An adventurous collection of scenes:
Santa had firmly made his decision to put in the wiring—and
that was that, really:
“Binglewax!” Santa’s voice bellowed through
a tube phone that the elf had pulled and stretched from a toy
factory wall like rubbery taffy, right up to his ear. Glitter,
that magical dust of communication where thoughts, ideas, words
and speech could be transmitted through shiny particles, now
spewed into the air, making the elf suddenly appear rather shiny
and metallic. It was November and that meant it was the month
where the big man, Santa Klaus, quickly grew impatient. “My
dear elf,” Santa continued, “go with T1Bizworks.
Call them Pronto, ASAP and stat! I need wiring!”
“What kind of wiring, sir?” Binglewax, the roundest
elf there ever was, stood perplexed. His body resembled a big
lump of chewy fruit. His head, though shaped like a merry wooden
puppet, had a remarkably frozen red smile across it. His ears
poked out like big green pears; they were rounded and not pointy
at all, and were covered in glitter. He held the funnel-shaped
tube phone near his glitter-covered lips, and smacked them as
if the glitter were rather scrumptious: “Sir, I hear Polarcell
is running a special on Net node BZ easy fit fibers. We can
get those instead of, what you call, these ‘outdated tube
phones’. And not only that, Santa, we can get a satellite
link for Blimpervision Bubbleworks—it’s water TV—pumped
in through big pipes, straight from the southern ninety-nine
and nine-tenths of the planet. Watch it while you bathe! We
elves sure appreciate those premium cable channels—beats
snapping together lobbadolls for twelve hours on end during
the cold months.” Of course Binglewax was only mustering
up the courage to tell Santa that the elf’s own privacy
was at stake.
“No TV Binglewax. You know the rules. Section 14-A dash
12: Toys developed by elves who are influenced by popular media
appear as if manufactured on cheap sitcom sets. It’s bad
enough we use plastics. I never wanted to use plastics—we
broke the code on that one to compete with the snowless city
toy manufacturers of this world! But we’ve fallen behind
again. What I want is a cyber manifestation of this entire outdated
complex, Mr. Binglewax! I want wiring! I want the Internet!
I want a website with Santa-cams in every toy room of the factory!
I want a high-tech venture, here, in the North, where cold is
cold, and toys are toys!”
On Santa’s last word a puff of glitter blew straight into
Binglewax’s eyes, causing him to look around blindly as
he spoke. “Well certainly. Yes. But you know, Mr. K, privacy
will become an issue. We elves have always run a secret toy-making
biz up here in the North. We never wanted kids, dogs or competitors
to learn our magical ways.”
“Oh, that,” Santa said. Binglewax couldn’t
see it, but Santa got a great smile upon his bearded face. That
caused Santa to march straight from his office that was only
a few feet away, open the rickety and bulging toy room office
door and throw a plump red-suited arm around Binglewax: “Don’t
you realize there is no issue here, my little worker? It’s
all about location. People want to be in touch with this snowy
village of ours. They want to see and feel the elves and reindeer—and
me of course! And that means Internet requests, and requests
mean lists! And without lists, YOU don’t know what to
concoct for my little children in that big toy factory of yours!
Connectivity enlightens, Mr. Binglewax! I mean really, what
issue could there be? Ho-ho-ho…” Suddenly, Santa
spun the big round elf right into his own wide red face, and
growled, “Now you and the boys get to making phone calls:
I want to get wired by December 8th! Good day, Mr. Binglewax.”
As Santa saw it, his elves suddenly had real work to do. There
were phone calls, payment plans, threats they had to make to
cyberspace-line routing workers who were told that if they didn’t
come up with T8, DSL and T99-water NET links in the coldest
place on Earth by the 8th of December, that Santa would boycott
his yearly Christmas planting of over-sized toys down too-small
of chimneys for certain little boys and girls whose parents
installed cables and ran tech-support. Certainly Santa never
minded paying for services rendered. But everyone knew there
might be snow folly involved! No business was ever willing to
fly in to their remote settlement without the usual hitches
and glitches of mass high-tech capitalism trying to take Santa
for a Wall Street ride.
And so the phone calls went—elves on the phone, angry
as angry could be in tiny whiny voices that together worked
toward turning Santa’s Village into a high-tech wonderland.
