The Stocking Stuffer: complete Meh-rathon story

The Stocking Stuffer: a Ghastly Christmas Meh-rathon

Dearest Mother,

I must warn you at the outset: this will, almost certainly, be the longest missive I have sent you since an unsigned letter bequeathed unto me this inn sitting atop a cliff overlooking an ever tumultuous sea, framed by ever gray skies. To put it simply, much has occurred in these weeks following Thanksgiving and preceding Christmas, and that is without even considering the necessary context, some of it going back years, which I shall lay bare at the outset.

My only steadfast employee, Hugo, returns to his home each year to partake in his family’s holiday banquet. Since my overtaking of operations, he has always promised to be gone a maximum of three days, only to return no earlier than mid-December. He has the allotted sick and vacation time to take these absences each year, and also keeps in correspondence so that I understand he has not abandoned his post outright. Still, his annual disappearance amounts to some frustration on my end as I must take his duties into my own workload.

I asked him once if traveling during the season of inclement weather might be the reason for his tardy returns. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, his parents live somewhere remote and prone to snow and ice? But Hugo assured me that it had nothing to do with this. “The only storm fronts I must confront upon my return home,” he told me once, “are those of the mind.”

Hugo, I have come to learn, is an only child. Moreover, he was homeschooled. Starting when he was ten, his parents began a series of accelerated correspondence courses, each of them earning, in the course of the following eight years, four doctorates. This, they thought, allowed them to continue homeschooling Hugo through college and even grant him an unofficial master’s. The veracity of this schooling, I cannot claim to know. I once asked if his parents’ degrees came from an accredited university, and he assured me that, first of all, it was pronounced ‘accelerated’ and that yes, his parents’ schools had augmented the course of study with speed in mind. This conversation did not reassure me as to the quality of his education.

Really, though, that is neither here nor there. Suffice it to say, Hugo spent an inordinate amount of time with his parents in his youth, and his leaving at the age of thirty brought about great strife within his household.

As such, whenever he returns, thus re-completing their family, it brings about such ecstasy in his mother and father that they attempt to entrap him.

One year, Hugo’s mother claimed wrist pain of such intensity that she could only chop one vegetable each day. As such, she explained, Thanksgiving would have to be delayed indefinitely until she could reach the end of her work. His father, she said, could not help due to an oversensitive tear duct. Just being near a chopped onion would cause, in her words, “a pain like fruitless childbirth” under his lower lids.

Hugo, of course, volunteered to help his mother, but she refused to let him near the knives, despite his protestations that he, an adult, often helped out within the kitchen at the inn. (Which, I should add, is truthful; he is of great assistance to our culinary staff, though he did, once after peeling squash, go to the emergency room, fearing the taut quality his skin took on after touching the squash’s flesh to be a condition that required medical attention.)

One night during this stay, around 1am, he heard cheers from the basement. Going down, he found his mother and father engaged in an intense game of table tennis. His mother showed none of the wrist strain present in the kitchen, but when Hugo confronted her about this, both of his parents simply laughed in a condescending way. The wrist is a complicated instrument, his mother explained, and she would know whether something might hurt it further or not; after all, one of her mail-based doctorates had been in sports medicine.

Another year, Hugo told me that his father, who had at least one advanced degree in a horticultural field, took Hugo for a hike around the woods adjoining their property. They came upon several rocky features, and each time, Hugo’s father identified the variety of moss growing upon them.

As the hike went on, Hugo commented that there was no need to keep at this; it all amounted to one or two common variations. He realized his mistake a moment later. His father seized upon this. It was a tragedy that his only child in the whole world could visit home and see such boring moss. He would therefore not, he declared, permit Hugo to leave the premises until they found a more interesting moss.

