Santa Claus (p. 3)

Santos used this latest failure to become, if possible, even more abusive and violent toward his wife, and she, disillusioned, disgusted, and heartsick, left the North Pole to return to Scandinavia. This separation was quick to become a long-distance divorce and Debbie, known as "Missus 'Klos" to the few who had known her, dropped from the pages of history after a brief career as an international fashion model.

Santos, filled with bitterness and hatred, vented his wrath upon the hapless elves. It was during this time, the immediate post-Debbie years, that the name Santos started to become synonymous with "evil" or "demon" in the elvish lexicon. To this day, elves will often punctuate their infrequent swearing with the word "santa".

One incident that took place soon after the divorce stands out in the record. Santos had long complained of nightmares, saying "bad little boys and girls" haunted his dreams. One late night, during one of his frequent orgies, Santos flew into a drunken fury and experienced some sort of "psychotic break". Details are sketchy, but we know that at least two elves were killed and all but one of the dilapidated reindeer stables were burned to the ground. From that day, Santos would wear nothing but red clothing, claiming it symbolic of the lifeblood he'd poured into the North Pole operation.

The Christmas Giveaways had gotten out of hand. Santos spent no time on publicity and had taken to "forgetting" many of the "good" little boys and girls. To he truthful, most of the children had forgotten about Santos Nikklos, and were occasionally surprised when a present from the North Pole arrived at Christmas. Still, the demand for free toys increased, mostly in proportion to the 20th century worldwide population increase.

Santos devised a plan whose purposes were twofold. In order to publicize the toy factory and yet keep children from demanding free toys, he sent a small army of decoy "santas" to visit shopping malls for photo opportunities. These santas were supposed to perform some public relations smoothing, while informing children that Santos' toys were only available to a lucky few. The plan backfired as the fraudulent santas usually promised that all children could have anything they wanted.

Santos' business was drowning in red ink (once, he used that fact to snidely answer a reporter's question about why he wore red). He tried to cut corners further by refusing to squeeze his gluttonous bulk down chimneys at Christmas. He quit going into locked houses. He "forgot" more and more children. By now, most of his free Christmas toys were used to fill out dwindling Mattell orders. Santos' Workshop was on the brink of bankrupcy. It was only saved by the fortuitous occurrence of two nearly simultaneous events.

The first was a fluke: the Canada Revenue Agency granted Santos' toy factory tax-exempt status, pursuant to a complete book-keeping reorganization. The Santas Workshop facility continued to mass-produce toys for Mattell, while a dummy distribution company was set up to provide toys for the Christmas Giveaway. This division operated under the name North Pole LLC and was the equivalent of Santas Workshop obtaining a "doing business as" certificate and operating a separate business entity under that fictitious name, even though it was owned by Santas Workshop. On paper, though, both ventures — Santas Workshop and North Pole LLC — would have continued to lose money were it not for the second saving grace.

The elves themselves hit upon the idea of war toys, which is not surprising, given their generally less-than-savory character and the hostile environment in which they lived. Santos, by now completely psychopathic, gave his approval and the factory started churning out various items of a violent nature. These were manufactured under the brand name "MistleToys." The elves became adept at creating Christmas tree armaments. The war toys were a big hit, and a number of toy distributors started placing orders with North Pole LLC.

By the next autumn, while the toy factory was going great guns (so to speak), the eight neglected reindeer Debbie had left foraging around the encampment had quietly grown into a herd of over forty head.

Some of the less sociopathic elves had taken it upon themselves to work the herd, feeding the animals from their own rations and tending them during their brief off-hours. There was a beautiful doe named Snowflake which had been impregnated by Prancer, and the elves waited with anticipation for another fawn. It was born prematurely, however, and some combination of recessive genes caused it to have the brown coloration of a normal caribou, rather than the glorious white color of the other members of the herd. The fawn was male, and the elves named him Rudolph, incubating the tiny runt until they felt he could be reunited with his mother. When the time came to replace him in the stall, however, the mother rejected the baby deer and nearly kicked him to death. By the time the elves could get close enough to remove the fawn from danger, blows from the doe's hooves had destroyed his muzzle.

