Following on from Santa’s endeavours with the Roller Coaster of Doom, Santa has now realised it’s the 1st December and his outfit hasn’t produced any toys for the 2023 Christmas push.

Not that Santa is worried. He’s a hardy professional who knows how to get the job done! Rest assured, you’ll be getting a sack of charcoal (at the very least) for Chrimbo.

When Santa Claus Hits the Panic Button

Santa has been a BAD boy this year. By my own Christmas rules I shouldn’t be getting any presents… that’s just as well because at the start of the week we had 0% of our toy quota completed for 2023, so by that reckoning even if Santa had been a GOOD boy he’d be getting no presents either.

Life has a funny way of balancing things out doesn’t it? Hahahaha. To celebrate that I decided to fire off my bazooka (not a euphemism). I was in my Santa office at the time and let that mother rip. It blew through the roof, erupted, and I was showered with debris.

“Very good!” I said to myself.

Not wishing to catastrophise, but that’s NOT very good.

There are NO presents at all ready! My mood changed violently. From glee to fury in the matter of 0.000000000000001 of a millisecond.

But the solution to Santa appeared to be simple—marmalade. It appeared from my hungover state as if a mirage of great beauty, dangling before me like a bottle of whiskey, just there ready for me to grip with my grubby big Santa hands!

And GOD spoke to me in that instant. A message Santa shall hold dear to thine heart for the rest of mine days. God said:

“Marmalade will make it all worthwhile.”

To get the ball rolling on Christmas 2023, Santa whacked the giant red Panic Button fitted on the left wall of my office quarters.

An ear-piercing air raid siren started pelting out at over 120 decibels. Markus, my head elf, rushed into the office. I shouted at him the bad news about the 0% toy quota target for 2023. Markus said something, but I didn’t know what it was over the siren racket.

“WHAT?!” I bellowed back at him.

I could tell the little git was shouting at the top of his tiny lungs, but I still couldn’t hear anything over the siren racket.

“WHAT?!” I bellowed back at him.

Markus waddled over to the Panic Button, jumped up into the air, struck it, and then the siren stopped all of a sudden. That was an improvement, I must say. So, I told him about the Christmas presents situation again and the unbridled horror of the 0% quota meeting dilemma.

“Sir, I know, I’ve been telling you that for the last three months.”

“DON’T GET SHARP WITH ME, YOU DIMINUTIVE GIT!”

“Sorry, sir.”

Having put the little bastard in his place, Santa then laid forth the marmalade plan that I know to be of momentous genius. But Markus stood there shuffling his feet. That was a sign he wasn’t impressed with my plan.

“Out with it!” I barked.

“Sir, I can’t see how on any logical level that’ll help this situation.”

Jesus H Christ! These elves… it’s like no one wants to work anymore! So, with marmalade on my mind got to it myself. Santa went online and ordered in several metric tonnes of the stuff while I bellowed obscenities at Markus. The cost? A mere $3 million spent on citrus fruit foodstuffs.

Then I began drinking heavily.

The Arrival of Several Metric Tonnes of Marmalade

Let me put it like this… it’s really not a very good idea to have a vast assortment of marmalade flown onto your business premises when you’re so hungover you can barely walk.

Paranoid and anxious, Santa was in his manky dressing gown when they all turned up. I watched it all while clutching my bazooka close to me like it was a loved one (which it is).

I got Markus to sign for the stuff and then the helicopters left.

The marmalade was all there, all right, but in my paranoid state I sure as hell wasn’t going to trust it! Who knows what sort of poisons my enemies had put in the stuff!? This one time I ate 37 instant noodles in a row and was violently ill and on that terrible day I KNEW some bastard had spiked me! I’ve been wary ever since!

I needed my elves to taste test a small dose of every single one of the 335,212 marmalade jars! AND IT NEEDED TO HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY!

The Great Marmalade Test

Despite Markus, my head elf, protesting the Great Marmalade Taste Test was simply further delaying Christmas 2023, I ordered the elves to abandon whatever they were doing (getting on with Christmas 2023) to get on with taste testing the marmalade.

The elves started in shifts of 24 hours of non-stop work.

I got Markus to keep track of them to make sure they were sticking to their intake. It was an arduous task, but someone has got to do it! And with my chronic gout, there was no way I was spooning through all that marmalade… especially with the possibility of poison in there.

Markus updated me every 30 minutes on progress. This is what developed:

• The elves started hallucinating due to sugar overdose.
• Elves became jittery, hyperactive, and nauseous.
• Marmalade became the least favoured food of the elves.
• Elves began REFUSING to eat the marmalade!!!
• An outraged Santa stormed down to the testing area with his bazooka at the ready to threaten obedience.
• Santa saw a scene of marmalade-based devastation, with elves everywhere groaning in horror and declaring marmalade to be “evil”.
• With the elves out cold, it appeared the testing was OVER.

It took 72 hours and after that 70% of the stock was tested.

With the elves too sickly and incapacitated to continue, I had the remaining 30% stock taken out back, thrown in the elves’ cesspit, and shot at with bazookas, thus removing the tainted poison off the face of the Earth!

Markus suggested Santa could have given the 30% to “charity” and I glared at him haughtily before bellowing in a long rant about how Santa was not one for poisoning charities with poisoned marmalade and he should shut his elf face.

I then gave him a 1% pay cut.