“Wiring! wiring!” they sang from their cubicles
into their multi-colored tube phones, “Wiring! wiring!”
they sang into tube phones full of voice-glitter and other strangely
shaped tube links; links with multi-colored shifting voice-carrying
ooze that moved through tubes into the tube lines, and those,
into faraway cities, magically, the way only elf voices could.
They did that for three weeks—not all at once, mind you—but
until finally a fleet of blimperwhirls carrying three hundred
and thirty-five tons of supposed high-tech equipment hovered
in from one of the great ‘wired’ cities of the southern
99.9% of the planet.
“Sir, the bubble ships are here with our order,”
said Binglewax as he stood at Santa’s office door, peering
in. As Santa sat behind great stacks of leaning papers, he felt
the presence of so many ships as their vibrations nearly shook
the factory loose from its foundation.
“Well isn’t it about time those ships arrived? Or
maybe they’re early, or late; I have so many schedules
that I don’t know a thing any more. December does this
to me every year. Do you realize that there are children in
the tropics who have yet to know that I exist? Why I’ve
known about them forever and a day. But I need chimneys and
temperate climates! My sleigh will only get filled with lizards,
scorpions and snakes if I try a mud hut landing. My dear friend,
it always comes back to the same question in the end: how can
I change the world?”
Binglewax did his best to grimace, though he could only smile
eagerly in the growing hum from the ships outside and overhead.
“Good sir, I believe that it’s our world that is
changing these days. Now, please sign these orders for a larger
peppermint swirly shake machine in the steam room.”
“Now these are the details that change my life like no
other, Binglewax. Why don’t you elves eat less so I can
order smaller machines??” Santa said as he stamped his
name onto forms he pulled from a stack of papers.
“One can’t downsize when quality work is at stake,
Santa. Besides, the ships are here to upsize our image, to connect
all of us to the world, and make visible our once private lives.
I don’t believe downsizing is in order.”
“Oh there is nothing private about being an elf. You are
each made from drops of goodness and sugar, why not let the
world witness the entire baking process? That way, the world
can follow you elves from sugar drops to gleeful toy makers.”
“It’s just that—a private matter, sir. I would
rather Slim Pardoux write one of her insane stories about how
elves come from rubber chickens.”
“An elf could only be so lucky as to come from rubber
chickens. I would just have to do battle with Pardoux through
the regular press to straighten your life out if she were to
tell such lies. Oh, her and that insanely written North Pole
Tabloid! Why, look at these latest headlines: “Furious
Klaus Lands Elves in Jail”. Who ever heard of an elf in
jail? And for what? Listen to what that greedy tabloid writer
wrote: “Elves have landed in jail for the first time in
1200 years. Sources indicate that Santa’s sleigh was piloted
by three renegade toe-headed elves on Saturday night after a
cocoa rum ball party went haywire. The three criminals snuck
into the reindeer lot in a reindeer costume, then unzipped and
flew to the moon. Santa is furious. Moon men demand more presents
after airspace illegally entered before Christmas Eve. Three
reindeer have been cited by Klaus for ‘looking the other
way’.”
“I called Slim Pardoux about this and she said, ‘Klaus,
you know that I am just making a living here. Besides, it’s
not like we didn’t have pictures.’ What can I say
to that? I don’t know what kind of pictures she concocted.
But she did. And I could hear her crunching on candy canes.
She probably buys the cheap ones too. She says they help calm
her nerves when she writes, and that peppermint has a soothing
quality.”
Santa suddenly beamed with a big smile: “Elves from rubber
chickens! Ha! Now go and see to those blimperwhirl bubble ships,
my dear Bingle-chicken, ho-ho-ho! They are getting rather loud
aren’t they? I hope my little elves are having a good
time of it. Perhaps they’re already getting ready to wire
my office! Rubber chickens! Ho-ho!”
Zsssshhuummmm came the sounds of the blimperwhirls. Their big
propellers and whirling bubble jets shook the village air and
caused clumps of snow to shake from rooftops and plop onto unsuspecting
elves. “Here they come! Here they come! You can hear their
whirly twirly songs!” a large group of elves yelled and
danced on the snowy eve of December 7th. It was one full day
before Santa’s deadline for high-tech wiring (which of
course only gave them 24 hours to get the wiring finished according
to a deadline known around the village as the ‘Klaus Manifesto’).
