Who Stole Christmas?

𝕭𝖑𝖔𝖔𝖉 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝕶𝖓𝖔𝖜𝖑𝖊𝖉𝖌𝖊

"Somehow, I feel like we are in a dream."

"Then if you know you are, that would make it a lucid dream."

"Wait, punch me. I need to be sure all of this is real."

Balthazar gave Casper a heavy punch and the latter started to bleed on his lip.

"Ow! I didn't mean that hard! Now you've caused me to bleed."

"Blood! That is it!" Melchior snapped his fingers.

"What's up with him?"

"The answer to the riddle is blood! 'The infant is accompanied by the red stream and stream by that same stream indeed was the reason the babe had come forth, to purify and to redeem.' Blood!"

"Okayyyy?" Balthazar quirked an eyebrow. "And how does that help us advance?"

"I... I don't know," Melchior looked puzzled to everyone's dismay.

♱✭♱✭♱✭♱✭♱✭♱✭♱✭
Melchior spent the whole night staying awake. It was his usual late night routine but he was also chewing the cud over Christmas; he wished that he wouldn't have to restore it but for his friends and everyone in the town.
    Christmas had never been the same after his family had been kidnapped and killed over something they had began a long time ago; they had given Christmas another meaning, a true meaning. For this, they were annihilated. And although their special acts, in the past, defined Christmas, Melchior could not revive that even if it was the truth. For he was afraid of the people and what they had become. He simply wanted to please and protect them.

          The reflections of the kindling flame shone on his face with a thousand words and from afar off, he could hear those  songs of harmony and joy like they were being activated only in his head.
         Precipitously, the strange appearance was there standing at a distance before the flames. Melchior gradually arose and before he could take a step the man disappeared.
         He trailed the path he sensed the man had taken, in the dark until he suddenly began to see a blurry vision of the birth of a baby with unusual objects around him. It felt as though a spirit suddenly possessed him and occupied his thinking.

"Look harder and tell the things that you can decipher from this vision," he heard a voice, like that of Noeleen say to him.

"I see gold which could have its in-depth significance to be kingship."

"What else do you see?"

"Frankincense. It is used in incense and perfumes. It signifies... The divinity of the baby and signifies His priestly duties."

"And what else do you see?"

"I see myrrh. It is an anointing oil. It prefigures sacrificial death... Of the baby."

"Do you know His name?"

"Jesus the Christ," Melchior uttered and immediately, the spirit left him.

The others awoke.