The Clara Kringle Story
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 The Fir Tree Snowflake Letters Workshop Crystal Star Heart of the Tree
Chapter 2 - Snowflake
Woods Outside Santa's Village - 1974
The morning began like a hush you could hold.
Clara woke before the bell in the kitchen and before the first stove door clanged open. The window above her quilt was flocked with delicate frost—ferns and feathers, spirals and stars—and through the pale pane she could see that a night of steady snowfall had smoothed the world into clean curves. Santa’s Village liked to get up early, but the square would be slow today: powder this light invited careful steps and long breaths, not bustling.
Clara slid from bed and set her feet on the braided rug. The room was cool enough to bite, but it felt good on her ankles; it made her toes wake up. She pulled a thick sweater over her nightdress, then paused at the sill and tapped a fingernail to the glass. The frost patterns chimed in a way that wasn’t a sound so much as a feeling, like a crystal answering its own name.
“Good morning,” she whispered.
Behind her, the house stretched and settled. Somewhere below, Mrs. Claus—Merry Lou—coughed in the way she did when she stoked the oven, a little soot in her lungs and a lot of cheer in her hum. There were voices out in the lane, too, muffled by snow; a True Elf laughing, a sled runner squeaking, a dog’s soft huff. Clara listened for the note she’d noticed since she was little: the village had a tone to it, a low, round sound like a bell still ringing. The Great Fir Tree in the square sang the clearest—slow and patient—but everything joined: chimneys and awnings, the north wind around the eaves, the stack of wood by the kitchen door. Clara had always heard it. She didn’t know how not to.
She dressed quickly and laced her boots. On the sill, a single snowflake had landed and stuck to the inside of the glass. It was perfect. Not a smear or a clump, not just a suggestion, but a whole star: sharp arms, half a dozen branches per spoke, each branch split and split again into tinier mirrors. It seemed improbable that something so small could be so exact. Clara leaned close until her breath fogged the pane, then held her breath to keep from melting it.
“Are you staying?” she asked the snowflake. She really meant: Please don’t go yet.
It didn’t melt. It glittered instead in a very slow way, as if answering I can, for a little.
Clara smiled. “Then…come with me?”
The snowflake didn’t move, of course. But something about it—its steadiness, maybe—settled in her chest like a promise.
She left a note on the kitchen table under a ceramic sugar bowl shaped like a polar bear: Gone for a walk in the fresh snow. I’ll be careful. —Clara She added a small drawing of a pine bough because her mother liked drawings. Then she pulled a red cap down over her hair, wrapped a scarf twice around her neck, and slipped out the side door.
The air outside was the kind that tasted blue: cold and bright without being harsh. Dawn was only a pale thought behind the mountains, and the square lay undisturbed except for a few careful paths. The Great Fir Tree rose out of the white like a ship at sea, its lower boughs frosted thick. Deckhands of elves would be along later to shake free the snow where the lights needed checking, but for now every needle hid a spark.
Clara stood a moment with her mittened hand on the bark. The Great Fir’s song was a tone she felt in her sternum, a slow O that never finished. The tree didn’t speak in words, exactly, but it kept time with things; it made everything around it agree. You could stand beside it and learn the day’s rhythm if you were patient.
“Good morning,” she told it. “I’m going out a little.”
The O became a slightly different O, the way you’d answer mm.
Clara laughed, took two hopping steps backward, and then she was off—through the quiet square and past the bakery where the roofline was a soft white pillow, down the lane where the icicles caught early light, and then up and out beyond the last fence. Here the village ended and the soft scrub began, low hedges and sled paths winding into the wider white. The snow out here was still untouched: a skin of sugar that sighed when you pressed into it.
She chose no path at first. She didn’t need one. The ground told her where it bent and what it hid. She stepped light and even, letting the snow discover her as much as she discovered it. In the distance, the low hills were drawn like sleeping seals. The sky was so pale it looked like the inside of a shell.
One hillside over, the village dropped out of sight. That was the first new thing. The second was the quiet—not the absence of sound, but a texture of it: the way wide white spaces have their own voice. The third was the snow itself.
Clara hadn’t noticed at first because snow is easy to take for granted when you grow up with it. But out here, she could see its thoughtfulness. The drifts piled in ways that made sense; the wind had combed them, not at random, but in lines that curled and spoke to each other like handwriting. The little hollows between hummocks weren’t just scoops; they were careful bowls for seeds and sleep. And every time the light shifted, the surface revealed a map of tiny ridges, each one a spelling of something she didn’t know how to read yet.
