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feeling rather pleased that someone actually considered me to still be young. “I’ll gladly marry you, but there’s a condition. You must promise we’ll be equal partners, in gift-giving and in marriage. I will always love and respect you. Will you feel the same toward me?”
    â€œI already love and respect you,” Nicholas said, and my heart pounded and I found myself smiling so widely that the corners of my mouth hurt. I thought he would now come over and kiss me, but instead he suddenly looked uncertain again.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” I asked, afraid that he was having second thoughts and might take back his proposal.
    â€œIt’s just that I’m still learning about special powers and this gift-giving mission,” Nicholas said. “I mean, how long will you live, Layla? Felix and I have stopped growing older, but what about you? I couldn’t stand it if we married and I lived on forever, only to lose you along the way.”
    I hadn’t considered this. The possibility of living forever, or at least for a much longer time than the average person, seemed almost unimportant compared to marrying Nicholas.
    â€œMaybe, like Felix, I’ll stop aging, too,” I said. “Maybe I won’t. No one can know the future. We’ll have enough to do giving gifts. Let’s not waste time worrying about something we can’t control.” Nicholas started to reply. Apparently, he wanted to keep talking. But I was a newly engaged woman and the time for talking was over. “Hush up and come kiss me,” I told him—and he did.
    Nicholas knew a priest in Constantinople. He married us the next day. Felix was best man. After the short ceremony, the three of us immediately departed for Rome in Italy, a city Nicholas and Felix already knew well and one I had always longed to see. As a wedding present, Nicholas had told me we could go give gifts anywhere in the known world. He and Felix seemed delighted when I asked to go to Rome.
    â€œThere are plenty of needy people there,” Nicholas told me as we walked arm-in-arm to the dock where we would board a boat and begin the trip. “We’re going to be busy. You may regret very soon that you ever married me.”
    But I never did.

    We left those as gifts for poor children in Naples to the south of Rome. The next morning we returned to their neighborhood, and how wonderful it was to see boys and girls shouting with sheer joy as they shot their marbles or played with their dolls or rolled hoops across the meadow.

CHAPTER Four
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    Y ou must be wondering when I’ll begin telling about Oliver Cromwell. I will, very soon, but first I must explain about how our gift-giving mission gradually changed. Only if you know about how toys and Christmas and America came to be part of what we did can you understand why I happened to be in England without my husband in the 1640s when Oliver Cromwell tried to do away with the holiday, and why I was so determined that he wouldn’t succeed. Things that happened as much as twelve centuries earlier had their effect—on me, on Cromwell, and on Christmas itself.
    My early days with Nicholas were fascinating. I found it quite different to be traveling and gift-giving in the company of my husband and his friend. As a married woman, I was welcome in any clean, reasonably priced inn; a wife arriving with her husband was not looked on with suspicion in any community. We gave our gifts in small villages as well as large cities. And, of course, I loved traveling formerly impossible distances at equally impossible speeds.
    Oh, sometimes we had to make voyages on boats or travel in carts as part of caravans, but most often we simply walked, moving at night, and though there was no sense of hurry we would still find, by sunup, that we had gone eighty or one hundred miles. I was also amazed not to feel at all tired at the end of such lengthy treks. It