Once upon a time in an era of pandemic and quarantine there lived a little boy named Timmy.

Sometimes you meet people that seem to have been born into the wrong generation by mistake. Timmy was one of those peculiar individuals - he didn’t like video games, he never complained about broccoli or peas and he read a lot of books. He especially liked reading them at night under his bed covers, shining on the pages with an old caving headlamp. For all his precocious intellect, Timmy firmly believed that the bed covers provided sufficient camouflage from his parents' eyes. He was wrong. His parents were indeed very aware of their son's nocturnal activities and they didn’t mind at all. In fact, last Christmas they bought him an expensive electronic book with inbuilt illumination that could fit a whole library in it. It lay unused because Timmy thought an e-book just didn't feel right, it didn't smell like a book, it didn't rustle like a page, it was too fragile and cold to sleep on. He ended up giving the gadget to his grandmother who found it very useful and spent many hours reading Barbara Cartland novels in an alarmingly large font.

It was safe to say picking a gift for Timmy was a bit of a challenge.

One grey December morning Timmy was composing a letter to Santa Claus. Although Timmy previously had doubts about the existence of Santa, this year he had irrefutable proof that Santa was very real, if a bit weird.

You see, last year Timmy asked Santa for "a friend". If you're going "awww" right now, don't - Timmy was relatively friendless because he had what he called “high standards”. Anyone who did not love Jules Verne was immediately deemed unworthy, so to clarify his wishes Timmy stipulated "a friend who doesn't say Jules Verne is boring". Not so "awww" now, is he? It was a tall order even for Santa; after all, seven-year-old Jules Verne himself would struggle to read the books he would one day write.

On Christmas Day nothing happened. Not like Timmy expected to find an actual human child under the Christmas tree, but he expected at least something. There lay the package with the e-book lovingly signed by his parents, a jumper and some sweets from his grandparents. No friend.

A rational person, and Timmy was a very rational person, would conclude that Santa didn't exist or he didn't care, and in either case the result was the same. Santa was forgotten and Timmy was going on with his life, attending school that had exactly two huge Jules Verne fans - Timmy and the school janitor Mr. Davies, who was not looking for a seven-year-old friend, because this is not that kind of tale. Everything was routine and a bit dull, but at least Timmy had the school library and a broad selection of teachers to terrorize with his sesquipedalian essays and endless questions. Then a pandemic broke out and Timmy found himself trapped at home with his parents. To their horror, his parents found themselves trapped at home with Timmy. They soon found ways to opt out of listening to his enthusiastic stories and retellings of books, and feigned sickness or sleep every time he asked them to read yet another wordy composition.

Right when Timmy was imagining himself a tragic Robinson Crusoe marooned on a deserted island of Canterbury Kent with two uncooperative gorillas and not enough batteries for the caving headlamp... a miracle happened. His mother gave birth to a baby girl and just like that Timmy was one friend richer.

Immediately Timmy knew - Santa was real.

Baby Beth made life very exciting - even though she was not a great conversationalist, she listened to Timmy half of the time, a record-breaking amount, and she never said that Jules Verne was boring. And yet, all the fictional wishes granted by the jinn and shifty German imps came with a downside, and so did this very real Santa miracle.

Much to Timmy's chagrin, every night when he was reading under the bed covers, his tranquil immersion into the world of imagination would be interrupted by a frequent and seemingly inconsolable baby cry.

Seven-year-old Timmy was unaware that babies cried just because that was the duty of every self-respecting human baby, they cried at any time from dawn to dusk and vice versa until they grew up and acquired enough skills to annoy people in a more sophisticated fashion.

Like a true 19th century explorer and engineer, Timmy went on a quest to discover the cause of the crying. In this case, he decided that the best place to start would be with people who had previous expertise in the subject matter - his parents. It took his sleep-deprived mother Mrs. Humphries about three minutes to understand that her son wanted a whole articulated conversation, at which point she deftly referred him to her husband. Mr. Humphries, to the best of her knowledge, hadn't given birth in the last year, and was paid a decent salary to sit in front of the computer in a shirt and jogging trousers and pretend to be awfully busy.

Timmy's father was also a world-class expert at coming up with exhaustive believable answers.

"Why does baby Beth cry at night, Dad?" asked Timmy.