She knelt and brushed a glove across that ridged skin, and the skin answered like a harp. A high shimmer, a whisper like glass dust sliding into place. The tone climbed up her arm and into her cheekbones and then into her head, where it settled between her eyes and asked—without words—Do you hear me now?
“Yes,” she said aloud, and grinned at the echo.
She began to follow the lines.
They weren’t trails exactly; more like agreements between wind and the lay of the land. Here a crease turned gentle. There a feathered ridge pointed like a finger. Clara moved with those nudges, feeling the way a good skater feels ice. She veered once, twice, then again, letting the curves teach her knees, until she came to a place where a cluster of scrub pines rose from the snow like a family gathered to talk.
The pines were younger than the Great Fir by far, but they knew things too. Their song was higher and thinner and it trembled when the breeze said something funny. Clara pressed her ear to a warm spot on the sun-side bark and closed her eyes. Sap moved far within. Branches hummed where it was good to be a branch today. The pines liked the snow because snow was a good listener. The snow liked the pines because pines were storytellers. That was the feeling of it. When she opened her eyes, a tiny drift collapsed in a sigh at her boot.
“Bless you,” she told it. And then she laughed at herself, because you couldn’t bless a drift, or perhaps you could and it would take the blessing seriously.
A flick of something bright caught the corner of her eye.
Clara stilled, turned her head slowly. The bright thing wasn’t in the pines; it was hanging in the air just beyond them, where the land fell a little, like a curtain lifted by a hand. It wasn’t a bird—the motion was wrong. It wasn’t a leaf—wrong color and wrong time. It wasn’t a spark from a chimney. It was…a bit of light that wasn’t interested in falling.
The bright thing noticed her noticing. It hid.
Not behind a branch, exactly. More as if it rotated, and by rotating, it found a place in space that didn’t line up with where Clara’s eyes were looking. It was an odd sensation, like seeing someone step sideways into a narrow hallway that wasn’t there a moment ago.
Clara didn’t move. She smiled in a small way that said you can come back when you like, and rather than stare at the bright place, she looked again at the snow, at the pines, at her boots. She hummed—not a tune she knew, but a kind of slow mm-mm in the key that the Great Fir loved.
The bright thing peeped out. A small face watched her from the edge of the place-in-between.
If Clara had to describe that face later, she would say it was like the tip of a star that had decided to be a person: all quick eyes and edges, small and exact. The being attached to it was the size of a hand-span and no more, with fine, translucent wings that didn’t so much flap as correct themselves. A few grains of shimmering dust hung in the air beneath those wings, rising and falling as if they were deciding whether to be snow or not-snow.
“Hello,” Clara said, still very still, as if speaking to a shy deer in the orchard.
The little person cocked its head in a way that could have been a question, or a Hello? back.
“I’m Clara.”
The little person considered the syllables. Then it made a sound that was very much like taking a bell and drawing a wet fingertip around the rim. It was small but it filled the space between Clara’s eyebrows and the middle of her chest in the best way.
“I don’t know that word,” Clara admitted, smiling. “But it’s nice.”
Another shimmer of dust, and then a note that sounded like yes. The dust landed on Clara’s mitten and didn’t melt.
The face brightened. The little person stepped—no, slid—out of the misaligned place and into the air on Clara’s side. Wings corrected again. The cold around them behaved in that particular way cold has when it decides you are welcome. The tiny person examined Clara’s mitten, then the knit of her sleeve, then her scarf, and finally the corner of her left eye with a concentration that made Clara want to laugh for the second time.
“Do you live in the snow?” Clara asked.
Two notes, a glide and a pause. The pause meant sort of. Or maybe when we like. It was hard to say, but the feeling in Clara’s chest said not always.
“You can be here and…there,” Clara guessed.
A new note. Not a yes, not quite a no. More like it depends.
Clara nodded, relieved. “Me too, sometimes,” she said without thinking, and then she blinked. She didn’t know why she’d said it, but it felt true. The Great Fir had told her in its way that there were other ways to stand in a place than just with her boots.
