A Modern Day Saint Nick Story by Christopher

The following is a story Christopher wrote for his writing class. It was a lesson on how to create a story from a set of three minimally sketched drawings. The pictures he had to work with were 1) A person snorkeling in water, 2) A law officer beckoning the person towards him, and 3) The officer leading the person away in the background of the drawing with a water fountain in the foreground. He came up with the following story to turn in, and for fun we searched the Internet for pictures to post here to accompany it... we came up with some very interesting images indeed... but decided to use the one you see here.

A Modern Day Saint Nick

by Christopher Amick

One night in New York City, an Italian man named Giovanni was snorkeling in a public fountain because he was stealing coins that people had tossed in. He happened to look up and saw a police officer beckoning to him with one hand, and with the other he held a pistol pointed directly at him! Hopelessly Giovanni just stared at the officer dumbfoundedly until the law enforcer fired his pistol causing a bullet to zip by just two tiny inches from his face! It was so alarmingly close that it actually hit his snorkel tube causing Giovanni to to have water fill his mouth. Energetically he spat his water in the policeman's face. Giovanni was confused; he could not figure what he had done wrong since he swam in the fountains in Italy often.

The angry officer kept his gun raised while Giovanni asked his pardon, but before he could do anything else the officer had him by the scruff of his neck and was dragging him along when suddenly Giovanni howled "Wait! I need my hat!" Then he quickly snatched up a Santa Claus hat that was lying beside the fountain. Next the law man put Giovanni in the back of his car and drove him off to police headquarters. Upon arrival he was taken to a room to be searched - even though he was only wearing swimming trunks?????? They discovered coins from the fountain hidden in his speedos (which had a secret hip pocket sewn into them)! After this he was taken to jail until the time of his trial, sadly his orange prisoner suit did not match his Santa hat.

A few weeks later at his trial he explained that each year on St. Nicholas Day (December 6th) he honors the memory of this special man by placing gold coins in the shoes of poor children just as St. Nicholas had done. Since he was from Italy and only had coins from there, he realized at the last minute they'd be useless to American children, so he desperately began trying to gather American coins. Noticing the fountain and all that it held he decided to collect them to distribute. The judge was so deeply touched by the man's kind intentions that he set him free from bondage to follow in the footsteps of the great Saint Nick.