They hiked for days and days, doing loops, his father feigning disappointment at each unsuccessful trip. Making matters worse, Hugo had not packed particularly good shoes for the outings. His father shrugged this off, informing his son that there was a pair of his old hiking boots in the closet of his room. That his feet had grown roughly two inches since he last wore these seemed to perplex his parents. “Just like with the knives, they ain’t view me as more than a boy, even still,” he told me. Either way–with his tennis shoes of appropriate size or his hiking boots that cramped his toes–he would get blisters.

Adding insult to injury, they dined each lunch and dinner on Thanksgiving leftovers, his mother having prepared a feast that could feed a family five times their size. Not only did Hugo clomp along with upset belly; his father insisted upon leading these jaunts, leaving Hugo to follow in his wake, finding the air oft befouled. He only managed to free himself, he told me, by securing a shaving from the cat, dying it to the appropriate hue of a rare moss found only in Portugal, and adhering it to a stone in the woods with a strong glue late one night under the cover of darkness. The next day, Hugo pointed it out, and though his father was suspicious, he eventually relented and allowed Hugo to return to his adult life.

And here I seem to have fulfilled my own prophecy! So it goes that when one anticipates a lengthy letter-writing session, one finds oneself forsaking thrift in one’s word count, even as one provides little more than exposition.

All this adds up to a simple fact: Hugo, otherwise reliable, could not be counted upon during these weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, anticipating it this year, I simply gave him the weeks off and decided to hire a temporary employee to work in his place.

(When I told him this, Hugo expressed great relief. “You show a great deal about yourself by approaching this predicament with kindness,” he told me, and made a point to contrast this with the previous proprietor’s approach to his annual absence. When I pressed him on how my predecessor handled things such as this, Hugo went white as a sheet and said something about how “he had a way of using the weather to show his displeasure.” So perhaps he put Hugo on snow-shoveling duty when he returned? I cannot say; he speaks so peculiarly sometimes.)

This temporary employee’s name was Ollie, and he stood of quite a diminutive stature. He worked in the toy industry for most of the year, his employment history claims, but had this period of the year free. When I joked that the holiday season would be a strange time for someone working in toys to be seeking temporary employment elsewhere, he grew serious and explained that he worked on the production side, and he completed much of his work well before the fall, at which point the packaging department took over to prepare items for delivery.

He provided only one reference, but, perhaps arrogantly, said that he needed no more. The man who could vouch for him, he assured me, held a great deal of power, not only in their company (whatever it was) but outside it, too. People the world over relied on him a great deal, Ollie said, and even went so far as to render their homes into shrines to him for a month out of each year.

A bit of hyperbole I had to imagine, made all the more dubious by the fact that I could not exactly read the name as Ollie wrote it. He did not possess a physician’s hand, mind you. If anything, his letters appeared overly ornate, displaying a childish embellishment (an extension of his person, I should say, with his rosy cheeks, his curly hair, his ears coming almost to a point, and his almost cherubic looks despite being, according to his application, nearly sixty years old).

Rather, he had written the letters with a number of curious slants and serifs, turning it into one of those pictures that transforms as the viewer changes their angle of appreciation. At first, I swore it said ‘Nicolas.’ Then, after a blink, it appeared to be ‘Christopher.’ A third study revealed something like ‘Weihnachtsmann.’ (I did not bother looking that up, as it is clearly a nonsense word created by my mind.)

The area code of the provided phone number I had never seen before. But I will say, while I rolled my eyes at Ollie’s bravado in discussing his employer initially, speaking to the man, my opinion changed almost instantaneously. It is hard to explain. His voice carried within it a unique sense of authority: an oddly stern joviality that seemed to short-circuit my thinking. The topic of our conversation was to be Ollie. He was the one who needed to make a good impression via the telling of his supervisor. And yet, I found myself eager to please this man over the phone. Or, not exactly please him, but make a good impression. I wanted him to think of me as ‘nice.’ This impression seemed absolutely necessary, as did the inverse need, not to be thought of as ‘naughty.’

