Background Information for
Steven Argyle's Phantom Pain
In November of 2001, Dale challenged me to write a Christmas story, and promised that he would write one too. “Phantom Pain” is the result of my efforts. As of July 2002, I have yet to see Dale’s Christmas story (hint, hint).
Surely you’re thinking that “Phantom Pain” is an odd title for a Christmas story, and you’re right. But then, “Phantom Pain” is not your usual Christmas story. You see, Christmas stories terrify me. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I invariably get asked to tell one or two every holiday season. I hate telling Christmas stories because they only come in two varieties, the sappy, formulaic ones and the good ones. I refuse to tell the sappy ones, and I can never retain my composure well enough with the good ones to render an acceptable performance.
So, there I was with a challenge to meet. I began looking for inspiration in a coffee table book about Christmas traditions around the world. There I found a tiny reference to the Christkindl, a tradition among the Pennsylvania Dutch that had been imported from the Germanic countries. I was intrigued and pursued the matter further. Evidently the Christkindl figure appears variously as a tiny boy or as an angelic being of indeterminate gender. The illustrations of the angel that I saw, however, were all distinctly feminine. I also learned that the tradition had originated in Germany during the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries. Of course, Germany did not exist as a nation at that time, instead being a jigsaw puzzle of petty states embroiled in religious wars. I had just finished reading a book on the Thirty Years War, and so, perversely perhaps, I decided to set my Christkindl story in the midst of that conflict.
Once that had been decided, Gottfred sprang fully armed from my mind and we were off on his painful ride together. I find that happens with almost all of the best of my stories. Once the groundwork is laid, they take on a life of their own and writing them is more an adventure of discovery than a labor of creation. I’ll let you judge the results.