How the legend of Santa Claus really born - An hazbin Hotel story

How the legend of Santa Claus really born

 Charlie loved Christmas.

She loved seeing the cities covered in twinkling lights, the trees filled with balls and decorations, the garlands, the mistletoe, the Christmas carols. During that wonderful time of year all evil seemed to fade away, replaced by joy and brotherhood; even though she knew it wasn't that simple, it was good to live in that atmosphere of unity and love.

And what was the problem, you ask, with loving Christmas?

Simple. Everyone loved Christmas. Everyone except her father. Lucifer Morningstar, aka his majesty the devil, ruler of the bad side of the afterlife.

In Hell, Christmas was banned. Her father hated it because according to him on that day people celebrated the birth of his archenemy, Jesus Christ, and therefore their task as infernal royalty was to do everything to destroy that holiday. Every year, Lucifer reunited with her uncles Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Mammon, in order to devise a diabolical plan to ruin Christmas.

Charlie disapproved her father wholeheartedly. Once, when she was still too young to travel to the human world, she agreed with him and she almost cheered him on; but as soon as she was old enough and went to Earth on a Christmas Eve, she literally fell in love with Christmas. Since then, she sneaked into the human world every year to be able to enjoy a few hours of that joyful time. She passed her time smiling at the children, singing songs along with choirs in the streets, eating sweets or helping the workers decorate the trees or place the lights.

And of course her father always discovered it. Every Christmas Eve Lucifer already knew that his daughter would go to the human world, and Charlie already knew that when she returned she would find her father waiting for her ready to give her a quarter-hour lecture. It was almost a tradition now. Lucifer himself was no longer making any effort to reproach her: he limited himself to chanting the usual old story about their role as noble demons enemies of everything that was good and joyful and of their mission to ruin Christmas, not to appreciate it, and then he let her go with a look in his eyes that meant that he knew very well that the following year he would have to repeat himself.

That situation didn't make Charlie happy. Seeing her father so strict erased any joyful memories she had just acquired in the human world. Fortunately, however, her mother was there to comfort her.

Lilith didn't hate Christmas like her husband. Indeed, when he extolled how much he hated that holiday, she fixed him with a mocking look, as if she considered him ridiculous. Besides, Lilith knew how much Charlie loved Christmas. And so mother and daughter had forged their own little 'tradition': every Christmas night, while Lucifer and her uncles were in the human world to implement their new diabolical plan, the two of them would sit in the living room wrapped in a blanket and they would have a marathon of Christmas movies, munching on cookies and chocolates and occasionally humming a little song. Then, when they sensed Lucifer coming home, they put everything away and pretended nothing had happened, and then spent half an hour consoling the devil who was complaining about how yet again the plan to ruin Christmas had failed.

Charlie would have liked to spend at least one Christmas night together with the whole family. She would have been fine just playing cards, not watching Christmas movies and not singing any songs. Or have dinner together. Or even just looking into the eyes. Her, her mother and her father. She would have liked to experience, at least once in her life, what it meant to spend Christmas Eve together. But her father, selfish as he was, had always refused to give up on his yearly diabolical plan. And when Charlie had told her mother about it, she had asked her to be patient, because even if it didn't seem like that night, it was very important to her father.

Charlie didn't understand how her mother could let her father get away with it. From her point of view, her father was just being selfish towards them, putting his own entertainment before family. Not that he never did, but the other times Lilith scolded him properly. But about her behavior at Christmas, strangely, her mother didn't seem to mind at all.