(Again, these two words seemed imperative. I did not seek to be considered ‘professional’ or ‘intelligent’ or ‘discerning,’ nor did I worry about being perceived as ‘rude’ or ‘unkind’ or ‘frivolous.’ As I spoke to this man whose name I could not exactly say, I concerned myself only with being ‘nice’ and not ‘naughty.’ The only possible explanation I can come up with for this is latter, sillier word is that, I settled for whatever reason on wanting to be ‘nice,’ a completely normal attitude to seek, and then the other presented itself due to the mind’s natural inclination towards alliteration.)

At any rate, Ollie’s employer assured me of his good work ethic and said that it would likely do him well to get “out of the cold.” (A bit odd, really; the inn is not exactly located in the tropics.)

So I took him on, and he immediately showed his reference to be in the right. I asked him to help hang ornaments for the coming holiday, and he leapt at the opportunity. Oddly enough, I did not even need to tell him where I stored the decorations; no sooner had the assignment been given than Ollie rushed to work, stringing up garlands and bells and lights. Each surface became a miniature village, each doorway a vessel for mistletoe. Some of these knick-knacks, I will admit, appeared unfamiliar to me.

More to the point of my story, though, he installed several stockings within the guests’ rooms. This, he said, was his speciality. (Again, he said earlier that he worked in the toy-making department of his company, but now claimed an expertise in decorative hosiery. This, though, could have been my own shortcoming as an interviewer. I had not discussed with his reference the nature of Ollie’s work, so obsessed was I with impressing the jolly spirit on the other line–this word, ‘jolly,’ like ‘nice’ and ‘naughty,’ imprints itself upon my mind as essential in describing him for reasons I cannot fully explain.)

Given the hotel’s age, many of the rooms possess fireplaces, but, of course, with modern safety concerns, we cannot allow our visitors to light a fire themselves. As such, they have become ornamental, visual features without function.

I will add: they are all sealed. This had to be carried out due to repeated complaints from multiple guests that there often came from them a cold draft, even during the height of summer. On some days, this could be seen as a positive, but the guests who complained also mentioned the draft brought with it a series of, as they described, musical notes, the sound of someone whistling. Peculiarly, they often whistled it to me, and all of them managed, to the best of their ability, to whistle the same tune. I imagine it came from a popular television program or film and floated this theory to Hugo, doing my best imitation of the song. He became concerned and muttered something about a lovesick chimney sweep who, when spurned, stepped from the top of the building. (He did not mention the title of whatever this came from, and anyway, it did not sound like anything I would be interested in, so I did not ask for it.)

Even sealed, the fireplaces continue to provide their fair share of problems. Now, the complaint is that, from behind the plate, there comes a knocking noise late at night. This time, the guests who complain all make sure to note the rhythm of this knocking, each one replicating the last almost perfectly. Once again, this brought to Hugo’s mind some story or another that he had witnessed on page or screen, this one about an old woman trapped in a wood-burning furnace. It sounded, if you will allow me to be judgmental, even worse than the other, and I expressed as much to Hugo, asking where he found such drivel. Hugo did not understand the question to be rhetorical and answered that, in fact, that was the whole point: he found nothing but a scorched clog among the ash. It can be so difficult talking to someone who does not seem to hear what you are saying!

But again, I have, it seems, taken for granted the permission I gave myself at the outset of this; allowing myself excess length, I have lost the thread once more. It is not Hugo but Ollie who sits at the center of the happenings of these past few weeks. So I will return to him.

The point of my digression about fireplaces was to say that Ollie located these rooms containing them and managed, in the time following the previous occupant’s departure and before the next’s arrival, to hang stockings over each one.

And they were beautiful stockings. All of the guests admired them.

More to the point: many admired what they found within them.

