Princess Luna sighed as she set aside her quill. This Hearth's Warming's Eve hadn't been friendly to her. A massive stack of paperwork, just finished, lay next to her desk. Not that that had been the only thing troublesome this day. She stretched a little, cricking her neck before walking out of her room and into the adjoining hallway.
Today had been trouble. In spite of the holiday season, there was still work to do, and threats came regardless of the existence of a holiday. A Changeling scare had run rampant in Fillydelphia recently, and witch hunts had taken place. It had taken a week of trials and putting her hoof down to put things right, which accounted for much of the paperwork, though hardly all. Yesterday, a riot of angry peasant farmers had broken out in the south; several tax collectors had been tarred, feathered, and literally run out of town on a rail; the farmers were upset about the taxes they had been under, and only after the Royal Guard was sent had peace been restored, though privately she held some sympathy for the members of the mob.
Today, though; today had almost been a breaker, literally and metaphorically. Many ponies, even after a year of her being in office again, still feared her, whether it was Nightmare Night or not. They remembered her as a demon who roamed the night, as an evil goddess determined to bring terror and everlasting night to them; they forgot that she was simply a pony like them, with failings and mortality like the rest of them, devoid of divine power and wishing good upon the country she was diarch of.
Some hours ago, when it was still daylight, Celestia had had a medical appointment and was unavailable for court. She had been coughing for the past couple days, and, at Luna's urging, had reluctantly decided to go. Luna promised that she would take care of things while she was gone.
An hour later, when court was in session, most of the cases had gone by in a semblance of normality. Nopony had said or done anything to raise her hackles, and so far, everything had proceeded smoothly. However, the final appointment had seen a small family of three - a unicorn father, an earth pony mother, and a unicorn daughter - approach the throne. As the father stated his case, Luna had noticed, despite her attempts to pay attention to him, that the daughter leaned against her mother and kept her eyes shut, desperately trying to ignore the Princess before her. Finally, after she had assured the father that she would look into his case (a claim that his farm was under the threat of being foreclosed unjustly), the young unicorn had said, quite audibly, "She won't eat me, will she mommy?"
Although stung, Luna would have been willing to let that go as childhood innocence... if the mother hadn't answered, "She won't... because mommy won't let that monster anywhere near you."
It had been more than she could bear. She had fled from the courtroom; she managed to hold the tears back just long enough to reach her room. The knowledge than even fully-grown ponies still expected the worst of her was too much for her to bear.
It had taken a while for her to get herself together, then - unnecessarily, perhaps - she had ordered one of her Guards to inform everypony that court was closed for the day.
It was not a particularly good night, and it was Hearth's Warming's Eve. Everypony would be celebrating the holidays tonight and tomorrow, and she wasn't up to speed on modern customs. She had taken some time to get used to using "normal" speech, even though she would occasionally drop back into olde English, and the rush of modern technology and the magical discoveries since her - or rather, Nightmare Moon's - first defeat were sometimes overwhelming. The fact was, she had little in common with the current era, and it disturbed her. It was made much worse by the fact that she was still feared, and she was sure that some even harbored hatred.
Depressed by all this, she set out for her room once more. She was now going to have to defend her subjects, as much as possible, from nightmares. The process in which she did so allowed her body to rest, almost as if she'd been asleep, so she suffered no physical exhaustion and only limited mental exhaustion. Luckily, most of the monsters she found in dreams were easily taken care of, but every so often she'd run into herself, or rather, Nightmare Moon; of course, it was never literally the foul monster that had taken her over, but it was another depressing proof that she was widely feared, and it weighed heavily on her.
She used her magic to open the door.
It took her a moment to recognize what she saw within.
A large evergreen tree stood where it certainly hadn't been standing just a few hours before. Under it were several wrapped packages. Three mooned-speckled stockings stood hung up over her personal fireplace, and a warm fire blazed in it, bringing wonderful heat into the room. Those hadn't been there either.
There was also a large, chubby man in red and white dress still stuffing the stockings full of smaller packages, pulling objects out of the sack on his back in order to do so.
Luna shook her head, mouth open in shock, trying to make sense of it all. Surely this couldn't be happening...?
It was. The man could hardly be unaware of her arrival, and after he finished filling those stockings, he turned toward her and chuckled kindly. He didn't say another word, but pulled what appeared to be a small book out of his bag and placed it in front of the other gifts that he'd already set under the tree.
"I think you'll find that last one rather cheering," he said in a deep but jolly voice. "Ho, ho, ho!" With that, he put his finger up against his nose, and swept up the chimney... without so much as being singed by the fire he'd set in Luna's fireplace.
Luna stared at the spot where the man had just vanished. To be sure, she knew of a world inhabited by humans, but she'd never expected to see one here without some sort of project that she and her sister would have been working on, and since Celestia shared just about everything these days, she knew of no such plan.
She walked over to the tree, hooves clip-clopping loudly against the floor as she did so. She picked up the book in her magic and opened it.
She almost reared back in shock when she saw what was on its pages.
There were photographs and paintings of her life; a few recent, but the vast majority were from before her fall to Nightmare Moon, when she and Celestia ruled in peace. In fact, many of them were from before the diarchs' reign had begun, when they were simple fillies exploring their world and having fun... as sisters, as the closest of family.
There was a photo of her and Celestia the first time they had snuck into the royal kitchen and tried to cook. She held back a giggle with her hoof; the results had included the kitchen looking as though a bomb had hit it, and the shoddy cookies that had come from all their hard work had been burned so thoroughly that they wouldn't even smolder when her angry father threw them in the fireplace. There were more; of the first snowpony they'd made, of the times each of them had learned to fly and use magic (Celestia had accidentally singed their mother's eyebrows and Luna had fried a coatrack - with the coats still on them), of their hard studies and ascension to power.
The book held no pictures of her as Nightmare Moon; in fact, there was no mention of it. Rather, the photos picked up after the Elements had cleansed her; of when she had walked through Ponyville just after the aforementioned cleansing, of her successes on Nightmare Night, and of the good times she'd spent with her sister after she'd become herself again. There weren't anywhere near as many of these as the pictures displaying events during her childhood, but they were all happy and uplifting.
How would he have gotten his hands on these? And how could they have been taken? These date back well before photography was invented.
"God rest ye, Merry alicorn," she read on a tag fixed to the book. "From, Santa Claus. Have a Merry Christmas and Merry Hearth's Warming, and a very Happy New Year!"
The "how" aspect quickly faded from her mind. She felt tears stream down her face. However, these were much different from the ones that she'd shed earlier; she felt warm and loved inside, and the difficulties she faced in the world seemed to have dissolved, at least temporarily.
She hugged the book close to her chest. "My thanks, mysterious stranger," she said quietly. She felt peaceful, in a way she hadn't for a long time. She felt rejuvenated, and looked forward to protecting the dreams of countless Equine children tonight.
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"Now really, my dear," Mrs. Claus said to her husband, who set himself down, exhausted, in a chair by the fireplace, "meeting with royalty and not introducing yourself in person! You ought to have better manners than that."
Santa smiled. He knew his wife was mostly joking. Nonetheless, he answered, "I do have others, some just as bad off if not more so, to think about, you know. And," he added, picking up a crystal ball and gazing into it to view a confident and determined midnight-blue alicorn go about her own work, truly happy for the first time in a long while, "I think what I said, wrote, and left was enough for the situation at hand."