“This can never, never, never happen again!” shrieked Senator
Nutcracker of New York on the Senate floor.
She had received complaints that millions of children nationwide did not
get what they wanted for Christmas. Senator
Nutcracker cackled like a witch when she laughed and her voice was like nails
across a chalkboard. “Year after year, these children are not getting what they
want for Christmas. Doesn’t Santa know
that children have the right to get whatever they want for Christmas? It’s a right guaranteed by the Good &
Plenty Clause of the Constitution! I will not stand by while children are
deprived of the latest Playstation or iPhone! Therefore, I am proposing a new
law called the Santa Regulation Act.”
Senator Yogatofu of California rose to his feet to second Nutcracker’s
motion, “Anyone who rejects this bill hates children!” The majority of Senators
were snickering if not doubled over in laughter. Surely this was some kind of joke. To their dismay, they soon found out that
this was not a joke. The cable news
networks and NPR launched an around-the-clock assault on the opposing senators
and blasted anyone who opposed the bill as a “Grinch,” a “Scrooge,” or a “children-hater.”
The President also weighed in, announcing that if Congress did not pass this
bill, he would issue an Executive Order in its place. Fearful of the next election, most of the
senators caved in. The Santa Regulation Act passed in the House and Senate by
an overwhelming majority and became law.
The Santa Regulation Act is a 5,000-page law. It regulates everything from the dimensions
of the sleigh to the types of food Santa is allowed to eat while delivering
toys. The new law prohibits Santa from
eating cookies, because they contribute to obesity. However, he is allowed to eat fruit and
granola bars. The new law also limits
how fast the reindeer can fly, only allowing them to fly half as fast as
before, for safety reasons. In
accordance with federal aviation laws, the reindeer can only fly for eight
hours per day and need at least eight hours of sleep before resuming
flight. The reindeer are also prohibited
from flying if the weather creates poor visibility.
By regulation, handwritten letters from children are no longer accepted
at Santa’s Workshop. Now, a child must
submit a standard Christmas Gift Request Form by mail or they can visit the
website. The website, which cost
billions of tax dollars, was designed and launched by elves who live on the
South Pole. “They have no #%&@ing
idea what they’re doing!” complained one elf who works at Santa’s Workshop. “They’re
literally on the other side of the Earth!” When the website first went online,
it crashed within a few minutes. There
is a “minor glitch” in the website, said the President at a press conference,
referring to the fact that the “submit” button deletes 80% of the requests.
The new eight-hour workday for elves includes a fifteen-minute break
every hour, and an hour for lunch. Many
of the elves pretend to work for the last hour of the day. “I don’t give a
####! I’m getting paid the same either way,” one elf stated anonymously. It is almost impossible to fire an elf under
the Santa Regulation Act. Under the new
law, Santa has to write up extensive documentation on an elf’s poor performance
before the elf appears in administrative court.
The crowded docket at the North Pole Labor Board means that it could
take a year for a really bad elf to be dismissed. Most of the time, an elf
attorney will have the case thrown out on a technicality and the elves return
to work. The meanest, laziest elves who
cannot perform the normal duties of an elf are usually put in key
administrative positions. All paperwork
and requests must first be cleared by these elves.
The elves receive a generous salary with a full federal benefits
package. The reindeer are not so lucky. Recently, the reindeer went on strike. “I’m
sick of this ####!” exclaimed one reindeer who did not wish to be named. “Every
freaking year we have to literally run all over the Earth in 24 hours. Then the rest of the year we’re unemployed.
Meanwhile, those damn elves are sitting on their keysters in a nice warm cabin
making toys and getting a fat paycheck year-round.”
During the first year the Santa Regulation Act went into effect, only
five percent of the gifts arrived before or on Christmas Day. Santa did not complete his deliveries until
April Fool’s Day. There were also
millions of complaints about the quality of the toys. “Those are some busted, ####y toys!”
complained Karen, a disgruntled mother of four children. “Where are our tax
dollars going?” Unbeknownst to Karen,
her tax dollars are going to an elf government contractor at the South Pole who
manufactures toys with sub-standard parts at ten times the market price. The shoddy toys are then shipped by jet to the
North Pole, from where they are supposed to be delivered on Christmas Eve.
“We have a large fleet of cargo jets that guzzle a lot of fuel and
require a lot of maintenance,” said the elf in charge of air operations. “As provided by the Santa Regulation Act, we
had these jets built from scratch specifically for this purpose. I estimate it’s costing about a billion
dollars a week to fly the toys from the South to North Pole.” When asked if it would make a lot more sense
to manufacture all of the toys at the North Pole, he simply shrugged his
shoulders.
Of course there were millions of complaints about the sub-standard toys
and the extreme lateness of the deliveries, some of them several months after
Christmas. “The first Christmas this
happened, my children were devastated,” said one mother. “They cried all day on Christmas. Now, they’ve come to expect not to see any
presents from Santa under the tree until around Valentine’s Day. We obviously
don’t use a real tree anymore.”
The government responded by setting up a complaint department at the
North Pole. Those who make complaints by
phone have an average wait time of 45 minutes, during which time they listen to
the Yanni Christmas Album. In many cases
an automated voice comes on and says “goodbye,” thereby ending the call. Those
who actually get through speak to the mean, lazy elves referred to earlier.
After several years of this, the public outrage has been palpable. “The
problem is a lack of funding!” shrieked Senator Nutcracker. “We need to raise the debt limit and increase
the budget for Santa’s operations! I
propose a spending bill in which funding for the Santa Regulation Act is lumped
in with national defense, highways, schools, hospitals, and animal shelters…”
Image from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (1964) NBC
