‘Christmas comes but once a year.’  Thought Santa with a sigh.  ‘And it’s a good thing otherwise my work would never get done.’ 

He leaned back on his comfy chair and reflected on the past year’s events.  Christmas 2010 had gone off with a bang.  He had taken delivery of a brand new greenhouse emission friendly sled and he’d managed to get through all his rounds in record time.

Shame about the timing of the greenhouse taxes thought Santa.  All that talk about the world heating up and the drought that was going to reduce everyone to an annual shower with a cotton-bud dipped in seawater didn’t quite go off as planned.  A small break in the inclement drought led to several billions dollars worth of damages due to something wet falling out of the sky in great quantities and inundating entire country towns and major cities.  He was quite certain the wet thing was called “rain” that fell a tad too abundant in this case causing great consternation in the ranks for the expert scientists with a predisposition to doom-saying.

The deer were initially a bit testy with the new sled, but soon enough they got used to it. They were now able to do more prancing and less pacing as the new turbo-charged low emission photon engines not only were efficient but left little for the deer to do other than look ‘prancy’.

Rudolph was still leading the pack with his red nose even though the GPS-enabled self-drive App didn’t need to see in the dark to get them there.  The red glow was kind of pretty and he would have missed it if it weren’t there.

The new App was integrated with the gift list on Santa’s iPad, so he didn’t have to cross check the list with the location before depositing the right toys down the right chimney.  It even kept track of the inventory and signalled ahead to the next refuelling station to have the right sack ready with the correct number of toys.  That also helped with the weight distribution and refuelling costs as the sacks were only filled at the right time in the right place for the next leg of the journey instead of having to carry all the toys from start to finish.  That App was a great seller for the likes of the Qantas CEO who was looking to save some money too.

Who knew how a simple device would change the world.  In the past twelve months there wasn’t a child in the world that didn’t have an iPad either in their hands or on their Christmas list.  And it wasn’t just the kids, the adults were worse.  The number of serious head injuries had increased manyfold simply from the number of adults bumping into immovable objects because they had now learned to walk around with their headphones plugged in, SMSing their twitters on their iPhones whilst surfing their Googles on their iPad and crossing the street at the same time.

There were now apps for everything.  Apps for games, apps for twitting, apps for writing stuff, apps for taking notes, apps for sending notes, apps for attending meetings, apps for avoiding boredom during meetings, apps for taking minutes at meetings, apps for deciding which meetings to attend, apps for getting you out of meetings, apps for finding what apps you might like based on what apps you already have (I’m not making this one up!).

There are apps for making a shopping list (because paper is so passé), finding a post office box because looking out the window or walking out the street is so 20^th Century, and apps for telling you when the next train is due (as if someone actually does know!).

So all things considered that trip was a success. The day after Santa got back he and Mrs Claus went off to visit the grandchildren while the deer went off to prance in the forest.  Mrs Claus hadn’t seen the grandchildren for a whole week and she was fretting.  The little dears were getting older now and she hated to miss seeing them grow up. 

Their son in law Harry on the other hand wished she could spend more time with Mr Claus and less time tidying things about the house.  He yearned to put down a glass on a table without a coaster magically appearing under it microseconds before the bottom of the glass touched the table.  Not to mention how quickly toys disappeared into toy boxes the second one for the kids thought about being bored with that toy abandoning it to its fate on the floor. 

It would have been so bad except the kids had now come to expect toys to tidy themselves up even when grandma wasn’t there.  And it wasn’t just the toys; clothes had a habit of washing, ironing and hanging themselves away no sooner than they had jumped off the kids’ backs.

Now as it happened the son in law and his wife were a hard working couple.  So it wasn’t easy to keep up with the demands of the daily grind as well as wait hand and foot on their children.  They had tried to instil some sense of self-sufficiency on the older ones, but grandma had a habit of undermining all that good work.  The upshot was that their eldest had just graduated from university but was still living at home and getting her room cleaned, laundry and three square meals a day at her beck and call. So Harry mumbled something about Gen-Y being spoiled rotten, grabbed his coat and Santa and went off to the pub for a couple of beers.

The pub was packed to the rafters with other fathers getting away from the reality of daytime teenagers. Bob had already acquainted himself with a couple of cold ones before Santa and Harry rocked up.  They all shook hands and Harry went off to get a round of drinks.

‘So Santo, (Bob always called him Santo either because his hearing wasn’t so good, or because he thought Santa was just an Italian grandfather with a penchant for red suits) when did you get in?’

‘Early this morning’ replied Santa. ‘The missus wanted to make an early start and miss the traffic.’

‘Yeah, so did mine.’ Replied Bob. ‘Except she wanted to be there before the stores opened for the boxing day sales’.

‘What is it with women and sales?’ asked Santa. ‘They just finished buying stuff for everyone on Christmas Eve and they are off to set the credit cards alight again within 24 hours!’

‘I think they are afraid their credit cards might pine for them if they let them rest for a day’ replied Harry who had just brought back their drinks.

‘I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t for the shoppers, the whole global economy would collapse in a screaming heap in a few weeks’ added Bob.  ‘Just look at what happened to the Greek economy, as soon as they started cutting back the whole shebang went pear shaped.’

‘Right, look at them now’ agreed Harry. ‘They are trying to cut back on pensions instead of getting everyone to pay their fair share of taxes.’

‘Tax avoidance is a national sport in Greece,’ replied Santa. ‘It’s been Greece’s biggest contribution to the world in the past five thousand years’

‘What? I thought that was democracy’ asked Harry.

‘That’s what everyone thinks,’ replied Santa.  ‘Don’t get me started on that. No it’s definitely tax avoidance.  Just ask any taxi driver; they’ll tell you no self-respecting Greek would be caught dead or alive in the vicinity of a tax office attempting to pay taxes.  He would be immediately seized by the mob and be paraded through the town naked so that the rest of the mob would laugh at the size of his miniscule brain!  The word democracy comes from two Greek words; “Demos” meaning mob and “crato” meaning holding on tight to what you’ve got.  So really, if my old friend Socrates was around, he would be dismayed at the how the rest of the world has interpreted the word democracy.  It’s got nothing to do with voters and elections, it’s all got to do with not paying taxes!’

‘So what’s the solution?’ asked Bob.

‘Eat more fetta cheese, drink ouzo and dance!’

‘Then what?’

‘Drink some more ouzo and then dance some more!’

‘How exactly is that going to help?’ asked Harry.

‘When you dance, you get happy.  Then you drink some ouzo and get more happy.  Then you dance.  So you get hungry and you eat some fetta.  And you dance.  Then you get thirsty and you drink some ouzo.  And you dance some more. In the end you’re pissed, you had a blast and you don’t really care if the country is going to the dogs.’

‘So after five thousand years, this is the best Greeks could come up with?’

‘Sure, can you do any better?’ replied Santa.

Harry and Bob thought about that for a couple of seconds, then Bob got up.

‘Right… A round of ouzos it is then…’

As he headed off to the bar Santa leaned back and in his chair and knocked back the last of his beer.  Maybe next year things could get less hairy…

OPA! OPA! OPA!

 © A.C. Alexander 1999-2012

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A Greenhouse Christmas