, smacking to indicate his desire for more.

Jean giggled when he asked, "What nectar is this?  Is it from some flower I do not know?"

"No," she answered.  "A druggist invented this in his Columbus, Georgia, and served it at his soda fountain.  Folks from all over liked it so much somebody got the idea of bottling it." Sure and begorra, her Scots-Irish heritage was coming out.  Talking to the wee ones, she was.  No doubt if anyone walked past it would look as if she were talking to herself!

"We've never had it in the North Pole," he said.  His chubby little face wrinkled with pain so she gave him another granule of aspirin.  The strange light that surrounded him grew steadier as the odd little creature gained strength. 

The nurse closed the door to the compartment and hurried to join the nurses in checking the supplies for their run to the front lines.  She rubbed the knot on the back of her head.  Did he say North Pole?  She dared say nothing to the other nurses; they would think she had come down with battle fatigue and would put her in one of the beds their injured soldiers needed so badly.

A sharp pain shot through her head and she considered consulting a doctor herself.  A tiny elf from the North Pole sipping Coca Cola with aspirin and glowing stronger by the minute sounded like a hallucination.  There wasn't time, even if she was so inclined.  She had to make sure all the windows were covered and not a sliver of light showed.  The train had to be completely shrouded so that it would not be spotted and bombed.
    
        It took six hours to get to the front.  Then, with bombs exploding around them, they loaded patients, stacking stretchers in racks three patients high.  Those able to walk occupied compartments with seven other patients.  From the moment they loaded, she was busy administering what pain medicine they had, answering their cries for water, changing dressings . . . just trying to make them as comfortable as possible in the dark jolting train.

Several times she ran back to the compartment to give Alliwishus a dropper of the precious Coca Cola with a granule of aspirin.                                 

They later learned they  were smack dab in the middle of one the most vicious battles of World War II in Belgium...the Battle of the Bulge.  The worst cases were burns.  The Infantry had come to fear the flame throwers so much that they had trained Point Men who specialized in sneaking up behind the enemy flame throwers to choke them with a jerk of a neck.  Their fellow soldiers relied upon the instinct and quickness of the Point Men to protect them from the agonizing effects of the sudden burst of flames that could envelope an entire squadron.

 The only light on the train was in the beam of light from the flashlights carried by the nurses.  It was such a "torch" that Jean carried.  She did not realize it looked like a flame that Point Men were trained to zero in on.  

A Point Man's failure could mean death to his company.  Joey had seen his entire platoon destroyed just hours before.  He had jumped frantically into the midst of his burning friends to try and save them.  But it was impossible.  He only knew he lived...and they were dead.  The fact that he nothing he could have done would have saved them mattered.  He'd failed his friends and in his mind the shock of seeing his friends killed obliterated everything else.  

        Now he stood in the corridor waiting directly in front of the advancing torch.  His target had surprised them once.  He would not fail them again.

Jean walked down the corridor carrying medications to the men stacked in cots in the compartments.  The light pierced the Point Man's consciousness and all of his training focused itself on the source of the potential danger.  With each step danger came closer and closer in the disturbed mind of the soldier.

Stealthily, in spite of his grave burns and injuries, he rose to fulfill his mission.  Exhausted, Jean reached out to steady herself with the hand holding the flashlight as she swayed with the train while still balancing the tray in one hand.  Suddenly from the darkness appeared a grotesque face with clawlike hands reaching toward her, only inches from her neck.  She was frozen with fear and could not make a sound.

In her terror she saw a tiny glimmer of light beside the man's face.  Amazingly she heard the soft voice whisper, "Joey, Joey.  Time for bed, now.  Santa's on his way.  Joey's been a good boy and Santa knows about the train he wants for Christmas.  Sit and sleep."

Miraculously, the anger and fear that had contorted the man's face now relaxed into its natural boyish contours.  He couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen.  Yet only moments before the hate and rage of war had given him the look of the gargoyles carved into the Gothic cathedrals that dotted the country.  

       Jean leaned against the wall suddenly breathless.  The light came and rested upon her shoulder.  Alliwishus sighed deeply and said.  "He is one of my charges.  It is only recently that he quit writing me his letters.  His is one of the many voices that called me into this darkness," he told her sadly. 

The light flickered and the nurse knew his strength was waning.  "Thank you for coming when you did.  But, you're too weak to be up.  Let me take you back." Imaginary or not, her danger had been real, and this figment of her imagination, or Santa's elf, had saved her.

"Another drop of that strange nectar?" he whispered.

In spite of her fear she had to smile.  Strange thoughts whirled through her head.  But she was too busy to ask questions then and he was too weak to talk.

Later when they were settled again in the hotel where the nurses were quartered, both slept soundly for hours.  When she awoke she found Alliwishus sitting in the duffel flexing his uninjured wing.  "I can fly with only one wing as you saw last night.  It is terribly awkward and so I must exercise to build strength.  I am needed," he explained, distress and compassion clouding his ruddy cheeks.

At last she understood.  She would only have a short time to ask the many questions that seemed so important.  "Can you tell me about yourself?"

He continued his flexes as he answered, "My name is Alliwishus and I am in Santa Service."

"Santa Service?  Why . . . that's only make-believe."

        "Now, Jean," he said to her amazement, "you only quit believing when your father died when you were thirteen.  I have heard all your hopes and dreams sitting in the limbs of the Mimosa tree right outside your window.  I listen to prayers as well as read letters."  

Jean's emerald green eyes grew wide with amazement.  How could he know so much about her?

"But, what are you doing here?"  she asked when she finally could speak.

 “I was watching my charges around the world and knew the dangers around you. I was not paying attention to the dangers around me.”

Sadness clouded his face.  "It seems there is so little I can do.  Yet, as I did for Joey tonight, I can remind them of a Love that brings Peace.  Wars are won, not on the battlefields, but in the hearts of men.  If men can conquer the evil within themselves, then the collective evil of War need never be fought. Only Love can conquer the Darkness that would destroy the Master's own."

After Alliwishus accompanied her on a few more trips on the hospital train, he was well enough to leave. 

"You, your children, and your children's children are on my list.  Remind them to be very good.  They will never know when I'll be sitting outside their window," he told her.  "And please, leave some of that bottled nectar out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve!"  He winked and flew away.  

Picture: Grandmother with three children

         "Is Alliwishus watching us now, Grandmother?" asked Brooke  as she pulled her thumb from her mouth and wriggled to get more comfortable on her grandmother’s lap.

"I see him!  I see him!" her five year old brother, Drew, yelled jumping up and down in front of the picture window. 

"That was the Hannahan's car lights.  Wasn't it, Grandmother?" said Cecily, her mature seven year old granddaughter sitting on the stool at her feet.