Santa Claus

When I was a child, there was only one thing I wanted for Christmas: to be Jewish. Also, I wanted to be continent. When Christmas Day rolled around and I was still wearing rubber pants, I figured Santa probably didn't deliver on the second part of my wish either. He didn't take it too kindly when I accused him of fraud and threatened to sue him. Not having the money to follow up on my claim, I turned to the occult; if Santa wouldn't grant me a real spiritual conversion, I'd find a shaman or genie who would. Year after year I scoured the world, but I was forced to return to my homeland, Enewetak Atoll, after I found out the U.S. government bombed it in 1936. By the time I got there, nothing remained; the whole island was gone. Wiped off the face of the map in a nuclear test. That's when I realized Santa Claus must die.

Hear me out, now. It's not that I held a grudge against the late Mr. Claus. Indeed, I admired his organizational skills and work ethic. I had a part time job in his sweatshop cleaning looms as a young child, which is how I would have known where the breaks in his security grid were, if I did it. Ah, to be a child in Santa's sweatshop! The sights, the sounds, the occasional purges of elf unionists, the merriment! How I loved the reindeer; I would glue magnets to the stable floor and watch them try to walk over them. That's how I learned that reindeer don't wear horseshoes. Who'd've thunk it? Of course, I was very upset when the reindeer didn't stick to the ground, so I may have set off a few bottle rockets to rattle their cages. Raise your hand if you've never set off bottle rockets at a pack of reindeer. Anyone? I thought not.

Memories... how I long for those days, back before 24 hour news channels. I suppose they're a byproduct of the temporal distortion, though. See, after the government destroyed my homeland, I had one choice only: use Santa's time machine to go back and prevent Herbert Hoover from becoming the United States' only five term president. Naturally, Santa responded poorly to my requests: "Ho ho, no no! The integrity of the timeline is paramount. We can't risk a paradox." His sarcastic undertones haunted my dreams. So I may have made the case to Congress that Santa was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and after the ensuing war with the North Pole, I may have looted his time machine from the wreckage of the old candy silo. But that's okay; I went back to 1929 and caused the Great Depression by walking into a single bank and yelling "they're out of money!"

This stroke of brilliance on my part threw millions into instant poverty and prolonged the Second World War for another ten years. But the thermonuclear destruction of Enewetak Atoll was likewise pushed back almost ten years, allowing the total population of six people a nice cushion of escape time. When I returned to the future, the world was completely different! My father went from being a mild-mannered office dreg to an accredited author, and there was a new car in my driveway. Cha-ching! And since nobody from my atoll died, I never goaded Congress into war with Santa, and the fat man never even realized I'd changed history.

I now had a time machine. Santa was completely out of the picture. Unfortunately, the device was stolen from me while I was karaokeing in Baghdad in 2002. Boy, breaking that egg to the C.I.A was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my real life. I mean, how do you tell the most secretive agency in the free world that Saddam Hussein himself may have the ability to change history? Bush himself got involved, and less than a year later Iraq was toppled, and the good people of Halliburton were spending millions of dollars sifting through the rubble to find even a hint of the time machine.

Success was elusive, but I was vindicated when the basic circuitry of the machine was recovered from an insurgent stronghold in March 2005. Alas, the Ptolemeic Stabilizer was damaged during the refurbishment process. Our first test run was an attempt to travel one day into the future. Instead of showing up in the test room a day later, the time machine materialized in the middle of some nebula a million light years away; exactly where the Earth had been one day ago. It was quite unfortunate, as the Iraq War could not be canceled out as the North Polar Conflict had been.

So I turned to the one man who could set everything right: Santa Claus, who still had the original time machine. I argued with him, saying that since time travel was the cause of the Iraq War, it should be used to prevent it. He argued that since neither Saddam nor the insurgents implemented temporal warfare, and since I lost the machine in the first place, he was not obligated to interfere in the affairs of the living. Bush waited patiently outside the factory complex in Air Force One for about three hours while we fought. When I walked out the front doors triumphantly, his heart skipped a beat. He looked me straight in the eyes and was all, "can we go back in time and cancel the war out? I've got a letter for my past self, if you need it." Then I told him the whole story, how Santa and I had reached an agreement. The Iraq War would not be altered through time travel, no.

But I wasn't wearing rubber pants anymore.

Historical Analysis

Coffee! Coffee! Coffee! Boy, you know what I really love?! Tea. Ha. I bet you thought I was going to say "coffee," weren't you? Well, you're wrong. I've never touched the stuff. Makes you short. Minuscule. Not as minuscule as the Persian empire after the Byzantines got done with them. You know what I'm talking about. I've had a vendetta against the Persians ever since Thermopylae, when my beloved pet rock was trampled. I have not recovered from the shock of losing Rocky, but I suppose I can take solace in the fact that the Persians never got the majority of the Islamic world to accept their choice for Caliph following the death of Uthman. I mean, come on, Ali was totally not the right guy for the job. He was a lover, not a leader. I don't want to sound sacrilegious here, but I knew him personally. I was at his birthday party! Quite a guy. But I think (and the Catholic church will back me up here) Martin Luther was much better at partying.

That man could breakdance at the drop of a hat, and speaking of hats, he wore one constantly. I asked him about that once. I was all, "Hey Marty, why are you wearing that hat all the time? Is it part of your justification by faith alone?" And he looked me right in the eye and pulled it from his scalp. There was... nothing there. He was bald. Ever since Charles the Bald defeated my Viking brthers, I've had the unfortunate distinction of being a goði without an Althing. It was at that moment I knew Lutheranism had no chance outside Germany and parts of Scandinavia, so I bid him farewell and hobbled off to help my good friend Jon Stewart integrate himself into Daily Show culture.

Sheesh! I have never met anyone since then (with the exception of Cicero) who held a greater disdain of formal wear. "Wear a tie," I said. "You'll be more impressive," I said. But he stuck to his guns and that... that turtleneck of his. How I loathe turtlenecks... but that's not important right now. You don't have to understand the turtleneck-based sectarian divisions that tore my homeland apart. The point is, Jon Stewart ended up taking my advice and wearing a suit and tie; immediately after he did, the show was renamed to include his name. It was then that my cordial friendship with Jon took a nosedive. I told him flat out that if he didn't add an "H" to his first name the show would die within the year. He refused. We've never spoken since.