With the Battle for Christmas 2023 nailed to the wall, Santa is on it! Finally. Christmas is on the way… until it wasn’t.

Now Santa has a different type of battle on his hands. One involving builders who aren’t happy with his cantankerous attitude problem and lax attitude towards an employer’s duty of care. Oopsie!

Ding Dong Merrily on Plague Outbreak

Kenneth the walrus and a very stoned Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer “did” a hiring spree while Santa was busy wooing my mortal rival—Jeremy Windfellow.

With 500 new elf hires, this meant we were DOWN for business!

Drunkenly at 4am Santa bellowed into the factory tannoy system, waking absolutely everybody up, “LET’S GET CHRISTMAS DONE! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

Then I belched exuberantly and passed out. I came to at 6am to face a pretty disgusting problem.

The poor sanitary conditions in Santa’s factory led to a sudden outbreak of plague. Despite the elves being stricken with delirium and seeping buboes, I forced them to work. With Christmas 2023 on the line I CAN’T BE DEALING WITH SLACKERS!!

But productivity is sporadic. Honestly… it’s like no one wants to work anymore!

Normally, elves are adequate workers. But I was now finding toys coming off the production line looking grotesque. Seriously, Santa has been having nightmares about some of them they’re so bloody scary.

I called Markus, my head elf, and Kenneth the walrus into my office quarters. Kenneth has befriended Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and the pair of them stalk about the factory premises looking shifty as all hell.

“Markus! There’s a plague outbreak.”

“I know, sir. It’s… happened before, if you remember?”

“OF COURSE I REMEMBER!”

I couldn’t remember, so I tried to get a plan of action out of my team to push  through with a miracle cure.

“Okay, you remember what we did last time then, Markus! We need to do that again. Problem solved, right!?”

Markus shifted uneasily on his feet. Kenneth brayed.

“Right?!”

“Erm… sir, I really don’t think we should do that again.”

“Oh, okay, and what’s that that I should not do again, Markus?”

“Sir… you got everyone to take bleach baths and then everyone’s skin peeled off.”

“I KNOW I DID, MARKUS! And it worked! Perfectly!”

Markus looked down at the floor, like the memory of what I was saying was so hideous a recollection it made his very soul plummet into a bottomless well of suffering.

Hitting the vodka with gusto, Santa grinned maniacally to himself. This, I knew, was my moment! This was what it was all about!

Then Nurse Doreen (who’s also our factory chef) arrived and served me breakfast—instant noodles with pork scratchings milkshake and an ultra-large energy drink.

Christmas 2023 is Go! (replete with plague)

Feeling very unstable indeed after breakfast, Santa stumbled through his plague-stricken factory.

Barbie dolls were now covered in pus from seeping elf buboes. Other toys were getting jumbled up—dolls were coming off the production line with dinosaur heads, with dinosaurs (T. Rex and co.) turning up with Barbie doll heads and the like.

All of which wasn’t helped by what that dumbass Kenneth the walrus did to the Barbie doll contraption! When thundering around the place like a lumbering calamity, he smacked into it one.

Now the machine was juddering and sparking like crazy. It electrocuted three of the elves, whom I had Nurse Doreen administer pain killers to and a shot of brandy. Then it was back to work!

While the poor state of the Barbie dolls is concerning, I’m not throwing them away! Wasting budget, or remaking them, is out of the question. Instead, I’ve rebadged this shipment as a new range of Dino Barbies. The little girls will love them!

Of course, I’m not a barbaric sort. With all this plague around one must move quickly and decisively to protect the interests of my business! Although I’ve no idea how to end the plague outbreak, other than through quantitative and qualitative something-or-other based on previous outbreaks, ultimately I decided to douse the entire factory, and everyone in it, in chemical grade bleach.

That process took half a day.

And it doesn’t appear to have helped and has just made the skin peel off many of the elves, so they’re wandering around red raw and groaning in agony.

They really should provide a pamphlet or something to provide warnings on these sorts of things. How the hell was Santa supposed to know!? Now the rancid stench is appalling! I had to check it wasn’t just me having a bad BO day, but now… it’s the elves all right. You really can’t get the staff these days…

Plus, I’m trying to avoid the media getting on my case about the outbreak. So I’ve issued a media blackout rule to all employees (including myself). NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS.

