“Here’s a chance for you to create your very own Santa Claus and reindeer, or a sleigh full of presents . . .”
Dancer, Prancer, Donner, Blitzen, and Dasher and Comet and Rudolph of the red nose, took form under his flying fingers. Santa’s sack was crammed with full-color advertisements clipped from mail order wish-books. Indeed, the sleigh threatened to crumble on its runners from paper weight. He saved Santa Claus till the last. And once he had the fat and jolly gentleman seated in his sleigh, whip in hand, ready to urge his harnessed team, Jeremy was good and ready to make them proper.
Only they weren’t; they remained obdurately immobile. Disconsolate, Jeremy moped for nearly a week, examining and re-examining his handiwork for the inhibiting flaw.
Miss Bradley had been enthusiastically complimentary and the other children sullenly envious of his success when the finished group was displayed on a special table, all red and white, with Ivory Snow snow and little evergreens in proportion to the size of the figures. There was even a convenient chimney for the good Santa to descend. Only Jeremy knew that that was not his Santa’s goal.
In fact Jeremy quite lost interest in the whole Christmas routine. He refused to visit the Santa on tap at the big shopping center, although his mother suspected that his heart had been set on the Masterpiece Oil Painting Set with its enticing assortment of brushes and every known pigment in life-long-lasting color.
Miss Bradley, too, lost all patience with him and became quite stern with his inattentiveness, to the delight of his classmates.
As so often happens when people concentrate too hard on a problem, Jeremy almost missed the solution, inadvertently provided by the pert Cynthia, now basking in Miss Bradley’s favor.
“He’s naked, that’s what. He’s naked and ugly. Everyone knows Santa is red and white. And reindeers aren’t gray-yecht. They’re brown and soft and have fuzzy tails.”
Jeremy had, of course, meticulously detailed the clothing on Santa and the harness on the animals, but they were still plasticine. It hadn’t mattered with his other creations that they were the dull gray-brown of plasticine because that’s how he’d envisaged them, being products of his imagination. But Santa wasn’t, or so he thought.
To conform to a necessary convention was obviously, to Jeremy, the requirement that had prevented his Santa from being a proper one. He fabricated harness of string for the reindeer. And a new sleigh of balsa wood with runners of laboriously straightened bobby pins took some time and looked real tough. A judicious coat of paint smartened both reindeer and sleigh. However, the design and manufacture of the red Santa suit proved far more difficult and occupied every spare moment of Jeremy’s time. He had to do it in the privacy of his room at home because, when Cynthia saw him putting harness on the reindeer, she twitted him so unmercifully that he couldn’t work in peace at school.
He had had little practice with needle and thread, so he actually had to perfect a new skill in order to complete his project. Christmas was only a few days away before he was satisfied with his Santa suit.
He raced to school so he could dress Santa and make him proper. He was just as startled as Miss Bradley when he slithered to a stop inside his classroom door, and found her tying small gifts to the branches of the class tree. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Miss Bradley smiled. She’d been so hard on poor Jeremy lately.
“You’re awfully early, Jeremy. Would you like to help me . . . Oh! How adorable!” She spotted the Santa suit which he hadn’t had the presence of mind to hide from her. “And you did them yourself? Jeremy, you never cease to amaze me.” She took the jacket and pants and little hat from his unresisting hand, and examined them carefully. “They are simply beautiful. Just beautiful. But honestly, Jeremy, your Santa is lovely just as he is. No need to gild the lily.”
“He isn’t a proper Santa without a proper Santa suit.”
Miss Bradley looked at him gravely, and then put her hands on his shoulders, making him look up at her.
“A proper Santa Claus is the one we have in our own hearts at this time of year, Jeremy. Not the ones in the department stores or on the street corners or on TV. They’re just his helpers.” You never knew which of your first-graders still did believe in Santa Claus in this cynical age, Miss Bradley thought. “A proper Santa Claus is the spirit of giving and sharing, of good fellowship. Don’t let anyone tell you that there isn’t a Santa Claus. The proper Santa Claus belongs to all of us.”
Then, pleased with her eloquence and restraint, she handed him back the Santa suit and patted his shoulder encouragingly.
