Once upon a time, when I was about fifteen years old or so, I had a very vivid dream about beautiful shoes. One pair were mint green, fawn, and chocolate brown platforms inspired by chocolate chip cookies. One pair were sapphire blue sling backs with lots of colorful jeweled beading embellishing the pointy toes. There were striped flats and polka dot sneakers. I dreamed of dozens of beautiful shoes and my love of whimsical footwear has been a staple of my wardrobe ever since.
I like shoes, and I take notice when they appear in fairy tales. Shoes play a critical role in Puss in Boots, Cinderella, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Red Shoes, and The Elves and the Shoemaker. Shoes are also critical to more modern folklore like The Wizard of Oz and Howl’s Moving Castle (seven league boots anyone?).
Shoes were also linked to romance in my formative years. I remember vividly the mother of a boy I had a crush on telling my mom and her friends how she told her son when he picked up his date for Prom (not me) to compliment the girl’s shoes. Because “Hey, cute shoes” showed that he noticed details and was attentive but also wouldn’t get him in trouble with any overprotective parents. In college when I was moving into my first apartment, a very charming neighbor was helping me with some boxes and started flirting with me over the box he was carrying. “Boots? You have a box entirely for boots? Where do you wear all these boots?”
In folklore shoes are symbols of independence, status, fertility, and in the case of The Elves and the Shoemaker, hope. A poor, old shoemaker has just enough leather left to make one last pair of shoes, and then he doesn’t know what he’ll do. The shoemaker lays out the leather and his shoes for work the next day and goes to bed. When he wakes up magic has occurred. The shoes made themselves, and they’re beautiful. And they’re quickly purchased for a very pretty penny. The shoemaker buys leather enough to make two more pairs of shoes, lays out the materials, heads off to bed, and in the morning magic has happened again. This keeps happening until overwhelmed with gratitude, the shoemaker and his wife stay up to catch a glimpse of their mysterious benefactor. They discover a pair of naked elves are making their shoes. So they make clothes for these elves and little shoes and lay them out on Christmas Eve as a thank you, and the elves find the clothes and are delighted and dress and dance and head out into Christmas dawning and are never seen or heard from again. Meanwhile the shoemaker and his wife enjoy prosperity and with grateful hearts live happily ever after.
There’s a lot of Christmas in this story. The idea of waking up to inexplicable magic is sort of the embodiment of Christmas to my mind. The idea of support appearing without explanation at just the right moment has some epically wonderful ties to Christmas in my mind. And of course I love that this fairy tale has a happy ending and presents. It’s really a very sweet story.
But to me Christmas also comes with a lot of swoon. Some examples:
The Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker is some of the most romantic music ever. I dare you to listen and not get swept away in the romance. It’s so Christmasy and so swoony. It’s the backdrop of a first kiss from a yet unpublished manuscript of mine (A Mississippi Christmas).
Much more kitschy, but equally lovable, is “Christmas Bride” by The Ray Conniff Singers.
My kiddos have participated in Christmas Around the World programs a few times and this is how I learned that in Japan, Christmas Eve looks a lot like Valentine’s Day. It’s a day for couples and romance, and all the sentiments that are in this song.
And then of course there are the movies. So many of my favorite Christmas movies are epic romances…Christmas in Connecticut, 12 Dates of Christmas, hold on… We have a Christmas bracket for all our favorite holiday movies. Except there are a few movies on this list that I refuse to watch, so I’m not sure how they’re on this list. Mr. Trent’s doing no doubt.
But yes, romance at Christmas is well represented in our favorite holiday movies. Content advisory on the clip below, it’ll absolutely make you blush, and then watching Mary’s heartbreak during George’s tantrum is devastating but whiplash will follow with the smooch and wedding bells.
Christmas is a lot of things besides swoon. Christmas can be hard. Christmas can be lonely. Christmas can highlight everything that is going wrong. And even a merry, magical Christmas comes to an end, and that’s hard too. It’s a well documented fact that the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is one of the toughest for all of us. Unmet holiday expectations. Loneliness. Financial strain. The let down of Christmas being a whole year away. The sugar crash. Pure exhaustion. It’s a lot to navigate. We’ve been hit hard with Christmas blues and post Christmas blues many a yuletide. We try hard to create a soft landing for after Christmas (post Christmas quests for best cups of cocoa in town, we save decorating gingerbread houses for the week after Christmas and look forward to lighting them on fire in the street on New Year’s Eve, we continue to watch Christmas movies and enjoy Christmas decorations, music, food until New Year’s Day, sometimes we travel), but there’s sadness there every year. And it is okay. It’s okay to be sad at Christmas, and it’s okay to be sad after Christmas.
So these elements–love of shoes, waking up to magic and renewed hope, lots of swoony, and coping with loss/sadness became the back bone of my holiday retelling of “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” I leaned hard into the comforts and joys that I love about this time of year. I also stayed true to the essential elements of the fairy tale: shoes magically appear in the morning, it is discovered that an unearthly being makes them, clothes and shoes are given to this person as a present, a shoemaker that was in serious trouble is saved. I then took liberties. It’s the shoemaker’s son who finds a beautiful princess making shoes in his shop and they fall in love and maybe have to find the courage to confront loss/sadness/family before their big HEA on Christmas morning.
I love this story. I love writing sweetpunk fairy tales. I love romance. I love Christmas. It’s a lot. It can be a mixed bag, but it can also be a time of comfort and joy.
(Photo credit: Mr. Trent snapped this picture last weekend when we went to the Denver Botanic Garden’s Blossoms of lights.)