Of course the answer would be "because babies often cry" but Mr. Humphries, for reasons that are purely personal, imagined that Timmy would then ask "why do we need a baby if all it does is cry?” to which poor Mr. Humphries would weakly reply "I don't know" and start crying too. To avoid this entirely hypothetical situation Mr. Humphries said matter-of-factly:

"That old train keeps waking her up and she's scared"

The railroad wasn't exactly close to their house, thought Timmy, but in the dead of night it was audible. Babies were incredibly sensitive, so it made perfect sense that the train sounded loud and scary to baby Beth.

Leaving Mr. Humphries to the vagaries of telecommunication and fatherhood, Timmy set out to fix his problem. Baby Beth was scared of trains. He knew the perfect cure for that - every night before her bedtime he would read "Around the World in 80 Days" to her.

To his surprise, reading out loud was much harder than he thought it would be. He rehearsed and did his best to sound as entertaining as possible; the book, however, seemed to have little to no effect on baby Beth's cries. Timmy was very patient with his sister; after all, it was he who asked for a friend - this was his cross to bear. He considered that the book might possibly function like an exorcism - you have to finish it and only then it would work its magic.

Half a year of bedtime reading later he closed the cover with a satisfied sigh and went to his room expecting the fear of trains to finally leave his baby sister.

That night, like any other night, she cried.

Plan A: Failure.

If the book didn’t work, thought Timmy, the only solution would be to fix the train. Naturally if there was a new train, it would be less noisy, much like his father's new car was almost silent compared to the old one. But how do you replace a train? They are even more expensive than a car; Timmy received one pound for every book he read, making that a solid 150 pounds a year, but still not nearly enough to buy a train. Making a train was impossible even for an adult... And yet... There was one elderly gentleman who could make a whole new train with the help of his elf workers and he possibly wouldn't mind doing it for a kid. Santa.

We find our unlikely hero writing to Santa exactly one year after he asked for a friend, on one gloomy December morning in the year 2020.

"Dear Santa Claus,

How are you? I trust this letter finds you in good health.

Thank you so much for last year, it wasn't exactly what I expected, but it corresponded to all the criteria, your professionalism is incredible.

I hope you don't find it too presumptuous of me to ask for another miracle this year. Unfortunately, I need a new train to stop my sister from crying. I know it's not easy to produce one, but if there is one person in the world that can make it happen, that person is you.

Yours faithfully,

William Timothy Humphries"

He wrote with a flourish, adding curly and entirely unnecessary tails to every word, and stamped the letter with a dinosaur stamp he bought in the Natural History Museum gift shop when he was 5. If you're going to ask for a huge miracle, better do it with style and respect, thought Timmy.

Quite understandably Timmy knew very little of the inner workings of the miracle business, he thought it a vague magic moody creature, while as the real Santa had a manual and strict rules and regulations. All the politeness and calligraphy were in fact completely wasted on Santa, Timmy could have written his request on a piece of toilet paper and the result would be the same.

Santa in the western world carried the name of the IV century Greek Saint Nicholas of Myra, in other cultures he was known by other names, kids wrote or prayed to him on other days, but the principle was universally the same - there was some benign magical entity that granted wishes and would occasionally toss a miracle here and there, encouraging kids to be well-behaved and nice.

The Santa that received Timmy's letter was actually the Head of the British Isles Division of the Department of Juvenile Miracles of a Ministry that I dare not name, but if I had to describe it, I’d say “byzantine”.

Santa was a job title and only the most important letters ended up at the Santa's desk. Letters went through a pre-sorting process by grade I Elf Analysts, who then strolled trolleys of grade-appropriate letters to grade II Elf Analysts and grade III Analysts. If a grade III Elf Analyst found a letter to be above their paygrade, they rerouted it to a grade I Elf Specialist and so on. Timmy's letter travelled all through grade II and III Elf Specialists and ended up on the Deputy Santa's desk. When the Deputy Santa saw the envelope, he immediately sorted it into a special red binder that he would give to the Santa in the beginning of the next workday, precisely 10 minutes after his morning coffee. The Deputy Santa was the last line of defence and Timmy's letter passed with flying colours.

What was so special about Timmy, you might ask?