Because the elves are a bit shellshocked by all of this stuff, there’s half a litre of absinthe for the 100 elves to consume to blank out their memories. The unusual side to this is seeing them, pissed as they come, laughing hysterically in between bouts of maudlin malaise as they pick at their plague scabs. It’s… what’s the word? Profound? Yeah, that’ll do.

The more pressing matter than the plague is the devastating state I’ve realised my factory units are in.

With 71% of my factory in near ruin, hasty repairs are in order to keep Christmas 2023 on track. There was nothing else for it… I had to get the builders in.

Bob’s Barmy Builders Enter the Fray

Santa hired, and flew in, some dodgy workmen to rebuild the factory.

You know the type—cheap and potentially good enough to get the job done. Beer guts, hairy backs, hairy backsides, balding and/or bald, and when they bend over their hairy butt cleavage shows for all the world to see.

They all arrived with tabloid newspapers and huge beer guts. I sensed a great deal of camaraderie with these working-class scumbags.

I hired them from Bolton in Greater Manchester when I searched online for “cheap builders no cowboys”. The business is Bob’s Barmy Builders. Bob is the boss. And his sons are Bob, Bob Jr., Bobby, and Archibald. The first three all speak with a strong northern English accent, but Archibald has a very posh accent. Not sure what’s going on there.

Also joining them for the repairs was a motley crew of barely human looking oddballs. One of them, the gaffer, is Frank and he reeks of BO. His son, Frank Jr., also stinks of BO. Must be a family tradition. Bob’s wife, Barbara, is also present and fusses about the builders offering cups of tea every five minutes.

Me and her hit it off real good and I can tell she has the hots for Santa. With my wife having divorced me, I could tone up the charisma. I began leering at her at every opportunity, to which she responded with evil glares. That’s flirting, that is.

Meanwhile, I toured Bob and Frank around the factory so they could size up the joint. They were whistling a lot in that “cor blimey!” kind of way.

I took them past the old factory unit 1 (the one we never talk about… media blackout!!), which has been cordoned off because of that nuclear fallout incident a while back. I ignored their questions about it and distracted them by talking about the good old days when half-naked page 3 girls were a thing.

At the end of the tour, us standing outside the factory gates, Bob said, “Nuclear meltdowns aren’t in our remit, mate.”

I was very surprised by this and stood shocked for a bit. What… what did he mean? My page 3 distraction technique had been superb and yet, here he was, directly discussing a matter Santa had expressly manipulated him out of discussing. There was nothing else for it.

“There is no nuclear meltdown.” I blurted out.

“Sure looks like a nuclear meltdown to me, fella. There’s nuclear hazard signs all over the property.” Came Frank’s glib response.

“It is not a nuclear meltdown. It may look like one, to the untrained eye, but it is not one. That is a keen distinction.”

Bob and Frank weren’t having any of it. Especially when an elf staggered past us red raw and with seeping buboes covering his face, all while carrying a box of weird looking Barbie dolls with T. Rex heads.

“Has… has he got bubonic plague!?” Bob gasped.

“No, he has not.”

“Sure looks like bubonic plague to me, fella.” Frank’s glibness.

“It may look like bubonic plague to the untrained eye. But, I assure you, it is merely a case of the shingles.”

Bob and Frank looked at each other warily, then looked at me, then back at each other. Bob said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Listen, Mr. Claus…”

“Please! Call me Santa.”

“Okay, Santa…”

“Mister Santa Claus.”

“Okay, mister Santa Cla…”

“Father Christmas, if you ple…”

“Mister Claus! I think there’s something you’re not quite telling us here. But we’ll do the job. We’ll keep our traps shut. But you triple that fee you offered us.”

My face must have turned purple and/or red with rage. I wanted to smash their stupid faces in. I wanted to stomp on their pummelled corpses. I wanted to bury them in the elves’ cesspit out back and rejoice in that knowledge day-in, day-out. I wanted… to repair the factory. Santa summoned everything within my immense intellectual capacity to control myself and return as cordial a response as was humanly possible.

“Oh… kay…” I wheezed.

They nodded and headed off to get on with the job. Leaving them to it, I went off to drink heavily and drain the pus out of my buboes.