Peter the Pirate and the Christmas Ship

This is the first of the three St. Nicholas Day stories that I wrote to my Children. I wrote the first two stories many years ago and would read them on the eve of St. Nicholas day. Last year I posted the third story because it was the last of the three and my children had never heard it before, so I wanted to share it with them from my residence in Abu Dhabi and thus try to keep something of our St. Nicholas Day tradition alive.

So this is now my third Christmas here in this land of sand and palm trees, where the snow never falls and there’s never a hope of a real pine tree. This year, I’m backing up to create this Audio story of “Peter the Pirate and the Christmas Ship” the first of the three. There are several more Peter the Pirate stories other than the Christmas stories. I started writing them long before Johnny Depp appeared on the screen in Pirates of the Caribbean as I said last year. If anything serves as an inspiration for the Peter the Pirate stories it is not the present love of pirates from my favorite movies, but from the Playmobile Pirates that belonged to my son Peter when he was a little boy and the time when we played with them together in the basement of an old house behind Van Weiren Hardware on the North Side of Lake Macatawa in Holland, Michigan. We had a great time doing that and these fantasy stories, as we played them, developed into night-time stories and later into the ballads/stories in verse that they became.