Jeremy was thunderstruck. His Santa Claus had only been made for Jeremy. But poor Miss Bradley’s words rang in his ears. Miss Bradley couldn’t know that she had improperly understood Jeremy’s dilemma. Once again the blight of high-minded interpretation and ladylike good intentions withered primitive magic.
The little reindeer in their shrinking coats of paint would have pulled the sleigh only to Jeremy’s house so that Santa could descend only Jeremy’s chimney with the little gifts all bearing Jeremy’s name.
There was no one there to tell him that it’s proper for little boys and girls of his age to be selfish and acquisitive, to regard Santa as an exclusive property.
Jeremy took the garments and let Miss Bradley push him gently toward the table on which his figures were displayed.
She’d put tinsel about the scene, and glitter, but they didn’t shine or glisten in the dull gray light filtering through the classroom windows. They weren’t proper snow and icicles anyway.
Critically, he saw only string and the silver cake ornaments instead of harness and sleigh bells. He could see the ripples now in the unbent bobby pins which wouldn’t ever draw the sleigh smoothly, even over Ivory Snow snow. Dully, he reached for the figure of his Santa Claus.
Getting on the clothes, he dented the plasticine a bit, but it scarcely mattered now. After he’d clasped Santa’s malleable paw around the whip, the toothpick with a bright, thick, nylon thread attached to the top with glue, he stood back and stared.
A proper Santa Claus is the spirit of giving and sharing.
So overwhelming was Jeremy’s sense of failure, so crushing his remorse for making a selfish Santa Claus instead of the one that belonged to everyone, that he couldn’t imagine ever creating anything properly again.
The Plot Against Santa Claus
James Powell
* * *
Rory Bigtoes, Santa’s Security Chief, was tall for an elf, measuring almost seven inches from the curly tips of his shoes to the top of his fedora. But he had to stride to keep abreast of Garth Hardnoggin, the quick little Director General of the Toyworks, as they hurried, beards streaming back over their shoulders, through the racket and bustle of Shop Number 5, one of the many vaulted caverns honeycombing the undiscovered island beneath the Polar icecap.
Director General Hardnoggin wasn’t pleased. He slapped his megaphone, the symbol of his office (for as a member of the Board he spoke directly to Santa Claus), against his thigh. “A bomb in the Board Room on Christmas Eve!” he muttered with angry disbelief.
“I’ll admit that Security doesn’t look good,” said Bigtoes.
Hardnoggin gave a snort and stopped at a construction site for Dick and Jane Doll dollhouses. Elf carpenters and painters were hard at work, pipes in their jaws and beards tucked into their belts. A foreman darted over to show Hardnoggin the wallpaper samples for the dining room.
“See this unit, Bigtoes?” said Hardnoggin. “Split-level ranch type. Wall-to-wall carpeting. Breakfast nook. Your choice of Early American or French Provincial furnishings. They said I couldn’t build it for the price. But I did. And how did I do it?”
“Cardboard,” said a passing elf, an old carpenter with a plank over his shoulder.
“And what’s wrong with cardboard? Good substantial cardboard for the interior walls!” shouted the Director General striding off again. “Let them bellyache, Bigtoes. I’m not out to win any popu
larity contests. But I do my job. Let’s see you do yours. Find Dirk Crouchback and find him fast.”
At the automotive section the new Lazaretto sports cars (1/32 scale) were coming off the assembly line. Hardnoggin stopped to slam one of the car doors. “You left out the kachunk,” he told an elf engineer in white cover-alls.
“Nobody gets a tin door to go kachunk,” said the engineer.
“Detroit does. So can we,” said Hardnoggin, moving on. “You think I don’t miss the good old days, Bigtoes?” he said. “I was a spinner. And a damn good one. Nobody made a top that could spin as long and smooth as Garth Hardnoggin’s.”
“I was a jacksmith myself,” said Bigtoes. Satisfying work, building each jack-in-the-box from the ground up, carpentering the box, rigging the spring mechanism, making the funny head, spreading each careful coat of paint.
“How many could you make in a week?” asked Director General Hardnoggin.
“Three, with overtime,” said Security Chief Bigtoes.
