Santa’s Cookies

Content notes: attempt to catch mice in traps

I am not a suspicious person. I’m not usually a nosy person either. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of me. I’d be quite a failure as a detective, because I’m not particularly interested in details. My mother was constantly frustrated with me on that count.

She wanted me to be an accountant like my father. But as an accountant, you have to be interested in details, and that’s just not my world.

I also never spied on a girlfriend just because she was always busy, or even read her diary, let alone spied on her friends. I always thought that if there was something I should know, she would tell me. Not that I had many girlfriends. I’m sure you can already guess why.

I’m only telling you this so that you understand how unusual it is for me to try to get to the bottom of something: it’s very unusual.

It all started a few years ago when I moved out of my parents’ house. Not to move in with a girl or to party all night – you should know me better than that by now. I was just tired of it all. I was tired of having to tidy my room just because my mother wanted to vacuum it, I was tired of being on time for dinner and I was tired of constantly being asked when I was going to bring a girl home. Well, in the beginning my mother would ask for a lovely girl; then it became a nice girl; and then any girl would have been fine with her. At some point it just became “someone”. This was a big step for my mother, and I give her credit for giving my happiness precedence over her traditional ideas.

I was actually more interested in girls, but it wasn’t necessarily mutual. They want you to be interested in them. When a girl says “it’s nothing”, sometimes she wants you to follow up. And I don’t do that.

I don’t dig deeper. If someone wants to tell me something, fine. I can listen as well as any other man. But if someone doesn’t want to tell me something, then I can leave it alone. I’m not good at interpreting the many nuances of silence, and I don’t want to become good at it.

I appreciate openness. Openness makes a lot of things easier.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not indifferent to girls or anything. I like them. I really do. But for me, a “no” is a “no” – and I want to keep it that way. Otherwise, my life would be far too complicated.

So, I moved out.

It wasn’t easy to find an apartment that met my requirements, especially in terms of affordability. But the day finally came, and I moved my few belongings into my own four walls. I didn’t have much. I had taken my bed, desk, closet and two chairs. My clothes fitted into a suitcase. To be honest, they fitted into a suitcase and a bag, because I didn’t want to pack my shoes with the shirts that had been ironed by my mother for the last time, but there would have been space enough. I also had about a dozen books and a radio.

I’m sure you’re now thinking that this surely was a long time ago and that we didn’t have more back then, but you’re wrong. There was more. My parents had a large color TV and a modern computer. Not with punch cards, but with a DVD drive. Before you object that there were never computers with punch cards for private use, rest assured that I am well aware of this. It’s just a figure of speech among us. It’s like saying: “We may not live in a big city, but most of our devices already run on electricity and are no longer powered by hamster wheels.” As if we had ever used hamsters. Mice were much cheaper.

You understand what I mean.

I certainly could have bought a computer, but I wasn’t interested. The internet, TV, video games, there’s so much detail that I don’t want to deal with. It’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s just white noise. You can spend so many hours, either from your sofa or your desk, looking at everything on offer as if you were at a huge bazaar. How often did I spend an entire weekend at my parents’ house during my school days almost exclusively in front of one of the two screens, without really seeing anything interesting or experiencing anything truly moving? Sometimes that can be nice, but instead of watching TV, I prefer to read a book. I can choose something I like and stay with it for as long as I want without commercial breaks. It is no closer to really experiencing the world, but it feels different. I don’t wake up from a technicolor half-dream afterwards.

So, as you can see, I’m a pretty simple person. But even I notice when something is wrong.

And that started with the new apartment.

The apartment had everything I wanted. A fitted kitchen, a shared laundry room, one bedroom and a living room, a couple of windows that weren’t too big, well-worn wooden flooring, and a fireplace.

I didn’t need the fireplace, but it was there. My mother was delighted. She saw romantic evenings in front of cozy crackling flames. I saw a wall with a clear function that needed neither furniture nor pictures.

Unpacking was quick, and soon I had made myself comfortable with a ready-made pizza and the radio. Do you know why almost nobody owns a radio recorder anymore? You can hardly buy these devices anymore. There are similar things out there under new fancy names, but they all have far more functions than you actually need, making it almost impossible to achieve what you want without a manual, which is to simply to listen to the radio.

The last time I was looking for such a device, the salesperson recommended that I simply buy one of the new shower radios in trendy colors. But I didn’t want something that looked like a toy, I wanted a solid device with a solid function. I hoped that my current radio would continue to serve me faithfully for a long time to come, as I looked out of the window to the sound of familiar Christmas carols.