One man, a marine biologist on holiday with his new wife, found the perfectly preserved skeleton of a creature long believed by those in his field to be a myth: something no bigger than a juvenile trout that was said, by sea farers of the distant past, to melee fearlessly with sharks and other much larger predators by swimming directly into their mouths and attacking them from within. The man told me excitedly as he checked out that no one had ever seen the so-called ‘David fish’ (in contrast to the shark’s ‘Goliath’) before, but the skeleton’s bone structure and fin placement matched ancient diagrams perfectly.

This was, he sputtered while holding his wife tightly to his side, a boon for his career as well as his marriage. His plans for the coming year had involved encamping to a remote island on which he might conduct some research. He would have to travel there on his own, the outpost having neither the room nor the amenities to accommodate family. Given these constraints, he would miss the birth of his firstborn child, as the couple had learned, the day before their arrival, that they were expecting. Now, with this skeleton, he could do his work at home, staying close without detriment to his professional trajectory.

Another guest found a similarly fantastic treasure within her stocking: a small watch. Not nearly as rare as the fish skeleton, it was nonetheless beautiful. Moreover, it had been set with an alarm, one that went off in the night, waking the woman just in time to roll over, look out the window, whose curtains she had left open, and see a shooting star through a rare break in the cloud cover. The wish occurred to her, she confided in me at checkout, and she made it without a second thought: to reconnect with a friend with whom she had fallen out of touch decades ago. Where this desire came from, and why this friend in particular, she had no idea. It just seemed right, and she went to sleep content.

The next afternoon, when she came down for a cocktail at the bar, she saw something surprising: there, checking in, was none other than this exact friend. Though it had been many years since they had seen each other, they recognized one another immediately. The friend told her that she had awoke in the middle of the night with a sense that she had been summoned, for some reason, to this very inn, the name emblazoned onto her mind. She imagined it to be a dream, but when she looked it up and found it actually existed, she came right away.

The two spent the next three days reconnecting and building up a bond so long dormant.

A third pair of guests, still, a brother and sister who must have been in their eighth decade of life, found themselves in rooms at opposite ends of the inn, each with a fireplace. It turned out their distance within the building had not been accidental. After an incident nearly a half-century ago, their relationship had never been the same. It had something to do with a broken vase, a dachshund, and an arrangement of daffodils. Or perhaps the dachshund’s name was Daffodil? Truthfully, when they told me the story upon checkout, they spoke over each other so joyously, I could not retain all of the details.

What was important was this: the incident, which they had not discussed since its occurrence, had driven a wedge into their relationship, one that would have severed ties completely were they not siblings. As such, being the last of their immediate family, they felt an obligation to see each other near the holidays, but the idea of one hosting the other left them both wary. Hence, they found some neutral ground, saw each other for the requisite number of days, and then departed for the comforts of home, feeling as if they had fulfilled society’s requirement of visiting with one’s family in November or December.

Only, after the first evening, they each awoke with the stockings over their respective fireplaces full. The brother found within his a cassette tape. The sister received a cassette player. This seemed fateful enough that they combined the two gifts, listening to his cassette on her player. Both knew the song: it had been playing on the radio when the incident occurred. (I now wonder if the vase, the dog, and the flowers could have been lyrics in the song; such was my confusion with their jittery telling.) This forced them, for the first time in years, to discuss what had happened, at which point they realized each had misunderstood the circumstances.

(There was something about a clove of garlic, an odd smell, a rickety step ladder, maybe?)

At any rate, by setting the record straight, they had thawed the long freeze of their familial love and left with plans for a longer holiday at one of their homes the next year and perhaps even a cruise in between.

Of course, all of this brought some joy to me as the proprietor of the inn. A career in the hospitality industry is nothing if not the act of providing others with a canvas upon which to paint their memories. But something disturbed me: if all these guests awoke after an evening’s rest and found their stockings to bear gifts, it meant someone would have to enter their rooms while they slept to deposit said gifts. And while the outcomes had been positive, and no one reported anything stolen, the act still represented an enormous breach of privacy.

Ollie did not possess a set of keys; he had made his rounds depositing the stockings with the cleaning staff, who all had great things to say about his disposition and work ethic. Moreover, he worked days.

