note: i have a christmas story to share, inspired by efforts of yesteryear. at some point this year, i figured that if i could complete more ideas on the theme over the next few years, then i’d have a christmas storytelling series of my own. time will tell if i manage to achieve this, but this year’s entry brings me closer to doing so… so, i present to you santa vs the elves: rebels without a claus(e), a mildly speculative fiction imagining how a conflict between santa and his little helpers might play out in a world like ours. you can hear / read it below. i do hope you like it.
santa vs the elves
The first anyone outside of the homeland heard of the dispute was roughly seven weeks away from Christmas Day The Main Event™, when Posten Bring reported the discovery of a letter bomb addressed to a certain ‘Father Nick of 1 Lapland’. In their initial investigations, Finnish police refused to rule out the possibility that one of his elves had sent it. However, none came forward to admit their part in the misdeed, less still the elf accused (who shall remain nameless to protect their anonymity; the case is still active).
Aggrieved, Father St Nicholas Kris Kringle of Christmastime (aka ‘Santa’) sought retribution among the immigrant population. He decreed that tufte climate refugees from the melting Norwegian glaciers and gonks newly arrived from war torn lands further afield would receive half their weekly elf rations until the culprit was found, thinking it would induce the guilty party to reveal themselves. The manoeuvre failed to produce an admission but it did trigger minor outbreaks of scurvy and rickets. The resulting loss of elves to the workforce through sickness led to a fall in the Volume of Wrapped Presents ready for Transit (VWP), which came at the worst possible time of the year for The Jolly Present Giver; he had hired them specifically for the purpose of ramping up the season’s output.
Worse still, the longest serving elves resented the treatment of their fellow workers for an as yet unproven crime and decided to down tools in solidarity. As word spread around the elven community of a cabal organising acts of disobedience in defiance of Santa’s vengeance, what started as a sympatian protestina soon turned into an impromptu strike in support of the right of all elves to receive fair alms for a fair day’s work.
Santa took to the world’s newsrooms to defend his actions.
Ho ho how do you think I get paid? Is it not in gifts of gratitude? I am but a dispatcher of the world’s wishes. The bulk of our output is borne by my little helpers. If one of us suffers, we all suffer. So it would not be in the interests of myself, my team, or indeed all the world’s children to have rogue elves who hate us for what we do and our way of life destroy Työpajan Henki with their terrorist actions!
Any dissident behaviour must be brought to heel, for the sake of the lasten. That is simply the nature of my business. They are my shareholders. They are the ones who matter in all of this.
This enraged the elves, one of whom told a journalist:
Father pays us, so how does he expect we cope with his decision? He says his hand was forced, but he could have done something else, anything else. Yet, he chose to make for us a famine of his feast. We need to eat too, you know! Why should any of us be punished for the actions of one phantom criminal? Remember: we still don’t know who sent the letter!
Santa’s sudden visibility also surprised them. Asides from overshadowing the original question of who sent the letter, some elves thought it odd that someone so concerned with their anonymity would want to raise their profile by engaging in public relations stunts.
Naturally, nothing came of these verbal skirmishes except a growing tension between both parties, which lingered till Thanksgiving Week when more revelations returned the homeland to the world’s attention. Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, video of emaciated gonks struggling to stack presents at two of Santa’s workshops leaked on social media, precipitating another decrease in week-on-week VWP.
‘Santa has lost his standing as the world’s most trusted father figure, possibly forever’
- Time
Up to this point in the dispute, The Wizard of Loz had promised the elves nothing. But footage of the cruelty done unto them shook his reputation in the public imagination. ‘Santa has lost his standing as the world’s most trusted father figure, possibly forever’ one Time magazine thinkpiece intoned, while financial experts at Bloomberg speculated whether Nasdaq Xmas futures would turn negative, an outcome last seen during the Winter War of 1939 between Finland and the Russian Soviets.
Sensing that he might have to downsize forecasted Goodwill Domestic Product receipts for the first time since League of Nations peacekeepers set foot in the Arctic, Santa turned to online retailer Amazon to plug a projected shortfall in productivity and restore business confidence in time for the festive season. He colluded with Jeff Bezos to secure the Elves in Lapland Security Agreement (ELSA) in which Santa® — the enterprise, not the person — would become a semi-autonomous division of Amazon’s Gift Giving Commerce Department, mandated to hire from the Amazon labour pool to meet minimum service provision levels as and when the parent company deemed it necessary. Someone had to keep the spirit of Christmas alive, after all.
The deal had the immediate benefit of shrinking employment costs, because gig-working Amazon hires were cheaper than elves thanks to an European Free Trade Area employment law exemption classifying them as independent contractors, thereby prohibiting them from unionising (as non-human beings, elves residing in the Lapland dominion are exempted from labour laws too, but no legislation specifically bans them from freedom of assembly, and Santa could ill afford to test this principle legally).
However, in assuming that it was in the public interest for him to fulfil his stated purpose by meeting what was commonly termed the ‘Nokian need’ — a phrase harking back to the labour shortages of Finland’s halcyon days as the leading producer of cell phones — Santa overlooked the optics of his deal. His favourability rating fell to an all time low of -49 points amongst the Helsinki Times readership and news of his scheming seemed to steer ever more elves towards the freshly formed Elf’n’Safety Workers Union (ESWU), stewarded by half a dozen of the ringleaders from the first wave of strikes. Those veterans were still infused with a charitable enough spirit to enter in good faith into arbitration with Santa’s cabinet delegation, the Yule Láds, until early December, when one of the Láds — Stúfur — accused the elves of wanting to ruin Christmas.
