The Perfidian Fire Insurance Company

The Perfidian Fire Insurance Company was founded in Milwaukee, WI on July 25th, 1811.  A rash of fires had engulfed the city in flames that fateful summer due to issues with safety standards at the breweries.  It was an optimum time to be insured.  Flash forward almost 200 years later, and this tiny, family-owned company, not quite a corporation, relying on the wits and wherefores of its forebears in ages past had been run over by the likes of Prudential and All-State Insurance companies that couldn't give a whit about fire insurance, that had seemed quaint at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Yet in fact, the Perfidian, as the locals liked to call it, took refuge and comfort in the fact that the employees of this almost Victorian company, took pride in their personal form of customer service: making house calls and building inspections, logging everything into a lined ledger the likes of which hadn't been seen since Ebeneezer Scrooge tallied up this takings on Christmas Eve.  So fire or no fire, the Perfidian was still one smokin' company, whose one claim to notoriety or fame, or whatever you'd like to call it was that they didn't own one single computer.  Everything was either handwritten in a beautiful cursive script, or typewritten.  It made for very aesthetic record-keeping.

So what does all this mean?  Well in point of fact, The Perfidian is where our hippie chick heroine, Noelle Christmas trundles off to work each day.  [At this point, you must be wondering if that's a made up name.]  We assure you, it's not.  Not quite.   In reality, her real name is Noelle Snow White Christmas, a burden she's had to bear each day at roll call in school; a burden she's borne beatifically, as she'd decided at 24, that she's finally loving her name.  I mean, no one else in Milwaukee could admit to having such a name, although it's a well-known fact that the Christmases had changed their name when they arrived in America more than 200 years ago from Grimalkin, for fear of witch hunts.  Noelle is proud to say that she could trace a faint line all the way back to the Saxe-Coburgs in Germany, to Prince Albert, the so-called architect of that first Christmas, hence the new appellation that stuck for generations.  Still, at first, it did seem to her a bit redundant that hers was not only a derivative of Christmas, as in Noel, but that she was also named after a beloved Disney character who was a kind of live-in maid/Mommy/girlfriend to more than a half-dozen little people.  Which brings us up to date to the present.  July 25th, 2011 was not only the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Perfidian Fire Insurance Company, but also the date set for the company's yearly Christmas in July annual event.  To this end, Noelle, unofficial head of company festivities, was in charge of coordinating these fun times, much like a cruise director onboard a ship.  She relished these times as well as looked at them with utter panic as she realized only a few weeks before that she hadn't a stitch to wear, despite all her forays into dressmaking and that she needed more than a fairy Godmother.  She needed a good thrift store to find something fun and appropriate for a festive mid-year cool Yule in the midst of sweltering 3-digit degrees of separation:  it was in the heat of such days that she wished she could separate her mind from the heat that enveloped Milwaukee and her skin like a bandage.  So, a trip to the one and only thrift store called The Silver Scream was in order, [named appropriately as it was, as the brainchild of a Norwegian immigrant who loved old Hollywood films, and was an art student at that, combining the scream of Munch with the silver screen.]  Noelle devoured fashion magazines the way most people had cereal for breakfast, so it was a no-brainer in that fever-addled brain of hers that she needed to get the latest gladiator sandals to go with the cute little summer rompers she had hoped to wear for "Christmas in July & 200 Years of Perfidian's Glory, 2011."  But she wanted something authentic to wear, as any old rip-off from Payless wouldn't do.  Besides, she was a size 10 and they never carried her size anywhere!  This was her cross to bear.  She had to either swallow her pride and sneak into the Men's Section of any department store, or get creative, as she had brilliantly put it, and go to the Hollywood-themed thrift store to search for the elusive gladiator sandals of yore.