Hardnoggin nodded. “And how many children had empty stockings on Christmas morning because we couldn’t handcraft enough stuff to go around? That’s where your Ghengis Khans, your Hitlers, and your Stalins come from, Bigtoes—children who through no fault of their own didn’t get any toys for Christmas. So Santa had to make a policy decision: quality or quantity? He opted for quantity.”
Crouchback, at that time one of Santa’s right-hand elves, had blamed the decision on Hardnoggin’s sinister influence. By way of protest he had placed a bomb in the new plastic machine. The explosion had coated three elves with a thick layer of plastic which had to be chipped off with hammers and chisels. Of course they lost their beards. Santa, who was particularly sensitive about beards, sentenced Crouchback to two years in the cooler, as the elves called it. This meant he was assigned to a refrigerator (one in Ottawa, Canada, as it happened) with the responsibility of turning the light on and off as the door was opened or closed.
But after a month Crouchback had failed to answer the daily roll call which Security made by means of a two-way intercom system. He had fled the refrigerator and become a renegade elf. Then suddenly, three years later, Crouchback had reappeared at the North Pole, a shadowy fugitive figure, editor of a clandestine newspaper, The Midnight Elf, which made violent attacks on Director General Hardnoggin and his policies. More recently, Crouchback had become the leader of SHAFT—Santa’s Helpers Against Flimsy Toys—an organization of dissident groups including the Anti-Plastic League, and Sons and Daughters of the Good Old Days, the Ban the Toy-Bomb people and the Hippie Elves for Peace . . .
“Santa opted for quantity,” repeated Hardnoggin. “And I carried out his decision. Just between the two of us it hasn’t always been easy.” Hardnoggin waved his megaphone at the Pacification and Rehabilitation section where thousands of toy bacteriological warfare kits (JiffyPox) were being converted to civilian use (The Freckle Machine). After years of pondering Santa had finally ordered a halt to war-toy production. His decision was considered a victory for SHAFT and a defeat for Hardnoggin.
“Unilateral disarmament is a mistake, Bigtoes,” said Hardnoggin grimly as they passed through a door marked Santa’s Executive Helpers Only and into the carpeted world of the front office. “Mark my words, right now the tanks and planes are rolling off the assembly lines at Acme Toy and into the department stores.” (Acme Toy, the international consortium of toymakers, was the elves’ greatest bugbear.) “So the rich kids will have war toys, while the poor kids won’t even have a popgun. That’s not democratic.”
Bigtoes stopped at a door marked Security. Hardnoggin strode on without slackening his pace. “Sticks-and-Stones session at five o’clock,” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t be late. And do your job. Find Crouchback!”
* * *
Dejected, Bigtoes slumped down at his desk, receiving a sympathetic smile from Charity Nosegay, his little blond blue-eyed secretary. Charity was a recent acquisition and Bigtoes had intended to make a play for her once the Sticks-and-Stones paperwork was out of the way. (Security had to prepare a report for Santa on each alleged naughty boy and girl.) Now that play would have to wait.
Bigtoes sighed. Security looked bad. Bigtoes had even been warned. The night before, a battered and broken elf had crawled into his office, gasped, “He’s going to kill Santa,” and died. It was Darby Shortribs, who had once been a brilliant doll designer. But then one day he had decided that if war toys encouraged little boys to become soldiers when they grew up, then dolls encouraged little girls to become mothers, contributing to overpopulation. So Shortribs had joined SHAFT and risen to membership on its Central Committee.
The trail of Shortribs’s blood had led to the Quality Control lab and the Endurance Machine which simulated the brutal punishment, the bashing, crushing, and kicking that a toy receives at the hands of a four-year-old (or two two-year-olds). A hell of a way for an elf to die!
After Shortribs’s warning, Bigtoes had alerted his Security elves and sent a flying squad after Crouchback. But the SHAFT leader had disappeared. The next morning a bomb had exploded in the Board Room.