The little person drifted closer. It touched her mitten with a fingertip so small and exact that Clara felt the pressure even through wool. The touch left behind a single grain of glittering dust, very pale and very clean, that shone without taking the light from anything else. In that grain was a sensation like a snowflake that had made up its mind. The shape of it mattered. The shape of it told you how it had fallen.
“That’s beautiful,” Clara whispered. “Does it have a name?”
The being lifted its face toward the sky, as if listening to a far hallway. When it looked back, it drew a tiny shape in the air: a six-armed star, simple and perfect. Then it drew another, more complicated, with side-branches, a little robust at the center the way a seed is robust. It finished with a twirl of the fingertip that signed this and also this, not with impatience, but with a laugh in it.
“Snowflake,” Clara said aloud, not as a guess, but like you would say friend.
The bell-note it made in answer was so pleased that the pines shivered.
“Snowflake,” Clara repeated, and then laughed because it felt like naming a river River. But the being didn’t seem offended. It stood for a moment at Clara’s shoulder, like a tiny person might stand at the rail of a small boat—one hand on the air—and looked out over the white with an expression Clara recognized as thinking of things I’ve seen.
“Would you…” Clara hesitated, then chose the truest question. “Would you walk with me? A little? I’m not going far. I just want to see what the snow says today.”
Snowflake rotated in the air—a polite turn that included a small bow—and then zipped a short, exact circle around Clara’s cap. It was so quick that the air drew a thin ring that hung for a heartbeat like a halo and then dissolved.
“All right,” Clara said, delighted. She pointed toward a gentle valley where she knew a creek ran under ice. “That way?”
They went together. Clara walked. Snowflake drifted in short, careful hops, sometimes beside her cheek where the scarf warmed the air, sometimes ahead like a scout, sometimes behind as if to check the history of her footprints. When Clara paused to listen, Snowflake stilled, too, turning slightly as if tuning a tiny ear.
The creek was a black seam in a white hem. Here the snow had arched itself into perfect bridges over the dark water. The ice at the edges offered a library of sounds—small pings, slow moans, two quick ticks like silver buttons tapping a glass dish. Clara crouched and put her glove to the ice. It greeted her—cool cat, friendly but dignified. Snowflake stood beside her mitten with hands on tiny hips and listened, too.
“It says the spring is still a while,” Clara murmured. “But it has its ideas. It’s practicing.”
Snowflake drew a quick picture in the air that could have been a wing or a leaf or a flame. Clara recognized the idea anyway: becoming.
They stayed a while. When Clara rose, she found she’d forgotten to feel cold. Her cheeks were ruddy, but the rest of her felt like someone had knitted an extra layer under her sweater. She could say it was walking that warmed her, but she knew it was also being in exact agreement with a place. That made its own heat.
They started back a different way, following a scallop of wind where the drifts made small, cheerful waves. Snowflake darted low and touched the crest of each wave with the tip of a finger. Each touch left behind a tiny star that persisted for a heartbeat and then relaxed back into snow. Clara tried it, too—tapped a glove to a crest—and the snow answered with a microscopic spike of light, a little Oh! that faded with the next breath.
“I think I’m learning to say hello properly,” Clara said, and Snowflake made a note that sounded like yes, and keep going.
They crossed a flat where the world felt very wide and the sky said remember me with a faint, high wind. For a moment, Clara felt a flicker of worry that had nothing to do with being lost—she wasn’t; the Great Fir’s tone reached even here—but a worry about time. There were chores. There were people who loved her who’d be looking for the shape of her in the kitchen doorway. The thought cast a small shadow over the bright.
Snowflake noticed. It turned, hovered at the edge of Clara’s scarf, and drew, very small, a hexagon. Around the hexagon, a ring. Around the ring, a larger ring, and a line back toward the village. The picture held for a breath before dissolving.
“Home,” Clara said. “Yes. I’m coming.”
Snowflake nodded once, decisively, and together they quickened. In the way of such mornings, the world gave them small gifts for choosing to return: a rabbit trail stitched like cursive across a drift, a late cloud pulling a pale pink scarf through the blue, the deep, comforting O of the Great Fir getting louder and more sure. When the first eaves of the village peeked above the last hill, Clara felt the shape of worry lift. She had been exactly where she needed to be; now she would be exactly where she needed to be next.
They paused at the top of the rise. From here Clara could see roofs like iced cakes and lanes like white ribbons, and in the square, the Fir—patient, enormous, listening. Smoke rose in polite threads. A Messenger Elf streaked across the far edge of the sky like a red-stitched needle: Wink, by the look of the wake. He zipped so fast a row of sparrows fell momentarily out of rhythm and then found it again.
