This year my mother-in-law's inspiration ran dry. At Thanksgiving I said, "We should get you a copy of Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters, they're great!" (I found my copy in a used shop as a teenager—I hadn't known such a book existed, and felt so privileged to have discovered it). My mother-in-law emailed me: Please do send material for the Santa letter that you talked about-----I've never read The Hobbit.
So I wrote her an adventure, posted below, with elements from J.R.R., as narrated by the elves Mac and Pete:
Dear Margaret,
It’s been
quite a year up here at the North Pole. We almost didn’t have a North Pole!
It all started with this polar bear, Urston, who likes to hang around Mrs.
Claus’s kitchen hoping for extra cookie dough. One day Urston stole a
tray of cookies that were cooling on Mrs. Claus’s kitchen window, and ran
straight into the North Pole trying to escape! He knocked it right over, and cookies
flew everywhere. It took several elves—and
a very embarrassed and sorry polar bear—to hoist the North Pole into place
again.
If that was the
craziest thing that happened this year, we’d probably be back on track with toy production.
But the next day we ran into some trouble with Santa’s old enemy, the Goblin
King, or, King Squite for short. King Squite is jealous that he and his
goblins don’t get any Christmas presents! All the goblins send Santa letters with
lists of the horrible things they want each year, and leave out moldy cookies for
him on Christmas Eve. But Santa writes back to the goblins that if they want
presents, they have to be good. Which
of course, is the one thing goblins can never be (because then they would turn
into elves, as you know).
This year,
King Squite and his goblin army surrounded Santa’s castle and demanded that all
the toys be surrendered to them immediately (including some stuff that is
supposed to go to you). Of course
Santa refused, and we elves ran around to close the shutters on all the
windows, and pull up the drawbridge. Then Mac and me loaded gobs of chocolate
sauce and marshmallow fluff into the candy cannons around Santa’s castle.
(Goblins can’t bear sweets, any type of sugar burns them, and they do a very
comical dance trying to get it off them).
Our candy
cannons were working alright at keeping the goblin army from climbing the walls
of Santa’s castle, but the goblins still surrounded us, and we didn’t know what
we going to do to get them to go away. King Squite rolled out a giant
slime-catapult, and said that if Santa tried to take his sleigh out to deliver
presents on Christmas Eve, they would shoot him down with it!
Just then,
Urston the polar bear showed up with his mother polar bear, who had dragged
him back to Santa’s castle to apologize for stealing Mrs. Claus’s cookies the
day before (even though Urston had apologized when it happened, and had been
very polite about it—for a polar bear). When
Urston and his mom saw King Squite and his goblin army surrounding Santa’s
castle, they called all their polar bear friends and relatives, and soon the
goblin army was surrounded by polar bears! (The polar bears have their own issues
with the goblins, but that’s another story).
As you
can imagine, the goblins ran off pretty quickly—so it looks like we’re still
on track for Christmas Eve deliveries, but just barely... The main problem is, when the goblin
army was escaping from the polar bears, they knocked over the North Pole, and this
time it broke into several pieces. We found most of it, but some of the pieces
are missing, and I don’t think we’ll have a chance to go looking for them till
after Christmas. I just hope the goblins didn’t steal any of the missing pieces
of the North Pole, because I sure wouldn’t want to have to sneak into the
goblin’s cave kingdom to get them back… Scary!
Anyway, I’ll let you know how it all turns out. Meanwhile, Mac and I hope you have a Merry Christmas!
Did you notice how I left it open for a sequel?
Also, I used "issue" in that vague, euphemistic sense of "problem," which I wouldn't normally, but I could see Mac and Pete doing that.
I had fun being Santa this year. I always liked him, though I'm grateful I was never told he was real. Life is hard enough to decipher without being deliberately misled.
Merry Christmas!