It was starting to snow outside. Back then, it still snowed in December.

My mother took it for granted that I would come “home” for Christmas. And I did want to spend Christmas at home, only I was thinking of my apartment, not my parents’ house. If she hadn’t just assumed I would be there but had asked me if I wanted to celebrate with them, I would certainly have let myself be persuaded. I make every effort to be a good son. But it offended me that she didn’t even ask, so I said I was having a guest and wanted to celebrate at my place. But I would like to come over on Boxing Day.

My mother was, as expected, upset, and I think a little hurt, too. Firstly, because I didn’t want to spend Christmas with her and my father, and secondly because I hadn’t told her anything about my Christmas guest, when she had wished for a girlfriend for me for so long. Of course, she assumed it would be a female guest: “Bring her along, then!” she said with impressive calm.

I muttered something about how she would probably be with her parents and that I would certainly bring her along another time. My mother left it at that, which I was very grateful for.

The next day, she brought me Grandma’s Christmas tree decorations. “So that you have a nice festive atmosphere.”

I could have cried. My grandmother’s Christmas tree ornaments had been in the family for a long time, and they meant a lot to my mother. In a way, these ornaments were Christmas for me, because we had celebrated every Christmas with them.

I was touched and I was ashamed to have lied to her. I wasn’t dating and there was no woman in my life.

When I thought about asking Mom to help me decorate later, I only wished for one thing: I wished I hadn’t lied to her. I wished she had just asked, so that we would have celebrated together. I wish I had the courage to just tell her this. So, it was more than just a single wish, if you want to be precise.

In the end I forgot to ask her if she would help me.

When I was alone again, I hung a sock by the fireplace, now that I had one. A fireplace, I mean. I had more than one sock. However, I hadn’t found the second sock when I was unpacking my clothes, which made this one ideal for use as a fireplace stocking.

And I put the milk and cookies on the mantlepiece. Some people put the milk and cookies right in front of the fireplace, but that seems unwise to me. If Santa actually came down the chimney, all the ashes would land on the cookies, and he might knock over the milk when he climbed out. Even though I no longer believed in Santa Claus like I used to, and I am not ashamed to say that I did once believe, I still wanted to make this tradition logical. Abolishing it completely would never have occurred to me.

My parents had always believed in a logical approach, which is why we did not put out milk and cookies only on Christmas Eve. We started serving the expected Santa Claus on December 6, his first day of work – at least in Germany -, and kept the good man supplied, not with bed and board, but with milk and cookies, until his last day of work on Christmas Eve. After all, he also had to eat and drink while he was wrapping presents and going through his lists.

And somehow the milk and cookies had always disappeared, but apart from me and my parents, there were also my siblings around, and I think someone must have helped Santa clear the food on offer.

I hadn’t thought about how it would be now that I was living alone. That turned out to be a mistake, because when I got up the next morning, I saw that there was only the napkin on the plate – no cookies. My first thought was that I had simply forgotten the cookies. You see, I like simple answers.

According to the principle of parsimony, the solution that contains the fewest assumptions is also the most likely. This really appealed to me, and I’m told that it has happened before that I only did half of something I had planned to do or didn’t do it at all. So, I went to work, did my shopping, came home, and put some cookies from the freshly bought pack on the mantlepiece. My mother had always baked her own cookies, but even if Santa didn’t exist, I didn’t want to poison him. Instead, I bought him my favorite cookies – apart from the ones my mother makes. Since I can’t really know what Santa likes to eat, I chose to offer him what I would like to be offered myself.

You probably guessed it: the cookies were gone the next morning. But the milk was still there. From the day before yesterday. I wouldn’t have wanted to drink that, either.

I spent the whole day thinking about the mysterious disappearance of the cookies.

I had never been prone to pondering things, so I had another reason to be confused. Understandably, I didn’t stay in the office any longer than absolutely necessary, and hurried to my apartment. This should have been my safe haven, my refuge, not a place to make my head hurt. I decided to put out cookies once more and wait to see if they disappeared overnight again. Which they did. The whole thing was starting to seem outright weird to me. It seemed so strange, in fact, that when I emptied my letterbox, I wasn’t excited to see the first piece of post with my own address on it, as I had assumed I would be. Instead I wondered whether I would find a missive made from words cut out from a newspaper: “I’ve got your cookies! No police or else!” You may have noticed that the ellipsis you’d expect to see here is missing after the “or else”. But since a blackmailer would have to cut out and glue on all those dots individually, I assumed that in this case they would dispense with the correct grammar. After all, most blackmailers are not also linguists. I think.

