Hey — It’s Toffer.
I didn't realize it was Christmas Eve, but maybe crashing my time machine into Santa’s sleigh was a sign.
Estimated read time: 5 minutes
All my life, I've been trying to figure out who I am, swiping between timelines like scrolling through endless reels on my feeds. Christmas was always different, though—it was the one time I actually stopped to feel things instead of just thinking about them.
The crash threw me into a dimension where everything was black and white. At first, I thought I’d broken reality itself, until Santa climbed out of his sleigh, his red suit blazing like a beacon in this colorless world. He wasn’t angry about the crash. Instead, he just smiled—that knowing smile that made me wonder if he’d been waiting for me all along.
A red ribbon fluttered across my path, briefly slicing through the gray. The sound of a distant Christmas carol drifted through the air, golden light painted the clouds, and then—just as quickly—it all faded back to white. That’s when I noticed it: in this place, color only existed in the present moment. Everything else—past and future—remained frozen in shades of gray. I’m not exactly sure about the physics, but that’s how I understood it.
“You’ve been searching for yourself in all the wrong places,” Santa said, adjusting his hat. “You’re always in the past or the future... but never here.”
He didn’t need to explain how he knew about my time-jumping. He was Santa, after all. He’d probably seen me growing up, watched me drift further from myself each year.
I’d spent so much time dissecting my past, trying to predict my future—thinking the answers were hidden somewhere along that timeline. But here, on Christmas Eve, in a dimension where only now had any color, I finally understood.
The magic of Christmas isn’t in the memories or the anticipation. It’s in being fully present—like when you’re sharing a quiet laugh with family, watching the soft glow of Christmas lights, or simply sitting by the tree, feeling the warmth of the lights against your face.
Time traveling isn’t really about jumping back and forth—it’s about seeing the colors in every moment. Sometimes, it takes crashing into Santa’s sleigh in a colorless dimension to figure that out.
Maybe that’s why Christmas always felt different. It wasn’t about the past or the future—it was about unwrapping the one gift I’d been chasing all along: the present.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer