At the North Pole there is one night a year when the post does not stop. It is the night after St Nicholas Day, when the boots in every house have been emptied and the children realise that Christmas is really coming. Then they write. All of them. At once.
Birk, the oldest post gnome there ever was, knew this. Since September he had sewn sacks, carved stamps and dipped candles. Even so, that night he stood before a mountain of letters taller than the post hut. Luna, his owl, sat on the roof looking worried, as far as owls can look worried.
“We will not manage,” said Birk, which he had never said in a hundred years. Luna did not answer. She never answered. But she flew off, over the mountains, and when she came back she held in her talons a gnome girl who was protesting very loudly: Mille.
“You can sort,” said Birk, instead of a greeting. Mille, who had never flown on an owl before and never wanted to again, looked at the mountain. Then she rolled up her sleeves. Sorting she could do. At home she sorted buttons, pebbles and her little sister’s moods.
They sorted by country, then by town, then by street. Birk stamped, Mille stacked, Luna carried sack after sack out into the snow where the sleighs were waiting. Around midnight they found a letter with no address. Only a picture: a red house, a tree, a cat. “I know that one,” said Mille quietly.
It was Lea’s letter. Lea could not write yet, so she had drawn, and what she had drawn was her home, with a tiny red door at the skirting board. Mille slipped the letter into her jacket pocket. Some post, she thought, has to be answered in person.
When the mountain had become a hill and the hill a pile, the sun rose, which at the North Pole in December means that it got a tiny bit less dark. Birk sat down on an empty sack. “That was the longest night,” he said. “And the best,” said Mille, surprised to find she meant it.
Luna carried her home, more gently this time. Back in the hallway Mille slid Lea’s picture under her door and laid a letter beside it: I got your picture. It arrived. Everything arrives. In the morning Lea found it, and although she could not read, she knew exactly what it said.