Of course, I hadn’t received any such letter. Who kidnaps cookies? But I had received advertising. A colorful flyer from a nail salon, an invitation to the opening of a new pet shop, and the menu for a pizza delivery company, which I put in my kitchen. Food belongs in the kitchen.

You can see how distracted I already was. It took me a few hours to realize my mistake. It wasn’t the pizza service that deserved my attention, but the pet shop! I went to the new store immediately after work and bought some mousetraps. There was even an opening discount, so I bought three.

I put them out next to the cookies that same evening. When I imagined Santa Claus coming down the chimney and noticing the mousetraps, I had to smile. I wasn’t eight years old anymore, and Santa was certainly clever enough not to fall into the traps.

As the next day was a Saturday, I could stay in bed longer. And I did. One reason was certainly that I didn’t know what to expect by the fireplace. An empty napkin without cookies? And empty mousetraps? Or mousetraps with mice in them? What should I do if I actually caught one?

Did I throw the mouse away with the trap? Or did you have to take it out first? And hadn’t I once read something about Christmas mice? What if I had caught one of them? I would never forgive myself for that. When I realized the direction my thoughts were heading in, I got up. I wanted to look at the traps rather than continue to follow such fantasies. Half-expecting to find a few white strands of beard hair trapped under the wire, I set off. I breathed a sigh of relief. The traps were empty.

But the cookies were missing again.

I walked back into the pet shop, the traps under my arm.

“I’d like to return these mousetraps here, please.”

The lady in the pet shop uniform looked at me questioningly. Do you even say “lady” when the lady is still very young? In the past, we would have said “girl”, but we don’t do that anymore. And just “female” seemed odd.

“Is there something wrong with the mousetraps?”

I shook my head. “I just don’t want to catch any mice with them.”

The lady smiled.

She looked at me the way waitresses at fast-food restaurants do when you keep changing your mind: “instead of fries, why not the large Coke, no, small Coke, without ice, or no, wait!” I’m sure you know the feeling.

It’s terrible. I also felt a bit stupid now.

“You know, Mrs. …” instead of “ma’am” there had to be an alternative, a name tag or something … Yes, there! Relieved, I read out: “… Mrs. ‘Pet Shop Koenig, Inge…’” – I had read the whole tag out loud before I realized that there was no surname on it. That didn’t go well. And the store was full of people who also wanted something from Inge’. And she wasn’t just smiling anymore. She was almost laughing.

“Do you still have the receipt?”

Why wasn’t I a mouse? Then I could have disappeared now. Of course I had the receipt at home, probably close to the wastepaper basket. Very close to the wastepaper basket, if you know what I mean.

“I was here yesterday, maybe you remember? I bought the mousetraps here.” That didn’t sound clever, but it was better than nothing.

“Unfortunately, I can only take the traps back with a receipt. That’s a rule.” I knew all about rules and regulations. That was easy. For ‘Inge’ at least. I was now standing there with my mousetraps, which I didn’t want to take back home.

“And if …” but the rest of the customers had already claimed her attention. I couldn’t even blame them, because they all wanted to buy something, while I just had a little too much, which certainly wasn’t that urgent.

I made my way back without having achieved anything.

The weekend was simply awful. I had nightmares about Christmas mice falling into traps, children not getting Christmas presents because Santa was stuck to my mantlepiece by his beard, and other things that seemed more or less logical, but all made me feel guilty.

I had stowed the traps in a box in the bag from the pet shop under my bed, together with the only slightly crumpled receipt I had rescued from the wastepaper basket.

So, nothing could have happened. And to whom? To Santa Claus? He didn’t really come down the chimney, especially not in the middle of December, and if he did, it was either on St. Nicholas Day or Christmas Eve, but not just like that at the weekend. No, not even on St. Nicholas Day.

Santa Claus didn’t exist, so nothing could happen to him. And I still didn’t know where I had heard about the Christmas mice. So they probably didn’t exist, either.

Just like the Easter Bunny. And all the other things that are always taken into consideration even though they don’t exist. And although I didn’t believe in any of them, I was worried. Like when you wish someone ‘good luck’ instead of ‘break a leg’ when you’re skiing or something.

Although it was pretty much the same thing. At least I thought I remembered that ‘break a leg’ came from the theater, where in some places instead of applauding the audience stomped their feet, and if they were truly amazed, they might stomp so hard they broke a leg, so you wished the actor good luck that way. I was annoyed for the first time that I didn’t have a computer, as I would have liked to look it up on the internet at half past two in the morning on a Saturday night to see whether it came from Elizabethan or Greek theater, which ultimately made no difference to me. And all because of a few cookies! Oh dear, the cookies! I had forgotten about the cookies because I was so worried about the mousetraps. I was completely confused.

