Why I stayed home this Christmas!

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BY SANTA CLAUS

For some people Santa came to town way ahead of time, letting the cat out of the bag. But then maybe next year . . . it’ll be Christmas for everyone!

 

 

Let’s face it, good boys and girls of all ages, if there’s one thing Santa is especially good at it’s making things up. And just in case some might be tempted to understand Santa too quickly (where have we heard that phrase before?) Santa wants everyone Nice—the perpetually impregnated and their ever horny impregnators alike—to know where Santa’s coming from.
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows it’s the North Pole. But just this once let’s keep things in context, shall we? Where Santa’s coming from on this occasion has nothing to do with where Santa’s been. It’s just a turn of phrase, as my favorite reindeer likes to say, a way of saying Santa wants you to get what he’s getting at.
When Santa speaks of making things up, don’t go concluding Santa would ever stoop so low as to pretend he is what or where he’s not, Santa would never be so lowdown as to invent stories about state visits to places nonexistent. Places like, say, Kimkardashian or Katchaskatchcan!
Under no circumstances would Santa claim a diplomatic relationship with a non-existent nation, let alone suggest such non-existent nation is just itching to dish out made-in-Cuba goodies left, right and center, especially left!
Santa wouldn’t dream of slipping down anyone’s hole in the ceiling as she or he slept, in the process making the hole larger. Chimneys are more to Santa’s liking, although he has on occasion broken into a House full of snoring professional misleaders.
Santa’s just not into making up tales. Not about himself, not about where he’s been and certainly not about how important chunks of seabed got into the hands of grabbing strangers with oil under their fingernails.
Such things Santa leaves to incorrigible boys and girls who are simply naughty by nature. How can you trust people who will say one thing today and pretend the next day it was someone else who had said it? Or that what they did say was said in a particular context obviously misunderstood by ordinary folks who never learned the difference between statues and statutes.
Politicians are especially prone to that kind of thing: remember that silver-haired horny Billy Goat who could think of nothing better to do to poor Monica than mess up her favorite little blue dress? When it came time to account for his naughtiness, what do you suppose the little scoundrel wrote
to Santa, who knows all things no matter where committed?
The silver-haired devil tried to tie Santa up in knots by clever use of his forked tongue. He had his own interpretation for this, for that and for what have you. He actually denied all knowledge of poor Monica, then turned around and tried to engage Santa in word games.
With his own blue eyes he looked right into Santa’s baby blues, wagged his cigar-size forefinger under Santa’s red nose, and said: “You know, Santa, the truth about this whole blue dress mess depends altogether on the meaning of is.”
Confusing, you say? Maybe. But nobody confuses Santa. Nobody, I tell you. Not even that other PhD upstart from the Land of Pitons and Sulphur. Or that other character with the puffed-up 2011 GDP figures!
But we were talking about how good Santa is at making things up. Things like toy trucks, toy houses, even toy money. You’ve never seen toy money? Well, have you ever played Monopoly? You think they play it with real cash? And what about this other game that always reminds Santa of carnival and La Rose and Fete la Maguerite?
On the Rock of Sages (where once they produced Nobel Laureates by the number!) the natives refer to it as “our most important cultural showcase.” Oh, yes, now I remember. It’s called “The Estimates of Expenditure” game. Sounds hifalutin’, huh?
On the Rock of Sages there’s no other game better enjoyed or more looked forward to annually than The Estimates of Expenditure. It’s played with billions of dollars, not a cent of it real. (The talented elves who print these trillions and trillions of toy dollars back home, with only the best intentions, prefer to refer to them as play dough and “other people’s money”—although these days more and more are calling it VAT and treating it as the panacea for all the problems confronting the Rock of Sages.
You won’t believe this—Dancer and Prancer certainly don’t and they’re mere animals!—but the movers and shakers of the Rock of Sages actually expect VAT to pay not only their debts at home but also the millions of real dollars they owe almost every bank this side of Venezuela.
But that’s only half the story, good girls and boys. Last year permanent residents on the Rock of Sages actually took a vote to forcibly lift their overweight King off his throne and replace him with an overweight monarch with vision. How could they tell the difference? Good question.
The way the story reached Santa and his little helpers, specially gifted and differently-abled inhabitants of the Rock of Sages were recruited to do for their country what the Pied Piper had done centuries earlier for the rat-oppressed people of Hamelin.
The Rock’s singers and songwriters burned the midnight oil and lit up a few other things for almost a month, to no avail. But just when it seemed they had wasted precious time and much donated real money, bingo! They struck oil. Red oil, that is, in the form of a mesmerizing chant that they called En Rouge—which any fool would know is Greek for “in the red!”
Before long, En Rouge was on the lips of women and men everywhere on the Rock of Sages. They hummed it, crooned it, rocked it, danced to it, made love to it, and for all I know worked out to it.  Day and night, there was no Rock of Sages activity without En Rouge blaring from ubiquitous loudspeakers, especially during the month before Christmas last year.
On this day that will live in infamy (did Churchill steal from Santa? Did Comet
sneak it into Santa’s speech?), that unforgettable day in November 2011, everyone deserted his and her regular section to board the En Rouge train. And now that everyone has gotten what everyone ever wanted for Christmas past, present and future, the naughty and nice of the Rock of Sages are finally united—crying together in VAT harmony—as their ancestors had never been!
From all Santa picked up back at the Santa ranch, he’d be taking his beard in his hands should he be foolish enough to dare set a reindeer’s foot on the Rock of Sages for another four years or so.
Why’s that? Well, according to all Santa (who knows all things) has learned, the last person to visit the Rock of Sages in a suit resembling Santa’s was booted out to, of all places, Taiwan. And right now Santa has too much work to do for the nice starving kids worldwide to risk another Rock of Sages landing any time soon.
At any rate, not without a special invitation of the visionary monarch and a whole bunch of background checks to establish his true identity.
And now, boys and girls, you know why Santa stayed away this year. Let’s just hope the atmosphere will be more, er,  conducive next year. Santa used to so enjoy coming down your chimney holes, your water pipes . . . whatever!
By the way, that feller in the STAR photograph at the weekend, surrounded as he was by the laughing leader and his elves? More make-believe. There’s only one true Santa and he was a million miles north of the Rock of Sages when Bill Mortley photographed those fat suits with their tiny toy Santas!

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