The Christmas Miracle

“Is this Heaven?”, she wondered, gazing up from her back at the multicolored stars, moving and twinkling in the night sky. She closed her eyes for a long moment but when she opened them the stars were still there. Were there stars in heaven? She didn’t know if heaven had stars, but if it did, they would HAVE to look like these. But alas, these stars refused to indulge in her idle wonderings so she sat up and looked around. She was seated on the roof of some metal boxlike moving car. She looked behind her and saw that her car was attached to another car and another and…oh it was a train. She was sitting on the roof of a caboose at the end of a train. How did she get here? Where was here? She looked to her right and saw colorful but strangely shaped hills and mountains. Glancing to her left showed her that the train was passing by a small winter town. She could see little homes and stores and a town hall with people ice skating in front of it on a frozen pond. The stores and houses were covered in snow and a blanket of snow lay on the ground. It all seemed very nostalgic and homey. She wasn’t cold, which was weird with all the snow around the train and her wearing just jeans and a sleeveless shirt. She needed to get off this roof and figure out where she was and what was going on. Especially if this wasn’t heaven she reasoned. There was a short ladder at the end of the caboose that led from the roof to a railed landing where someone could stand and watch the train tracks until they faded away. She was able to negotiate this without too much trouble, although her hands and feet felt weird. Maybe it was from laying on the roof in the cold for so long. Maybe. She stood before an old painted wooden door that led into the caboose. Steeling her nerve, she opened the door and stepped inside. The caboose wasn’t very large and was pretty sparsely decorated. There was nothing on the walls and only a bright lantern shining on a wooden table near a couple old wooden chairs. She was startled to realize that one chair was occupied by someone. He turned towards her at the sound of the door opening and gave her a smile as she entered. “Hi”, he said. He was dressed in military gear, and she gasped as she realized he was missing the bottom of his right leg. He was a soldier, she reasoned. “Umm, hi”, she said aloud. She winced at her voice. Is that the way she really sounded? It wasn’t at all how she sounded in her head. He grinned, seeming to read her thoughts. “Welcome to the Christmas Miracle”, he stated. Tilting her head, she asked, “What? “What do you mean Christmas Miracle?”

He smiled at her warmly and held out his hand, “you can call me Joe”.

She took his hand and shook it. “I’m……I’m……I actually can’t quite remember who I am”, she said quizzically. “Do I have amnesia?” “Why don’t I know who I am?”, she asked Joe.

“It’s OK,” said Joe. “I’m sure it will come back to you soon.” “The same thing happened to me”. He pulled the other chair out from the table and gestured to it. “Have a seat and we will see if we can fill in some of the holes in your memory.”

She looked at the chair and then at Joe. He smiled reassuringly at her again. She decided she didn’t really have any better options and slowly slid into the old wooden chair. Facing him she fidgeted and asked again, “What is this Christmas Miracle you mentioned?”

Joe pointed out the window at the town passing by, “Just watch out the window for a good two or three minutes and tell me what you see.”

She sighed and focused her gaze outside. It looked like they were leaving some open space and passing by another town. The train wasn’t moving exceptionally fast she noted but it didn’t seem like it was slowing down to stop in the towns they passed either. She watched as they went past a town that seemed eerily familiar to the last one. Houses, Shops, and again a town hall with an ice pond in front of it. She shook her head and glanced at Joe. He was watching her with a knowing look on his face. She looked back out the window and saw that they had left the town and were back to just a snowy landscape. “What is…”, she started.

“Just keep watching”, he interrupted her with a smirk.

She turned her attention back to the outside feeling just a little miffed at Joe for his secretive looks. After a short bit it seemed like they were starting to pass another town. She shook her head in disbelief as she realized it was exactly the same as the last town. “What the heck is going on here Joe?", she demanded.

“Look closer at the people”, he advised.

She looked closer and stiffened, seeing something that her mind had refused to see previously. The people weren’t alive. They were set up like decorations to the town. And the houses and shops…they weren’t real either. She felt her stomach drop as she lurched to her feet and looked out the other side of the caboose at the mountains. She focused and REALLY looked. The odd shaped mountains and hills weren’t mountains and hills either. They were…were…PRESENTS. Things suddenly clicked into place in her mind. Presents, snowy town, muti-colored stars overhead, train. She was on a Christmas train under a Christmas tree. Her legs started to collapse, and she would have fallen if Joe hadn’t been ready for it and caught her, lowering her gently into the chair. “How could this be?”, she asked herself. "How could she fit", she stopped that thought and looked at herself. Her jeans and sleeveless top were painted on. She looked at Joe and noticed what seemed odd to her at first, but her mind had glossed over. He was plastic. She was plastic. She was a plastic toy. With this knowledge all the fog lifted from her mind, and she remembered. She remembered her name. It was Alexis. And she remembered Rebekah. Rebekah was her little girl. Alexis came in the doll house that Rebekah got last year when she was four. But Rebekah’s mother was afraid that Alexis was too small and a “choking hazard”, so she set her aside and she was forgotten. She hoped for the day that Rebekah was old enough to play with her without danger. She remembered all this in a fraction of a second and looked at Joe in wonder.

