The Mysterious Tale of Santa

Puffing at his pipe, one of the most famous, yet elusive, men in the world sat down and began to read The Sunday Mirror. Don’t ask me why he bothered to read the Sunday Mirror since it was a Wednesday and he didn’t have even a vague interest in current affairs, but he was reading it anyway. One of the drawbacks of living in the North Pole was the postal system; the said copy of the Sunday Mirror was actually two months old. Nevertheless, Santa Claus read on showing no apparent interest. He needed to relax before the big day - he was to set off in a few hours; Christmas Eve was nearing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Santa Claus doesn’t exist! You may be thinking why on earth you’re reading such a silly sounding tale; but I assure it’s no sillier than a middle aged Venetian lorry driver eating lunch consisting of kumquats. So you see, this is a story we can all relate to.

Many people believe that the fabled Santa Claus doesn’t exist. They say such things as ‘Oh, it’s mathematically impossible for some old bloke to travel to hundreds of millions of people to give them presents in the space of one night,’ and other such poppycock. The thing that they don’t take into consideration is that it is mathematically possible. The thing that no one seems to know is that on the 24th of December every year, the Earth becomes exposed to a sort of time paradox. Due to the thinning ozone layer, the world becomes more and more exposed to this ‘time ray’ each year which ends up slowing down time a bit more every year. This is quite helpful since the population is rising and there are far more houses to visit. The time ray concentrates on the North Pole the most, which is why Santa resides there. He certainly doesn’t live there for the weather and postal service.
What this time ray does is slow down time to approximately a thousandth of its normal rate. But you say, ‘Why, I don’t notice any time difference on Christmas eve!’. This is partly true; on average, human beings’ sense of time is slowed down by a nine hundred and ninety ninth of its normal rate. This is because some people are thicker than others (metaphorically and physically), so the time rays cannot penetrate their minds quite as effectively as the physical world. This is why, for example, a child’s sense of time slows right down whilst a bank manager’s sense of time stays where it is; physically speaking, your average child is thicker than your average bank manager (if only the same could be said metaphorically speaking, too).
Santa, on the other hand, is unaffected by the time rays after living so exposed to them after so many hundreds of years. This possibly makes Santa the thickest man on earth. He has a good heart though.

Now, another argument against the existence of Santa Claus may be that no one actually gets presents from him; all your presents come from family and friends. This is no trick; Santa has in fact stopped giving out presents since the mid sixties. Santa spent most of his time in San Francisco during this time, where he was heavily influenced by the hippie movement. After becoming a hippie, Santa began to realize the unimportance of material possessions, and began to furiously dislike (hippies aren’t allowed to hate) commercialism. This struck a serious blow for Santa’s career. He then proceeded to free all the elves from his workshop, believing that he had been exploiting them for cheap labour all these years. They soon found work for the Coca Cola Company. He continued visiting every good child’s house every year, except he resorted to giving them high fives instead of presents. Because Santa is on a different level of time than the rest of the world, a child has yet to notice that he or she has just been high fived by Santa.
Equal rights and everything pure continued to fuel Santa’s heart well after the hippie movement. In 1976, Santa joined an animal rights group and proceeded to release all of his reindeer, except for Rudolf who didn’t want to leave. Rudolf now lives in the spare bedroom and rocks out every Thursday afternoon to The Grateful Dead. After this, Santa replaced his reindeer with a petrol engine (which he still sprinkles with magic dust) and he did splendidly with his updated sleigh for around twenty years, until joining Greenpeace and learning about the environment. He now drives his sleigh with an electric motor and is looking into hydro powered engines.

Santa took a last puff of his pipe and glanced over the Sunday Mirror at the clock. It seemed to have stopped working. ‘Ah,’ thought Santa, ‘Best be off, then.’