The story doesn’t actually start with Santa Claus or Neverland.  It starts much earlier, and here on Earth.  Specifically, in the year 318 A.D. a Christian priest named Nicholas was ordained as the bishop of the Greek town of Myra.  Nicholas was a very good man, and he got in the habit of secretly giving gifts to the poor people of his area.  Nicholas became very famous and was later made a Saint of the Church.

Saint Nicholas lived before the Church forbid its priests and bishops to marry, so Nicholas did marry and had a family, although the Church didn't record that fact.  After his death, many of his children and grandchildren carried on the tradition of secret gift giving, although none became as famous as Saint Nicholas, until much later.

The descendants of Saint Nicholas did not all stay in the Myra area.  Over the generation, they spread throughout the world, until 1507, which is the time that our story really begins.

A young Dutch lad by the name of Neik Klass was son to a fisherman in the city of Amsterdam.  Although he didn’t know it, Niek was one of those descendants of Saint Nicholas that I mentioned in the last paragraph. Niek, although poor, was very generous with the things he did have, and was constantly giving the younger children of his neighborhood small toys that he carved from spare bits of wood that he picked up around the wharves.

Neik Klass had dreams beyond being a fisherman as was his father.  Although this was long before the days that the Dutch established a seagoing empire, there were already merchants who traded out of Amsterdam.  Nek was determined to make his fortunes as a seaman on a merchant vessel, trading between the Netherlands, Denmark, and Iceland.  At age 16, with his father’s blessing, he became a crew member on the merchant ship Bruynvisch, working the sails.

From the viewpoint of his father, Niek’s chosen career was a bad choice.  On his first voyage, an enormous summer storm swept over the North Sea, and the Bruynvisch was never heard from again.

​​In the manner of such stories, young Niek Klass did not drown when the Bruynvisch was swept far to the north and then swamped.  As the ship was broken into pieces, sinking, several of the crew members clung to various pieces of debris.  Neik had managed to clamber onto a large sea chest, and found himself far enough out of the water to dry somewhat.

​​​Neik lifted his head cautiously to look around.  It had been half an hour since he had seen Lars, the first mate of the Bruynvisch succumb to the chill water of the ocean, and finally tumble off the narrow piece of the forecastle deck that he had clung to.  Unlike the massive chest that the boy rode atop, the deck section had barely floated above the water, and had been constantly washed over by the waves.  Neik's chest, on the other hand, kept him much higher, and for the most part drier.  The occasion spray of salty spume was easily shed by the oilskins that he and the crew normally wore.  Neik wasn't warm, by any means, but he wasn't freezing.  Yet.

Yet, decided Neik, was the important word.  He wasn't too cold, but he wasn't too warm either, and he was starting to get hungry.  The young lad knew that he didn't eat, eventually his resistance to the cold spray would diminish.  But still, Neik refused to give up.  Something would happen to save him... he just knew it.

Our story would have ended here, except that Niek managed something unusual… something incredible.  He believed hard enough that something would save him.  That he would reach safety.  And… he did.

​Remember the part when I described the Fairy world as being immediately adjacent to our own Earth, inseparable yet always separate to any but the Fairies?  Separate, that is, except near the poles, North and South.  The Bruynvisch was very far north when it foundered.  So far, in fact, that the barrier between this world and that was very thin indeed.

You see, the key to passing through the barrier between Neverland and the Earth was to believe.  While Niek wasn’t specifically believing that he could pass from one world to the next, he was believing that something would somehow save him very hard indeed.  And his belief was enough to nudge him, and his makeshift life raft, though the barrier from the frigid waters the Arctic Ocean on Earth to the Northern Ocean of Dondavar.