Clara laughed. “Show-off,” she said fondly.
Snowflake’s head tilted. It drew a quick darting line in the air and then shook with a tiny, private laugh that sounded like bells arguing happily.
They descended. At the edge of the first fence, where the lane began, Snowflake slowed. It hovered at Clara’s shoulder. Its wings corrected once, twice. Then it turned very slightly—not away, but as if addressing multiple rooms at once. Clara had the strong sense of doors—very thin ones—opening and closing somewhere she couldn’t point to on a map.
“You’re going?” she asked, hardly louder than her breath. She kept her voice matter-of-fact because it felt right to treat leaving as you treat arriving: with the same grace.
Snowflake drew a tiny star—and beside it, another. It left the second one hanging, bright as new frost, a fraction longer than the first before it let that one fade, too. Then it tapped two fingers against the air in front of Clara’s cheek. A minute particle settled on her scarf and glowed once, so faintly she almost missed it.
For a heartbeat, Clara sensed something more than weather. She felt the possibility of a shape not yet chosen, the way one perfect flake becomes another when it grows into itself. Or the way a girl becomes the kind of person who listens so well that listening becomes a bridge.
“I’ll be here,” she said. “Or there, if I can learn it.”
The note Snowflake made then was not quite in the range of ordinary hearing. It was a promise-whisper, a chord you feel in your teeth. And then it rotated—so easily, so naturally—into a place Clara’s eyes couldn’t follow. The air stitched itself neat. The bright was gone.
Clara stood for a few breaths with her palm on the fence rail. The rail was cold and good; it grounded her. When she looked down, the place where the tiny particle had landed on her scarf was just a soft sparkle now, ordinary frost and nothing more. Or perhaps not nothing. Perhaps a small agreement between this and also this.
She crossed into the lane. The village heard her and answered—boots on fresh crust, a door opening, Mrs. Claus humming a new refrain from the oven’s tune. The square was busier now, elves moving with careful steps, shovels leaning in pairs. A few children skated on their boots on the smooth part by the fountain. The air smelled of cinnamon and pine pitch.
At their gate, Mrs. Claus met her with a wooden spoon and a kiss that left a bit of flour on Clara’s forehead. “You left a note,” she said, pretending to scold and failing immediately. “That was thoughtful.”
“I didn’t go far,” Clara said. “Just…farther enough.”
Merry Lou smiled the way she did when a phrase pleased her. “Any discoveries?”
Clara opened her mouth to explain and then another feeling tugged at her tongue—the feeling that some discoveries are better when they’re a little secret at first, so they can sprout their true shape. She tucked the moment carefully under her ribs, where the Great Fir’s tone could keep it.
“I learned a new hello,” she said instead, and meant it.
Merry Lou’s eyes crinkled. “Then say it to the dough,” she said, turning toward the kitchen with a sweep of her spoon. “It’s been waiting politely.”
Clara washed her hands in the basin until they prickled with heat. The dough on the board was round and patient, its own small world. She pressed her palms into it with care, finding the right pressure and breath—O, O, O. The dough answered. It always did, but today it answered in a way that made her chest ring more perfectly with the tree’s long tone. She could feel the day agreeing with itself in layers: oven, dough, elbows, scarf, snow, the path she’d taken out and the path she’d taken back, the place-in-between like the space between two notes that is not empty at all.
“Good morning,” she told the dough quietly. “I’m listening.”
It didn’t speak in words. But it hummed back to her in the simplest language of all: warmth.
Later, when the rolls cooled and the first ones vanished into the hands of elves who had shoveled the square, Clara went to the window. The frost was melting now in filigreed lines that crept like tiny rivers. On the inside of the glass, a small shape persisted longer than the others, bright and patterned, whole and exact.
“Thank you,” she said to it. She meant the morning. She meant the snow. She meant the quiet, and the creek’s library of sounds, and the feeling of a door she might learn to find with her hands full of bread flour and her boots on the right boards. She meant the company of a small, exact someone, whose name was the simplest name and therefore one of the oldest.
She breathed, and the last of the shape disappeared into fog. But the promise stayed. It settled again in her chest, a steady flake that would not melt, and for the rest of the day, everything she did held just a hint of glitter when it caught the light.