Stubborn Stúfur told Yle TV:
Some of us are happy with what we’re given! Take a leaf out of my book — I survive on nothing more than the dregs of pots and pans. Do I complain while the elves digest a hearty broth from cousin Claus’s banquet? No! Anyway, judging from the average skammtur, these nisser should have more than enough to survive on anyways! They often store resources like malen’kiye belki, you know…
… and then proceeded to threaten a mass deportation of tufte back to ‘wherever they came from’ as a punishment for the attempted assassination of his unfairly maligned relative. ESWU chiefs took his comments as a gross insult to the integrity of all elves residing in Lapland, and abruptly broke off negotiations.
In this souring climate, elves’ frustrations propelled unilateral attempts to effect change. One faction of tufte tried to leverage the global community’s compassion for their plight to lobby for the Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian governments’ intervention in the dispute on biocentrist grounds. Unfortunately for them, the attempt to gain legitimacy through respectability in a trilateral plebiscite held the weekend before The Main Event™ ended with a narrow majority voting in favour of a non-strike solution to the dispute, under the moniker ‘Make Christmas Great Again’.
Other elves felt compelled to adopt more drastic actions. One such example involved a WikiLeaks-style exposé of The Christmas Controller’s annual rituals, with a particular focus on his behaviour around children’s bedrooms. But it did not take. The British tabloid press spurred a worldwide backlash over the story, taking exception to ‘glib’ and ‘deeply unhelpful’ comparisons made between The Christmas Chimney Climber and suspected paedophiles P—l— —f— and P— —dr—, and claiming that it was ‘implausible for Santa’s actions to have met a threshold high enough to have his character defamed by some faceless trolls!’
Controversies aside, the sudden spike in unemployment turned Lapland into an ‘ongoing concern’ for the United Nations, whose observers documented elves’ struggles to make ends meet in the new turbulent economic environment. With opportunities for gainful employment evaporating, some bandied together to try to take control of their economic fortunes by forming a cooperative to make and sell Elfical® presents. But, even though they were free to trade with the whole world, custom was hard to come by, save for a few niche artisanal brands and speculators eager to augment their asset portfolios with limited runs of Christmas trinkets certified with the Fairtrade logo.
Many more elves saw Hoesecker’s Hordes as a viable alternative. Joining the operation of Santa’s Helper-in-Chief required much less responsibility for a steady income… as long as they could stomach the illegality. For as long as Ol’ Father Nick had been in business, Hoesecker had run a parallel black market in Christmas counterfeit and coal, exploiting the labour of kidnapped elves in the process. All the while he presented a naive persona to the public, which gave him an almost unassailable repute, one that endured through the feud between both parties thanks to his hand-wringing lamentations over every failed attempt at reconciliation.
That is, until the night before the night before Christmas, when rumours of torture at Hoesecker’s hand surfaced on Reddit forums. Then photos of lacerations on the hind legs of reindeer Thrasher, Nixon, and Vomit spread on Instagram and Twitter, later confirmed by half a dozen eyewitness reports published on elves’ Facebook accounts.
Although Santa played no part in Hoesecker’s malfeasance, the court of public opinion adjudged him to be guilty by association. Brands queued up to denounce Baba Noel, most notably Coca-Cola, who pulled ads across global markets instantly and demanded he take as swift action against his Number 2. Animal rights groups held demonstrations across the continent, and a coalition led by PETA and the World Wide Fund for Nature threatened to open legal proceedings against Santa, Hoesecker, and anyone else in the Christmas universe found either in connection with or adjacent to the culture of abuse.
The fallout from the scandal shamed The Red Nose Rider into making concessions to the ESWU. This included wholesale acceptance of their ‘tufte dignity’ demand: the elevation of all immigrant elf workers to ration parity with their indigenous counterparts. The announcement lured a wave of elves back from the cold; almost half of ESWU members promptly broke off their pickets and returned to Santa’s workshops to do their part for The Xmas Effort.
But it was not enough, partly because few Amazon-contracted workers who made it to the frosty fjords could cope with the working conditions. A handful of them contracted pneumonia, got hospitalised, and were forced to leave Lapland for treatment. Of those able to work, many struggled to cope with the pace of assembly line production, too often with harmful results. Equipment got damaged, as did several limbs. On balance, the injection of human labour to the mission was more of a hindrance than a help. The snowflakes couldn’t keep up with Santa’s little helpers.
So the Yuletide Boss needed even more labour ahead of the Christmas Eve deadline. Knowing that time was tight to fill the persistent deficit in VWP, he threw in the promise of an unspecified bonus for those who returned to work the overnight shift. This attracted another wave of elves to the workshops in a last ditch attempt to meet the target. The Lapland Labour Organisation estimated that Santa’s appeasement yielded a 91% recovery of elves to the workforce.
Still, it was not enough. As Santa set off on his gift-giving voyage, Amazon’s shareholders held an emergency meeting in which they came to the unanimous decision that he could not deliver on his Christmas vows under the terms of the ELSA, forcing his business into the kind of administration that could only be resolved by the parent company, of course.
And that is why all your wrapped presents are watermarked with the Bezos smile now. Don’t believe me? Go read the contract for yourself. It’s in the bylaws, I swear.
Merry Christmas to one and all, and don’t forget to tune in to Christmas Day The Main Event™, an Amazon Prime extravaganza delivered to you by Santa Claus!
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