Little Pine fell asleep thinking about Sugar Bear. What a sweet creature she was! He wished bears like her would come to live in his woods. Then maybe, when he was bigger, they would climb his branches, hugging him with their furry limbs. Bear hugs, he thought, must be wonderful. Especially if the giver was a bear like Sugar Bear.
Soon he was sound asleep, his mind full of nothing but star-spangled sky. He drifted there for quite a while before he began to dream.
At first the dreams were replays of the day’s events. He dreamed he was in Mother Elf’s kitchen and that fragrant freshly-baked treats were stacked in towers that reached to the ceiling and pressed against all the walls, making them bulge. As fast as the elf brothers could haul them away to hide in the tree hollows, Mother Elf and Jeffrey Gingerman would pull more of them from the oven. He dreamed he was running through the forest with the elves, helping them hide the maple leaf candies and the winterberry muffins in every nook of every tree. And then he dreamed about the fun bubble exploding and the elves laughing as they rode its light streams around and around the decorated tree by their tool shop.
Finally the dreams faded and once more he drifted through a deep darkness lit only by twinkling stars. He floated there for a long time before a faint pink light began to fill the space. He dreamed that the pink was filled with rosy pine needles and streamers of some kind, and then, as the vision came into focus, he saw a beautiful bird in its center. Its wings were lavender and pink with a whisper of pale gold, and its body was pale gold, too, and reflected the lavender and pink. He had never seen anything like it in the woods. It must be a creature of the dream world, born of the starlit sky.
“Greetings, Little Pine,” it said to him in his dreams. “I am a messenger of the Great Yes, sent to tell you that the song of your heart fills your woods with joy. You lift the spirits of all you encounter with your cheerfulness and your respectful manner. And we thank you for that.
“It may seem to you that you are nothing but a little tree, one of many in a woodland full of trees. You do not think of yourself as important or special, and that is part of your sweetness.
“But your cheerfulness matters a great deal, Little Pine. It helps to balance the hurt and suffering in the world, and more of that exists than you will ever know. Because your heart sings with friendship and love, Little Pine, you add to the healing of the world.
“I have come to thank you for being exactly who you are, and to tell you that you are known, and loved, more than you can even dream. Carry on, dear child, with your mission of joy. Be undaunted in the face of darkness. Even as you celebrate the life-giving of the Great Light’s return, we celebrate the light in your heart. May it shine brightly forever.”
And with that, the vision began to fade, and Little Pine felt his heart float high, high into the nighttime sky. And when he woke the next morning, he was bursting with gladness.