You can imagine the state in which the mousetraps, the receipt and I turned up at the Koenig pet shop after work on Monday. There was hardly anyone about apart from me. I often notice this: on Saturdays, when I want to get something quickly for the weekend, the stores are always packed as if there won’t be anything left to buy for the next few weeks. And when I drive home after work on Mondays or Tuesdays, I look through the shop windows and see almost deserted aisles. And then I remember that I wanted to do things differently last week. Then I make a firm resolution not to do it the same way again this week. But somehow it ends up being Saturday again.

As if someone had secretly stolen the other days from the week.

Like my cookies.

I had to buy new cookies.

“Have you found the receipt?” Startled, I looked up from my thoughts.

Mrs. Inge was smiling at me. ‘Mrs. Inge’ somehow sounded like a governess in a nuns’ boarding school.

“Yes, thank you, I have. I’ve got everything here in the bag.” I handed her the bag. She took the box out of the bag and opened it.

“Three traps, the receipt from last Friday, it’s all there. Did you use the mousetraps?” I shrugged. “I don’t know when they’re considered ‘used’. I put them out, but luckily I didn’t catch anything with them.”

She looked at the traps critically. “What did you use as bait? Just so I know if I can take the traps back.” I took a deep breath.

“Santa’s cookies.”

She laughed.

“What were you trying to catch? Christmas mice?”

You can imagine by now that I wanted to drop dead. My guilt was apparently written all over my face.

I had tried to catch Christmas mice in small, breakneck snap traps. I couldn’t help but tell her everything. Well, actually, I could have avoided it, of course – you can always do that – but after that sleepless weekend I just had to talk to someone about it. Preferably someone I didn’t know and would never see again afterwards.

You may have noticed that I sometimes get a bit long-winded when telling stories and try to tell everything as accurately as possible. Especially when I’m talking to or about women. Because as little as I am usually interested in detail, many women love these little things. This was no different. I even had to tell her what kind of cookies I had put on the mantelpiece.

‘Mrs. Inge’ nodded. “They’re good cookies for Santa. I like them, too.”

I don’t know how much of my story the nice pet shop saleswoman believed, but I do know that she closed the store at some point and accompanied me to buy some cookies, and I finished telling the rest in a café. I also know that I wasn’t half as embarrassed as I could have been. And it was not in the least as unpleasant as another thing that was also bothering me at the time.

“And what else is bothering you so much at the moment?”

I faltered. Had I said that out loud? Then I probably had to tackle the hard part. “I haven’t the faintest idea how to address you. ‘Mrs. Inge’ doesn’t sound like you at all, even though I haven’t known you for very long, I don’t like calling you ‘ma’am’ because that’s too old-fashioned for a young woman like you, and I don’t know anything else about you.”

She laughed. “Just don’t call me ‘Mrs. Pet Shop Koenig, Inge’ again. Although that was almost right. My surname is Koenig. But you’re welcome to say Inge, since it’s already on my name tag.”

Inge was wonderfully uncomplicated. It was a very nice evening until I noticed something very unpleasant again. “Did I actually tell you that my name is Paul?”

And I realized a few things. I didn’t really mind details at all. If something really fascinated me, then I wanted to know everything about it. I just couldn’t get excited about many things quickly enough to recognize and express this interest before the other person had already moved on to the next, at first glance less fascinating, topic. I could now romantically claim that it was different with Inge, but you would immediately see through that as an exaggeration.

No, she also talked about things I had never been interested in. But as the evening progressed, I realized that it didn’t really matter. Because she interested me. I mean, hamsters are just little balls of fur to me, but Inge could tell funny stories about them that made her eyes light up. And then she got dimples.

I don’t want to bore you with my gushing. Suffice it to say that we saw a lot of each other over the next few days.

She was new in town, had moved here for the store and hardly knew anyone.

And I almost passed her store on my way home from work if I changed subways twice. So I showed her what there was to see here, which wasn’t much. You know the sort of area: two churches, a market square, the town center, a few parks and cafés, the local movie theater. Not a particularly extensive program. I wouldn’t have been able to tell her what you should and shouldn’t order from any of the cafés.

But we were able to find out together by trying things out for ourselves, so it took several evenings before everything was said. I had even read up on the two churches in the library so that I could tell her something about them.