On the top of Bigtoes’s desk were the remains of that bomb. Small enough to fit into an elf’s briefcase, it had been placed under the Board Room table, just at Santa’s feet. If Owen Brassbottom, Santa’s Traffic Manager, hadn’t chosen just that moment to usher the jolly old man into the Map Room to pinpoint the spot where, with the permission and blessing of the Strategic Air Command, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer were to penetrate the DEW Line, there wouldn’t have been much left of Santa from the waist down. Seconds before the bomb went off, Director General Hardnoggin had been called from the room to take a private phone call. Fergus Bandylegs, Vice-President of Santa Enterprises, Inc., had just gone down to the other end of the table to discuss something with Tom Thumbskin, Santa’s Creative Head, and escaped the blast. But Thumbskin had to be sent to the hospital with a concussion when his chair—the elves sat on high chairs with ladders up the side like those used by lifeguards—was knocked over backward by the explosion.
All this was important, for the room had been searched before the meeting and found safe. So the bomb must have been brought in by a member of the Board. It certainly hadn’t been Traffic Manager Brassbottom, who had saved Santa, and probably not Thumbskin. That left Director General Hardnoggin and Vice-President Bandylegs . . .
“Any luck checking out that personal phone call Hardnoggin received just before the bomb went off?” asked Bigtoes.
Charity shook her golden locks. “The switchboard operator fainted right after she took the call. She’s still out cold.”
* * *
Leaving the Toyworks, Bigtoes walked quickly down a corridor lined with expensive boutiques and fashionable restaurants. On one wall of Mademoiselle Fanny’s Salon of Haute Couture some SHAFT elf had written: Santa, Si! Hardnoggin, No! On one wall of the Hotel St. Nicholas some Hardnoggin backer had written: Support Your Local Director General! Bigtoes was no philosopher and the social unrest that was racking the North Pole confused him. Once, in disguise he had attended a SHAFT rally in The Underwood, that vast and forbidding cavern of phosphorescent stinkhorn and hanging roots. Gathered beneath an immense picture of Santa were hippie elves with their beards tied in outlandish knots, matron-lady elves in sensible shoes, tweedy elves and green-collar elves.
Crouchback himself had made a surprise appearance, coming out of hiding to deliver his now famous “Plastic Lives!” speech. “Hardnoggin says plastic is inanimate. But I say that plastic lives! Plastic infects all it touches and spreads like crab grass in the innocent souls of little children. Plastic toys make plastic girls and boys!” Crouchback drew himself up to his full six inches. “I say: quality—quality now!” The crowd roared his words back at him. The meeting closed with all the elves joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” It had been a moving experience . . .
As he expected, Bigtoes found Bandylegs at the Hotel St. Nicholas bar, staring morosely dow
n into a thimble mug of ale. Fergus Bandylegs was a dapper, fast-talking elf with a chestnut beard which he scented with lavender. As Vice-President of Santa Enterprises, Inc., he was in charge of financing the entire Toyworks operation by arranging for Santa to appear in advertising campaigns, by collecting royalties on the use of the jolly old man’s name, and by leasing Santa suits to department stores.
Bandylegs ordered a drink for the Security Chief. Their friendship went back to Rory Bigtoes’s jacksmith days when Bandylegs had been a master sledwright. “These are topsy-turvy times, Rory,” said Bandylegs. “First there’s that bomb and now Santa’s turned down the Jolly Roger cigarette account. For years now they’ve had this ad campaign showing Santa slipping a carton of Jolly Rogers into Christmas stockings. But not anymore. ‘Smoking may be hazardous to your health,’ says Santa.”
“Santa knows best,” said Bigtoes.
“Granted,” said Bandylegs. “But counting television residuals, that’s a cool two million sugar plums thrown out the window.” (At the current rate of exchange there are 4.27 sugar plums to the U.S. dollar.) “Hardnoggin’s already on my back to make up the loss. Nothing must interfere with his grand plan for automating the Toyworks. So it’s off to Madison Avenue again. Sure I’ll stay at the Plaza and eat at the Chambord, but I’ll still get homesick.”
The Vice-President smiled sadly. “Do you know what I used to do? There’s this guy who stands outside Grand Central Station selling those little mechanical men you wind up and they march around. I used to march around with them. It made me feel better somehow. But now they remind me of Hardnoggin. He’s a machine, Rory, and he wants to make all of us into machines.”
A Yuletide Universe Page 23