But on that snowy eve, the elves looked to the skies in bewilderment
at the lumbering machines that floated above the village like
bubbles from a child’s bubble-blow wand. The blimperwhirls
hovered low, just beneath a white sky of cotton ball clouds.
Those clouds then started to drip snow toward the village in
big blobs of icy snow-goo, as somehow the bubble ships distorted
the very snowfall of the North. The falling goo quickly froze
as it touched the ground, and as it did, the goo encased several
elves in blocks of ice.
Simply, elves of all kinds stood amazed at the technology of
the South that hovered overhead: the blimperwhirls, those bubble
ships of the vast skyline shipyards, the great fleets that bubbled
and oozed from a sea of glistening candy-coated technology that
made up much of the rest of the planet’s high-tech skies.
Those very ships sailed on candy-coated misty winds and appeared
in so many colors and sizes, bobbing, glistening, and were almost
transparent as they made their way, rendering many of the elves
speechless in their merry-making, while others simply pointed
upward and hummed never-before-made-up phrases like: “Big
small tall bubbly blasts of goodness” “Giggle-powered
floating ships of cloudy snowdrifts” and “Hum a
tune that goes schvoom beneath these bubbly bliss candyland
ships.” Weren’t the elves all so amazed? They really
were, that is, until one blimperwhirl, and then another, and
then all of them began to open their cargo doors and drop large
boxes that came crashing through the sky like an insane Christmas
of brown paper package bombs. Elves soon dodged dive-bombing
boxes that came right toward the village in packages of every
size imaginable. “O YEEEE look out!!” they yelled
as boxes as big as cars crunched onto chimneys, blew right through
parked snow-buggies, candy shops, and smashed onto their factory
smokestacks, tipping them wildly, and making smoke and soot
shoot right over their heads! That isn’t to mention Toyworks
Factory Number Three, which took an especially stout box-bomb
right into its toy heart: the stamper-put-togetherer machine.
What happened just then was most amazing and horrific as toys
of unknown design, of even un-Christmas-like proportions, because
of the extreme malfunction that was going on, began to shoot
wildly into the air and onto the snowy box-filled streets. The
stamper-put-togetherer machine, once the most stupendous of
all elven toy-making machines, had been created in a wondrous
design, drawn up by Binglewax and his two brothers, Zingle and
Dadalili. It was a feat that took 100 years to formulate in
miniature ice-carved designs; it also took three tons of condensed
steel-mixed magic dust to build, and the goodness and cheer
of a twelve-year-long Christmas festival just to work out all
of the bugs. Yet now the stamper-put-togetherer machine rung
out in desperate and woeful cries that only such a machine can
give when bearing new and unheard of toys. There were whines
as gears froze; grunts as steam bellowed; and there came a fiery
release of heat as strange new parts were formed among a banging
and clattering of metal against metal as molds squished together
shapes that not even Santa’s elves, in all of their goodness,
could imagine; then of course there sounded a final kaboom while
the machine stopped to think, wonder, and create. And of course,
after that there came a great silence—but just for a few
moments—as the stamper-put-togetherer machine suddenly
began to churn and sing a new tune, an unheard of Christmas
tune that was so dark and so dismal, that many elves began to
faint in the nearby snow. As the tune went, it was a marching
song very unlike the whizzbangy chorus of the toyshop elves
who could hammer and chisel, and make great machines of engineering
wonder, all while creating masterful and cheery toyshop tunes
and musical dance numbers. This new demented machine-churning
song was like a stormy rumble, a marching tune of toys unknown,
as if the tune itself were the very crazily spun wintry tornadoes
that seemed to have been released within the stamper-put-togetherer
machine’s now darkened heart. Oh those paper package bombs!