The elves rushed the broken deer into the war toys department of the factory and fashioned a new nose complete with a bright red beacon, hoping to lift his spirits. When Santos found out about the deer, he was furious and beat the elves, screaming about lost production time. In spite of this, the elves quietly and informally adopted Rudolph as their pet.

Santos waited cunningly for his vengeance. Still angry over his divorce and failure of his venison factory, and evil having become his general nature, he plotted his scheme to eradicate the small happiness the elves had.

That Christmas eve, as Santos prepared to embark on his annual drive to deliver toys, he tore Rudolph away from the protesting elves, saying he needed the fawn to light his way in the fog. The elves pleaded that he was too young, not yet a yearling; that his nose wasn't bright enough, that he hardly knew how to fly. But their anguished pleas fell upon deaf ears. Santos' diabolical plan was not to be thwarted.

Once away on the journey, Santos was not lax with the whip. He singled Rudolph out as the object on which he would vent his wrath, and cruelly beat the tiny fawn, much more so than the larger, stronger deer. He whipped the poor animal mercilessly, and upon his return the next morning, dumped the small deer's beaten body at the door to the elf barracks. Rudolph was once again near death, broken and bloody, his shiny nose smashed. The elves ministered to him again, but the damage done was too great. Rudolph suffered from internal hemorrhaging, and lingered another two days before he finally succumbed to his injuries. Officially, Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, died from complications of Flying Pneumonia before he was even a year old.

In 1982, a series of events culminated in what was eventually called the Silent Night.

Santos was obsessed. Financial problems dominated his mind. The toy factory was rapidly approaching the end of its business life, and the nightly bacchanalian orgies failed to distract him. Prostitutes he had been hiring for these parties were no longer available; they either ran away or demanded prices that were beyond Santos' ability to pay. Caterers and ouzo distributors, like most of his suppliers, were pressuring him for monies owed. Far and away the worst problem, though, was the overhead cost of running North Pole LLC and Santas Workshop.

Santos realized this, and set in motion a plan to end the entire operation. Filing for bankrupcy was an easy decision, one he had been contemplating for some time to temporarily hold off his creditors, but he was still left with the obligation of feeding and boarding his labor force. One must remember that at this point, Santos was virtually insane. Thus he could see only one quick and easy way to take care of the elves— one final solution.

He began by poisoning the ouzo he served at his house during the nightly "festivity". This wasn't as successful an effort as he had hoped, however. The lack of available concubines had caused attendance to steadily decline, and by this time most of the elves had learned to avoid Santos' dangerous revelries. Also, some of those that did attend stopped short of ingesting fatal doses.

The elves chained to their workbenches the next morning were suspicious and very afraid. A disappearance among them was a common thing at the North Pole, but usually a missing elf would return to the barracks, stumbling in sometime during the late morning hours. Never before had there been so many prolonged absences at once. The few elves that did shamble back to the dorms were desperately ill; spastic convulsions followed by death continued to occur throughout the day.

Santos ordered the remaining elves to the factory and they complied, excepting a few who stayed to attend to their ill comrades and bury the dead. As was the custom, the elves who reported were chained to their tables and the doors to the factory were locked. Fearful of their dictator's tyrannical punishments, they were hard at work when one of Santos' henchmen approached the outside of the building. This was a trustee named Klaus, who had begun working for Santos as a probationary release from a Nunavut mental health facility three years earlier. With the elves imprisoned inside Santas Workshop, Klaus methodically set fire to it. In the horrible blaze that consumed the main building, the fire spread to engulf some of the outlying dormitories. Only the very few elves who had been tending their fatally poisoned comrades were able to flee the flaming buildings. All of the elves chained inside the factory or lying incapacitated in the barracks died in the inferno.

As evening fell, the fire threatened the stables. The elves that remained alive were in hiding. Fearing for their lives, the only action of consequence they dared to take was to save Santos' Flying White reindeer by releasing them into the wild. Some tried to ride the reindeer to freedom, others just ran off into the snowfields of Nunavut, so desperate to make their escape that they were willing to take their chances against the Arctic wilderness. Over the next few days, Klaus occupied himself by hunting the escaped elves. Believed to be acting under orders from Santos, he individually tracked down and shot the refugees. With the "firing" of most of his workforce, and the poisoning of the rest, these snow-covered assassinations ended Santos' cost-of-labor problem.