Well, the Department of Juvenile Miracles has been in the proud miracle service for thousands of years and to this day this fine establishment has not degraded because it followed their work manual to a T. All letters were first evaluated by the sender's virtue and then by their conviction. In times long gone, before their funding was slashed, letters of no virtue would be answered with lumps of coal, but then there was the Elf Union strike of 1827 and the coal fund was reallocated to salaries... anyway, I digress. Letters of no virtue are nowadays discarded and all letters of any virtue are sorted by conviction - the Krampus-Joulupukki 0 to 21 scale of belief or KJS. The more conviction and virtue a sender has, the higher up their letter goes in the Department.

The Santa of the British Isles Division of the Department of Juvenile Miracles was sitting at his desk drinking his morning coffee, musing over his career and absentmindedly flipping through a particularly boring end of year report from the pre-sorting facility of Ireland. He was entirely unprepared for what happened next.

The door of his office opened and his deputy walked in with a red binder lying flat on the palms of his outstretched hands.

The Santa only raised his eyebrows, but everyone knew what a red binder meant. The Elves must be gossiping about it right now. Trying to look as cool and composed as possible, he opened the red binder and took out the letter. It was in a thick envelope with the Royal Mail stamp and neat boxy letters shaping the UK address for Santa in Reindeerland. Full disclosure: The Department is not in any Reindeerland, neither is it in the North Pole. It is not even on Earth or this dimension for that matter.

The Santa cut the envelope open with an old letter opener and took out the single folded piece of thick paper. He read the letter. Then re-read it. The words were written in a clumsy attempt at cursive, but there was no mistaking the wish.

"Head of Government" he swore.

Someone choked in shock. The Santa raised his eyes. His deputy was still in the office.

"Are you certain? 21 on the KJS and also virtue class Saint? How is that possible?"

"Yes, sir. The origin of the sender's high conviction status is unknown, we don't have anything on file, you know how it is with those things..." The Santa nodded. Although this has no bearing on the story, I feel it is important to clarify that The Department of Juvenile Miracles never really sent Timmy a sister - that would have been a serious breach of authority, because granting babies was not their jurisdiction. It also would have been very evident to Timmy, if he ever bothered to count 9 months back from March, that baby Beth was in fact a miracle sent by an entirely different Department, on an entirely different occasion that coincided with that two week holiday his parents went on alone, leaving Timmy in the care of his grandparents… But misattributed faith was still faith and Timmy's was as strong as it gets. The Deputy Santa swallowed and continued:

"As for the Saint status... The sender spent the last year being exceptional at school, reading books, eating his veg, even broccoli and peas…" the deputy winced in disgust.

The Santa looked at him questioningly. Plenty of children did well in school, ate their veg and read books, there was nothing Saint status worthy in that. Clearly, there was more to this William Timothy Humphries. And indeed, the deputy was saving the best for last.

"…and for the past six months he has been reading bedtime stories to his infant sister contributing greatly to her development and future as an acclaimed author. I double-checked with the British Isles Division of the Department of Fate... He also practices so that the story sounds better when she hears it... Since her birth, he has not rolled his eyes once when the infant cried or ever complained that she gets more attention. He also speaks to her as if she's an adult. Zero baby talk."

The Santa let out a whistle. Oh boy. That is true Saint status material. The wish though... He looked at the curly calligraphy. It might be above even his paygrade. There was no way British Isles Division had the budget for this... But the manual was clear: any 21 on the KJS with a Saint status gets their wish fulfilled, financing be damned. In cases like these, reputation was worth more than money.

He picked up his red phone, the direct line to the Department Head.

"What?" she snapped. She sounded annoyed.

"Ma'am. We have a 21 Saint."

"And?" Yep, definitely annoyed.

"His wish seems to be above the Division financing"

"Head of Government!" she cursed "Not you too?" She fumed for a moment, "Fine. Let's hear it"

The Santa read out the wish with a trembling voice.

His boss let out a string of unprintable curses.

After a pause that seemed to last forever, she sighed heavily.

"I'm signing your budget for this. But this is it. I'm retiring." She hung up.

The Department Head threatened to retire every decade or so, but the Santa didn't see her going anywhere for the next millennium, unless she got promoted to Minister. He slowly put down the receiver. He then took out a piece of branded paper, wrote down a concise order, stamped it, signed it with a heavy hand and gave it to his reluctant deputy.

The Deputy Santa looked fearfully at the order and then at his boss with eyes full of doubt.

"Sir. Are we? ..."

"Yes, the budget was approved. Prepare the new strain"