The Elves & The Toymakers

There once was a young dressmaker, who lived in the Northlands, and she was lucky enough to marry her one true love, a cobbler in the same small town. They were content together, running a shop that made the best clothes and the best shoes for many miles around. And yet, there was something they both longed for, but with which they were not blessed: children.

The dressmaker would sit in the window of her shop, where the light was best for her sewing, and look out at the children playing on the little field opposite. In Summer she would smile as they chased butterflies and rolled in the long grass, and she would wonder if their mothers tutted as they brushed seeds out of their youngster's hair at night. In Winter, between sewing her fine seams, she would sip cocoa and grin over her cup as snowballs flew left and right, and she would imagine herself holding out a blanket and enveloping a cheeky, reddened face with her own loving warmth.

Yet, a child was not to be.

The years passed, and the cobbler would go about his work cutting leather and binding boots and he would sadly watch his darling wife in her window as she longed for the children outside to be her own. He would wish there was something he could do to make her longing go away.

One day in the middle of the coldest winter the Northlands had seen in many a year, just as the light was fading and the couple were about to close their shop, a blast of cold air and the tinkling of the bell above their door announced a customer. The seamstress looked up from her final stitch and smiled at a small, pale face peeping out from underneath her father's heavy coat.

"Hello, Little Eva," she greeted, for she knew the names of all the children for miles around.

The child blinked sadly at her, but said nothing.

"Good evening, Mistress," her father replied for her.

The man nodded cordially to cobbler and seamstress, but, as the door closed behind him and he slipped off his big fur hat, there was sadness in his eyes too. The man, a farmer from up the valley, had lost his wife to fever only a few months earlier and the grief of it was still in both father and daughter.

Cobbler and dressmaker knew why the farmer was in their shop, to pick up a repair on his heavy work boots, so, putting down her sewing, the dressmaker stood and held her hand out to Little Eva.

"How about, while your daddy gets his boots, we go into the kitchen and find you some hot chocolate to warm you all up?" she offered the only comfort she could.

The girl's eyes lit up for just a moment, and she almost slipped out from under her father's coat, but then the memory of her mother came back into her face and she glanced anxiously up at her father. The man laid a hand on his daughter's shoulder and struggled with a smile.

"Go on," he encouraged so gently that the sadness in it brought a dampness to his watchers' eyes.

The child looked back to her hostess and finally stepped away from her father's tree-trunk leg. Her tiny hand slipped into the dressmaker's palm and she led the little girl out of the room.

The farmer watched his child until she disappeared behind the door into the parlour at the back of the shop.

"It is my Eva's birthday tomorrow," the man sighed when he finally turned his attention to the cobbler. "I wish I could make her happy, but she misses her mama so. Her mother promised to make her a doll and I had carved the head before she died, but these hands," he held out his palms roughened by hard work in his fields, "are too big and ugly to sew tiny dresses."

The cobbler patted his friend sympathetically on the arm, as men do. Then he turned to his workbench to pick up the man's boots that he had finished repairing.