Oh what a sudden tempest of ill-made toys! What a fearsome and
loathsome toyshop tune! And then, as the song bellowed its ratatat
drum-booming march, as if from the very heart of the machine,
so too the doors of the great machine opened, and out of which
marched toys from the dark recesses of the stamper-put-togetherer
machine. Those toys came from a place where no good heart of
mechanical toy-making seemed to be left. Out came robots with
real lungs that breathed and sighed angrily; wooden chickens
with fire engine hearts and red-painted beak lips danced and
sang Elvis tunes into the steely eyes of frog babies that squirmed
in their grasp, only to get tongue-tied and eat the tadpoles
in gulp after gulp; there were little remote control cars zooming
past with apples for wheels, that when peeling out, sent long
grey worms flying in every direction; out came devilish tunes
of all kinds played from pull-string gizmos of at least fifteen
geometrical shapes and sizes; there were pyramids of mechanical
red-eyed monkeys who didn’t know they were metal monkeys
at all—they spoke in bohemian poetics all at once so that
no one could understand their gibberish; and last to mention,
after many more strange toys, came one very small fiery little
red monstrosity that ran straight out of the machine only to
begin turning candy canes into ash. By simply touching a tiny
index finger to every candy cane it could find, this fire-haired
toy creature, with a good supply of batteries and a dark purpose,
created a holocaust for peppermint candies everywhere. “Oh
goodness,” a rather boyish looking elf said as he grabbed
the tiny toy, only to mumble further about the writings on the
label attached to its tiny clothing, “We’ve created
‘The Imp of Christmas Doubt’. Nothing like this
has been made in thousands of years. Those blimperwhirls have
created a truly devilish toy amongst us!”
It really was ‘The Imp of Christmas Doubt’, this
little toy creature that suddenly squirmed from the startled
elf’s grasp, only to turn into ash the entire peppermint
buggy where the elf sat, three nearby peppermint light poles,
and an entire Christmas tree of peppermint candy-shaped lights.
After dancing in victory, it then wandered its way down Candy
Cane lane, where, after sniffing a sudden waft of peppermint
air, it disappeared into a bank of snow and snuck its way into
the hollows of tunnels beneath Santa’s village.
There it went, into the dark and the cavernous recesses beneath
several of Santa’s toy factories. If ever there could
be darkness at the North Pole, this strange toy found the very
pit of despair. And why? Because from such darkness there emanated
a strong peppermint odor that the imp, in its strange purpose
of destroying peppermint candies, wondered about such fragrant
origins. It wandered dark passageways, squeezed between the
icy webs of snow spiders, and passed through a set of iron bars
built long ago to prevent merry elves from wandering into anything
dark and foreboding beneath the village. You might wonder what
kinds of sounds there were other than the pitter-patter of little
devilish toy feet? For one, there were the squeaky sounds of
water that didn’t quite know whether to be frozen or not.
From ice to liquid, and liquid to ice, water went wheezing in
these depths; little vermin which ate spider webs like candy
peered from dark holes and made muffled noises; it seemed the
very bricks and wood beams of these passages made lonely creaking
sounds that typically were only heard in empty rooms and old
houses late at night. And the strangest sounds of all could
be heard in a long brick-layered corridor, where old toys, not
quite able to move their broken parts, hung on the walls like
ghosts, and made sounds much like a wraith would make just before
saying, “Boo.” Quieted for a moment, the imp found
a lonely bench near the hanging toys. It was a seat that was
so tiny that it seemed made just for the imp’s solitude.
The bench itself was perched on a ledge overlooking a chasm,
where far below there was a twinkling and winking as if the
very universe had been turned upside-down; it seemed to the
imp as if the starry night-time sky had been formed as a very
deep chasm, instead of as a very high and untouchable place.
It was from far below that this peppermint scent originated.
However, on this slightly dusty bench, this strange devilish
toy looked away from the chasm and instead, pondered the meaning
of Christmas. It doubted itself, magic, and where even it came
from. “I am the Imp of Christmas Doubt. I have a purpose,”
it said to no one but itself. “I have to do something
about this purpose. But what about my batteries?” it said,
stretching its impish red arms. “I wonder if they will
work for very long, especially if I continue to where I had
wanted to go, so far below?” This was the Imp of Christmas
Doubt for goodness sake. It was full of self-wonder and forever
filled with self-doubt, and without any candy canes there beneath
the earth, the imp, though previously hungry on the trail of
the peppermint scent, became filled with ever more doubtful
thoughts, even as it looked to the twinkling lights from far
below, which perhaps were in themselves great peppermint stars.