So, instead of talking to him, I turned my attention to Gabriella. A local girl with dreams of becoming a novelist, she works at the front desk overnight, a job that benefits both of us. I need someone on hand for those who arrive late, but the role is, I will admit, boring, as there is very little to do beyond a few chores that will not fill the entirety of the eight-hour shift. As such, I had quite the time retaining people for it until Gabriella came along. The long nights give her time to work on her manuscript. Moreover, she says she finds great inspiration in the setting. (Based on this, I imagine she writes romance. What else would a cozy inn inspire? Also, she once named a writer who inspired her, and while I had never heard of the person, they certainly sounded like a romance writer. After all, with a name like ‘Lovecraft,’ what else would you write? A pen name, I imagine, and if I dare say, a bit on the nose!)

I did not want to alarm Gabriella by mentioning a potential intruder, so I simply asked if she had noticed any strange happenings during one of her shifts, to which she responded by asking how much time I had. So it goes with youth! Every conversation must be entirely random and ironic!

At any rate, I eventually got her on subject. As a matter of fact, she had noticed something.

She often sat in such a position, slouched with her notebook in her lap, that those who entered the lobby would walk past the desk without seeing her. The shape of the desk, however, somewhat inexplicably allowed her full view of the room even while seated like this. And so, she had been able to observe (while going unobserved) as a man wandered in with an enormous gift and placed this under the Christmas tree in the lobby’s corner. He had then, over the course of the next hour, brought down three other guests, one at a time. According to Gabriella, the man spoke easily with these people, and many of them shared certain of his features. Mentions of ‘mummy’ and ‘papa’ and ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ and ‘cousin so-and-so’ cemented her perception: these were family members.

The topic of the three separate conversations constituted variations on a theme; each family member the man brought to the lobby wanted to know why he had dragged them here to this miserable hotel, to which he always replied something like, “You shall know in mere moments!”

(I pause here to say that Gabriella used the word ‘miserable’ to describe the inn a bit too freely. Even if, as she claimed, she were only repeating what she heard, it seemed unnecessary. Just because the inn is framed by ever-gray skies and overlooking an ever-tumultuous sea does not make it ‘miserable.’)

Now, as Gabriella tells it, she did not want to eavesdrop so blatantly, hidden as she may be. Thus, each time the man led someone into the lobby, it piqued her interest, but she quickly turned her attention back to her notebook. As such, she saw him enter with a relative and then saw him exit, each time, alone, but she had no idea how he had become uncoupled in the meantime. After all, there had been no sounds of argument or even polite good-byes exchanged that she could hear. They walked in, chatting in a friendly way. The chatter grew harder to follow as they moved away from her desk towards the tree. A moment later, the man left by himself. At the conclusion of the third meeting, he brought the gift box with him.

Maybe, she thought, the others had gone outside? But if they did, she did not see them re-enter the inn before her shift ended. It did not bother her, though. Another weird occurrence in, as she put it, a veritable parade of weird occurrences.

But when this ritual continued into a second night, she decided upon a bit of impolite behavior: she made a point of watching it all unfold. What she saw confounded her. The man brought another relative in, again talking in the same casual manner as the night before. This time, the topic seemed to have been about a sister. Where had she gone off to for the whole day? Could she be laid up in her room, sick from too many of the bar’s abysmal martinis?

(Here I must have made a face, because Gabriella again delegated blame for her word choice to the guest.)

As they spoke, they wandered across the lobby and came to the gift, which the initial guest had replaced under the tree. He lifted the lid off the box, and his companion peered in curiously, cocking his head to the side, suddenly somewhat off balance, and asking what exactly it was he was meant to see. The initial guest, who himself did not look down into the box, responded (and Gabriella felt it necessary to clarify that this was not a paraphrase but his exact utterance): “Absolutely nothing.”

Continued in comments…