My Adaptation of The Shoemaker and the Elves
Hello! My name is Pam, and I have a wonderful husband named Steve. We live in a studio apartment above our shop where Steve is a fourth-generation member of a small-town family of shoemakers. While his family’s trade has always been a point of pride for Steve, in the past couple of years it has also been a great load on his shoulders because now he is the only one left to carry out “the family business.” His dream is to try to keep alive the old-world tradition of making shoes by hand in a world where mass-production for the sake of saving a buck generally reigns supreme. I am a patent lawyer myself, but I have sort of put my career on hold right now to help out around the shop.
About a year ago, at a time in our lives when Steve and I were both beginning to fear that our dream of keeping our shoe-making business alive was turning into something more of a pipe dream, something extraordinary happened that would change our lives forever. It happened after Steve had pulled another one of his late-nighters trying to get things done before he headed upstairs to get some sleep. He finally gave up after he had cut out some leather to start a new pair of shoes, and determined to finish them in the morning.
And the next morning is when it all started to happen.
I was making my way down the stairs the next morning to check the meager previous day’s totals before opening when I thought that I saw something like fireflies float up to the ceiling and disappear. At first it took me off-guard, but then I blinked my eyes and decided to chalk it up to not enough sleep. Steve came down about fifteen minutes later and this is when everything started to change.
Thing started off normally. We straightened up a little, opened the register, unlocked the doors and turned the sign to “open.” Then Steve went into the back room to pick up where he left off the night before and couldn’t find the leather he had cut out. Instead, sitting in its place was one of the most beautifully crafted pairs of shoes that he had ever seen. Even better, in his humble opinion (as he would later tell it), than any pair of shoes that he had ever made himself.
But where had these shoes come from?
“All that I know for sure is that I did not make these,” he said as he walked out of the back room, eyeing me with suspicion, as if overnight I had somehow become the world’s greatest shoemaker without telling him. I thought he was crazy at first. “You are going to have to start coming upstairs earlier if you are unable to remember a pair of shoes that you just made the night before,” I said. But he insisted that he really had not made this wonderful pair of shoes.
We were both perplexed, but decided to move on with our day and figure it out later. Steve sat the shoes on the counter and went into the back room, scratching his head. About an hour later, a young, well-dressed woman came into the shop and looked around a bit. Then she started asking questions like, “Are all of the shoes in this shop really hand-made?” and “Do you make all of the shoes on the premises, and can they be made to an individual’s taste?”
Then she spied the new shoes on the counter. Her face lit up and said that this was the greatest pair of shoes that she had ever seen. She asked the price, bought them straight away without even trying them on, took one of our business cards, and hurried out the door. I thought that this was a little strange, but since the day had started out that way, I figured that this small happening was just more of “the peculiarity of the day.”
That evening, things went very much the same way as the night before. Again, Steve worked late into the night and ended up having to leave some work for the next morning. Again the next morning, there was a brand-new, beautiful pair of shoes sitting in the place where only a piece of cut out leather should be.
At this point, Steve and I both began to wonder what was happening in our shop during the night. Was Steve sleep-shoemaking? Had we gone through some wormhole for two nights in a row that caused us to fast forward through a time tunnel, bringing us out of the other side and causing us speed past the moments when Steve had finished the shoes without remembering? Or was there some other explanation?
During this process of putting our heads together to try to figure out this mystery in the shop the next day, the well-dressed woman from the day before came back into the store. Again, she spied the new, beautiful pair of shoes and immediately swept them up to purchase them (at a really good profit to us, might I add). This time she stopped at the counter to talk to me.
Her name was Cassandra, she said, and she owned a successful clothing boutique specializing in clothes for the whole family that was in the process of expanding into accessories. She wanted to know if it was possible for us to produce a pair of beautiful shoes like the pairs she had already bought, only in much larger quantities at a time. If we could do this, then she wanted to stock our shoes in her store. I told her that I would have to get back to her, asked her to give me one of her cards, and wished her a wonderful day.
The opportunity that Cassandra was offering to us was one not to be passed up, especially since the business had not been doing so well lately. However, we had a big problem: we did not know where these beautiful shoes were coming from, and had no idea of knowing if our “shoe-fairy luck,” as we had now dubbed it, would continue. So, as we saw it, there was only one solution. We had to try to find out how these wonderful shoes were being made.
That evening, Steve got out the video camera and laid out enough leather to make two pairs of shoes. We determined to stay up all evening to see if we could solve the mystery. I hid under a low work table, while Steve hid under the desk and videotaped a workshop lit only by a tiny night-light plugged into the wall.
Absolutely nothing happened for three hours. Then something like the tiny lights that I had seen the morning before came down from the ceiling, and a group of child-size men with dreadlocks and adorned in shabby white lab coats appeared. They took up the leather and began working straight away to shape it into two beautiful pairs of shoes. When they had finished, Steve signaled to me that he planned to try to communicate with them.
He tapped lightly on the floor, and all of their heads turned toward the desk. Before they could make a move to leave, he gave them a sheepish smile and a quiet “hello.” This unexpected friendliness seemed to disarm them. They smiled back at him, and a wonderful conversation transpired between Steve and these elf-people.
He expressed his desire to thank them for the beautiful shoes they had made, and explained the proposition that Cassandra had made to us. He asked them if there was anything that he could do to make the elf-people come back and continue to make larger quantities of shoes for us every night in exchange for anything that we could do for them that they may find helpful. These wonderful elf-people smiled at us and looked at each other with eyes that seemed to question what they could possibly ask for.
Suddenly, as if they had just spoken to each other telepathically, looks of agreement came over their faces. Then the largest elf spoke up. Although the clothes that they wore were perfectly acceptable, he said, all of them had held a desire for some time to update their look. If they could exchange their shoemaking prowess for some new clothes from time to time, then this would be all that they needed.
Steve and I looked at each other. Surely that could be arranged! After all, hadn’t Cassandra said that she owned a family clothing store? This was sure to include clothing that could be tailored to fit men the size of children!
The deal was struck, and the next day we called Cassandra and worked out the details with her, telling her only that we had quite a few “little people” in the market for some new clothes. Cassandra would get her shoes, the elf-people would get their clothing, and we would finally see a healthy financial gain in our business that would take away forever our worries about “getting by.” It was a “win-win” strategy for everyone involved!
Years passed, and our elf-people stayed with us and life-long friendships grew between us. Sometimes we would stay up to visit them in the shop at night, and other times we would just leave them to their work. We all seemed to feel a mutual gratitude for one another and how we had improved each other’s lives, and Steve and I never told a living soul about our little elf friends that were our night-time visitors. I guess there are just some special relationships that we would rather keep to ourselves!
