MsCharlotte's Stuff: Christmas

Chapter 14: The Eating Contest

The Pigwidgen was a mite, a dwarfling, a peewee, a runt of a pygmy. He marched up to Claus. "What are you doing here?" he demanded in a high squeaky voice.

Claus told himself he could not possibly be afraid of a creature so small. "You have put a curse on all the children of the land," he said sharply. "I have come to ask you to lift it."

"You promised not to open the black purse that was left in your keeping," said the Pigwidgen. "I myself left the purse there to test you. The promise was broken and now the children sleep."

"It was no fault of the children," cried Claus. "You must wake them."

"Yes," blurted Patrick Tweedleknees. "And lift the curse you laid on the elves so that they must live underground forevermore."

"And who is going to make me do these things?" inquired the Pigwidgen icily.

There was a moment's silence. The Tweedleknees cleared his throat and said calmly, "Claus is."

The Pigwidgen sputtered. He fell to the floor. He rolled over and over squealing and holding his sides. He very nearly turned inside out with laughter. The other pygmies howled too. It seemed the roof of the castle would blow off in so much laughter.

At last the Pigwidgen got to his feet. He wiped the tears from his eyes and blew his nose with a wisp of a handerchief. Then he said, "You think yourself more powerful than I?"

"More clever," murmured Claus. "It comes to the same thing."

The Pigwidgen threw back his head a blew a cloud of smoke from his mouth. He vanished in the cloud. An instant later the cloud was gone and the Pigwidgen appeared again. "Can you do that?" he demanded.

"I - I do not wish to disappear," stammered Claus. "I am here to make you lift the curse."

"Well," said the Pigwidgen indulgently. "Let us have a contest. If you win perhaps I shall lift the curse. The elf said you like roast pig. Very well. Let us see who can eat the most."

He took Claus into the kitchen and shut the door. There was a table before a roaring fire. On the table were 10 succulent roast pigs.

The Pigwidgen sat down and sank his teeth into a roast. In five minutes all that was left was bones and a tail. He ate a second roast and a third and a fourth and a fifth.

The pigs the Pigwidgen ate had been secretly stripped of most of their meat and covered back over with skin. Nevertheless the meat that remained had so stuffed the tiny Pigwidgen that he now collapsed in a stupor behind an enormous pile of bones and five curly tails.

Claus sat before the five remaining pigs. Ne nibbled on the choice bits of each roast and licked his fingers and stared at the fire. At last he knew what he must do.

When the Pigwidgen woke he raised his bloated head. "Well, what have you eaten?" he demanded.

"All," replied Claus.

"But the bones? The tails? Where are they?"

"All eaten," replied Claus calmly.

And so they were, for while the Pigwidgen slept, Claus had thrown the unfinished pigs into the fire which had eaten them up skin, bones, tails and all.