Have you ever noticed that almost everyone knows something about the history of the pyramids or the Colosseum in Rome? But ask a local in a medium-sized town, someone whose family hasn’t lived there for generations, who the church on the corner is dedicated to. Then suddenly nobody knows anything, because it’s not a landmark, it’s just the church on the corner. You hardly know anything about the place where you live. It was no different for me until I wanted to show this place to someone and realized that I really didn’t know anything about it.

And even now I have to admit that I wasn’t interested in the details of the place for their own sake, but rather because I knew that the more I had to say, the longer this little city tour would take and the more we would have in common.

I was able to tell her how for long we had had the annual Christmas market, what specialties were offered there and what was special about them. It was as if it were the first time I had actually been to this market, when I went with Inge.

There was only one thing that spoiled my enjoyment of the time I spent with Inge.

Firstly, our town wasn’t particularly big, and I would soon have shown her everything there was to see and secondly, every evening with Inge was followed by a morning of missing cookies. So, I guess there were two things that dampened my joy. Counting was apparently not my strong point. All the more reason not to become an accountant. But I’ll tell you what: if I still did believe in Santa Claus, I would have written him a letter this year. A toy train would not have taken first place on it like it used to. I wouldn’t have approached Santa Claus in such a materialistic way. I wouldn’t have wished for world peace either. You never know how many wishes from the letter will be fulfilled, so I would have limited myself to one very special one: I would have wished for more wonderful days with Inge. But since I didn’t believe in Santa Claus and therefore didn’t write a wish in my letter, he couldn’t grant it. So I decided to make it my New Year’s resolution to continue seeing her without heavenly help. And if I had to buy a hamster for that, then so be it.

I got up late and slowly on Christmas morning. I could see the snow on the windowsill from my bed. It was pretty cold. I quickly made myself breakfast in the kitchen and ate at the small table that you could fold up against the wall if you needed more space. The kitchen was warm because it shared a long wall with my neighbor and only a short one with the snow outside.

I put the dirty dishes in the sink, as I did every day, and looked out. What was I going to do now? I had the whole day off! No plans, no obligations, nothing more to do.

No date with Inge – it was Christmas Day and she was going to her parents’ house. I looked out of the window for a while. Then I did the dishes.

It was still mid-morning. I tidied up the kitchen and got dressed properly.

I had actually wanted to keep my pajamas on all day to celebrate, but it was just too wintry for that. Besides, some things only sound good if you don’t really do them. Then I called Inge to wish her a happy holiday.

“Are you getting ready for a festive evening?” I asked her, and the other end of the line went strangely quiet for a moment. “I don’t have any plans today. I actually wanted to go to my parents’ house, but the roads are clogged with snow, and they said it is even worse where they live, and I shouldn’t go.” She sounded sad. I could empathize; I would have loved to celebrate with my family today, but it was my own fault that nothing came of it. “Maybe we could do something together?” I suggested daringly. “Aren’t you celebrating with your family?” I thought nothing could be worse than the mousetrap conversation. But then, for lack of a credible excuse, I told her why I really wasn’t doing anything today. She was silent for a while.

“Have you decorated the tree yet?” I took a deep breath. “I don’t even have a tree yet. Sitting alone under a decorated Christmas tree is even more depressing than just sitting alone in the living room.”

“Then why don’t you tell them I’ve changed my mind?”

I wondered. “What did you change your mind about?”

Sometimes I’m just not that quick. My mother was quite different. When I called her to ask if there was still room on the tree for Grandma’s baubles, she knew straight away that she would have to put out two more plates.

We’ve celebrated Christmas together a few times since then. Maybe we won’t live happily ever after. But maybe this year I’ll take heart and manage to ask her if she likes being called ‘Koenig’ – King – or if she’d rather be my queen. Maybe I’ll find a less cheesy alternative, but I’ll definitely be putting cookies on the mantelpiece for the rest of my life in the run-up to Christmas – or on the living room table, if I don’t have a fireplace.

You have to leave a little room for miracles if you want them to happen to you.

Oh, you want to know how the cookies disappeared? I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about that. I could tell you all sorts of things, of course, but you don’t want to hear fantastical stories, you want the truth, or am I wrong? I only know this much: Inge and I moved in together the following year. It was snowing when the removal van pulled up in front of our new home, and I thought back to my last move and how a few missing cookies had changed my life.

I’ll probably never know why the cookies disappeared back then, but whatever it was, it stayed behind in the old apartment. Or maybe it’s simply that I don’t need any more disappearing cookies.