“Christmas Miracle”, Joe said hesitantly to her.

“Christmas Miracle”, she agreed. “But why? How?” “Is it just us?” “My name is Alexis by the way, I remember now”, she said.

“I haven’t seen anyone else alive and moving, so yeah, I guess so”, Joe stated and shrugged. “Do you remember anything else Alexis?”

She closed her eyes and thought. The first thing she remembered was waking up and looking at the pretty multi-colored stars…I guess lights she now knew. Before that was fuzzy. She dug deeper in her memories. She thought of Rebekah’s face. Her smile and her laugh that made Alexis warm inside. The fog slowly cleared, and she remembered she was laying in the carpet under the couch. She had been there awhile, but she had a nice view of the living room where Rebekah played so Alexis was fine with it. She was glad that Rebekah’s mom didn’t vacuum under the couch too often, well hardly ever. She also remembered a round man dressed in red who picked her up from under the couch and placed her on the roof of the caboose. He had put a finger to his lips in a shushing motion and winked at her. He then whispered, “Every toy has a purpose,” and disappeared. She looked at Joe in triumph. “I remember it all now”. “I just don’t know what my purpose is”, she admitted.

As she said this, she noticed they passed a bright red light glowing in the snowy landscape outside of the town. “What is that light”, she asked Joe.

“I’m not sure”, he said. “I’ve noticed it the last few times we have circled around the back of the tree”. “It seems brighter than the last time we passed it though”.

They waited for the train to make another loop around the tree. It was hard to gauge time but seemed to only take about two minutes to make a full circle. As they passed the light this time, they were able to see that a strand of the tree lights had fallen and was laying in the white snowy looking tree skirt. The one red light bulb seemed brighter that the others as it lay against the white material.

“Is that safe”, she asked Joe? “Do the lights get hot”?

“I don’t really know”, Joe replied. Maybe we should keep an eye on it for a few times around. They noticed with each trip around the tree, the red light seemed to get just a little bit brighter. On the last trip, Alexis noticed that a very small amount of smoke seemed to be coming from the light.

“Did you see that”, she asked in a panicked voice? “What are we going to do”? She shook Joe’s arm, “you are a soldier…think of something”!

“What can we do”, Joe stated. “We are just small plastic toys”. “I don’t think anyone could hear us if we scream for help”, he said helplessly.

“You are right, we ARE plastic”. And she remembered the words of the man in the red suit, “Every toy has a purpose”. She looked at Joe, “I know what we have to do”. “But we have to jump off the train and get to the red light”.

Joe looked at Alexis for a long moment. “Well, if you let me lean on you a bit, I think I can make it”. She smiled, helping him to his feet and out the door to the landing in the back of the caboose. They waited as the train made the circuit towards the back of the tree where the red light was even brighter and seemed to be smoldering. Alexis put her arm around Joe’s waist. “Ready”, she asked him? “As ready as I can be”, he joked.

“One”

“Two”

“Three…JUMP”, she cried!

They jumped and rolled into a tangled heap just beyond the train tracks. Alexis groaned and pulled herself to her feet.

“Let’s not do that again anytime soon, I almost lost a foot", Joe quipped. They gathered themselves, with Alexis putting her shoulder under Joe’s to let him lean some of his bad weight on her. They slowly made their way towards the red light across the white skirt. As they neared it, they could see the light had started to blacken and smolder on the white material, suddenly bursting into flame. They stopped, both looking at the growing flames with open mouthed horror.

Alexis took Joe by the arms and turned to face him. “It’s time Joe”, she said resolutely. “There WAS a reason for this Christmas Miracle, and every toy has a purpose”.

Joe leaned in and hugged her, whispering, “thank you for sharing my Miracle and you would have made a good soldier”.

Alexis took Joe’s hand and together, hand in hand, they stepped into the growing fire. Immediately their paint started to blacken and blister. Then their plastic skin began to bubble and melt, sending dark black smoke up towards the ceiling. Alexis didn’t feel any physical pain, but it was hard to watch her body melt and come apart. Every instinct in her told her to run…run from the fire. But she held the picture of Rebekah’s face in her mind and felt the grip of Joe’s hand in hers as her body was lost to the flames. The dark black smoke of their plastic bodies drifted towards the ceiling and as Alexis’s thoughts started to fade, she was rewarded by the sound she was waiting to hear. The sound of the smoke detectors going off and the calls of the voices of the family in alarm. Rebekah would be safe now. She was thankful for her purpose in the Christmas Miracle.