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In an idyllic little town in snow-covered Alaska, a bar has a late-night opening on Christmas Day. Around the tavern, talking, cigar-smoking and eggnog-chugging was filling the place with liveliness. The bartender kept opening taps and pouring beer, whiskey, scotch and the like into many different glasses, mugs and bottles to satisfy the customers. In this very bar, way over in the corner at the end of the counter, a lonely little man in green clothes drank a glass of whiskey all by himself. Might seem like a usual occurrence; a man with no love in his life spends the day of jolliness in a tavern and drinks alcohol to keep himself from committing suicide. It’s a sad world, but this man was not alone in his life. Every day except for today he met thousands of people just like him, passing by him, sitting next to them, having conversation with them. He was just alone because everyone that he interacted with were also alone. Feeling generous, the bartender decides to sweep over to the lonely man and talk to him.
“So, what brings you here today on all days, huh?” the bartender asks him.
The lonely man slowly lifts his head to reveal a pair of stretched, green-tinted eyes, a small nose and long pointy ears hiding under his green Christmas hat. His coat was also green, with white padding on the inside and fluffy ends on the arms. He wore tight, striped pants in green and red, and he wore wooden shoes with a pointy end. The bartender realized who he was; he was one of Santa’s little helpers... an elf.
“What brings me here today? I want to forget it all,” the elf replied in a negative tone.
“Hey, forget about what?” the bartender asked back while wiping something off the counter.
“This! This whole escape I go through every single year of my miserable life!”
“What, Christmas? It is the season of jolly! You, an elf of all magical beings can’t be sad on Christmas, can you?”
“You might believe that from all the fairytales you humans read to your young, but no, we can be sad too.”
The elf chugged the remains inside his bottle of whiskey.
“Another one, pronto,” he said.
The bartender took a clean glass and filled it with whiskey. He placed it in front of the elf who immediately began drinking it.
“So… what’s your name?”
“Mike the Joyful… or according to the work schedule elf #4915750.”
“Damn, you got so many workers?”
“What do you expect? Providing toys for 3 billion children across the world is not an easy task, certainly not as easy as pulling on a lever and watching beer flow into a glass every god damn night!”
“Sheesh, take it easy man, I was just asking.”
The elf took another big chug from his glass and put it down with a thud. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked around the building.
“Look at all these people… taking joy out of my sweat! Laughing and drinking and having a good time-“
“Hey, what is the problem, really?”
“What the problem is? I tell you what the problem is! Santa! That fat, money-grubbing, cookie-munching white-bearded pedophile is what the problem is!”
“What has Santa done?”
“What hasn’t he done? He is a damn slave driver, pushing us and whipping us to do his bidding every single day, just so he can kick back and relax on his chair while eating cookies and drinking that ‘milk’ of his. I think I know where that milk comes from, Mrs. Claus… I tell you, if it wasn’t for this one day off I would just brake down and kill myself… Most likely with one of those guns the damn sons of drug lords always wish for”
“Wait, you make weapons in Santa’s workshop!?”
“Yeah! Weapons, drugs, money, Justin Bieber albums… Anything people wish for on Christmas we are forced to make! And it ain’t easy either. When a dude in New York wished for a hooker for Christmas, we had to kidnap a real damn prostitute from the Netherlands, paralyze her and make sure she woke up on his doorstep right on Christmas Day! That’s a whole lot of running around the globe just for one gift!”
“I thought you guys made all this stuff through magic?”
“Magic?! What kind of shrooms have you been smoking ‘cause I want some! No, there’s no such thing as ‘magic’ smartass. Santa has screwed with Mrs. Claus for thousands of years to pump out a new elf every nine months to add to his workforce, just so he can compensate for the rapidly growing population on Earth. Each elf is given an item to create every week, and if he does not finish it it’s off to the dungeons with him! I have been really close sometimes myself…”
“So… you really make things? In a factory?”
“Yup! And a shitty one at that. We are ten thousand elves per division and we are cramped in a tight 5,000 cubic meter factory with treadmills and levers and tools laying all about. Sometimes you have to walk on top of other elves to get to your damn workplace! Which sometimes is a good thing because the floor is harder and colder than Santa’s ice heart…”
“And you work there?”
“For 20 hours every day of the week! You would think living for three thousand years is a good thing but what do you do for all those years? You work! And work and work and work for what? Milk and cookies! MILK AND GOD DAMN COOKIES! We don’t get many either; two cookies and a glass of milk for every toy finished…”
“About toys, do you make licensed products as well?”
“Tell me about it, kids today don’t wish for anything else! Cellphones, cars, computers, televisions, frigging sex toys even! When I was tasked with making a PlayStation 4 for a kid in Albuquerque, I had to ride down on a reindeer to Sony’s worldwide headquarters in Kyoto, infiltrate their offices and steal schematics on how a PlayStation 4 is built! Then I had to go back and sacrifice two days of my time. I barely got it finished considering I have to use a hammer from 1159.”
“Wait, hold on… Doesn’t the companies that actually make the products get any money?”
“They do… From our own piggybanks because Santa is too cheap! We leave them gold coins from the medieval period on their desks and when they wake up hey you got a new antique for your collection! Hooray!”
“And what about Santa? What does he do?”
“Nothing, like literally nothing! He hires yetis to watch over us and if we make one mistake – which there are many of – they drag us down to the dungeons and do god knows to us. The day Santa actually does work is today, and that still is barely anything. He sits back and relaxes in his first class sleigh, whipping at those poor reindeers ordering them to go faster as three or four Christmas strippers get all ‘jolly’ on his scraggly beard. Then when he lands, oh boy… He sneaks around the house and eats their cookies and drinks all their milk – and I mean ALL of it if you get my point. I can’t count on how many wives, widows or single women he has screwed with on Christmas Eve… I can bet my jingle bells he’s humping one of ‘em right now somewhere. And you won’t believe what he does next; he grabs his camera, gently opens the doors to the children’s bedrooms and takes pictures of them while they sleep. Get that?”
“Santa sure is one mean son of a bitch!”
“Oh yes… Those reindeers by the way, they don’t really fly from magic. Santa used to ride around on the ground to get where he needs, but in the ‘30s he contacted some shady Nazi scientists on the North Pole and asked them if they could improve his transportation. So, they fed them experimental rocket fuel or whatever the hell it was for several weeks before they had developed the ability to hover fly from their… ‘fumes’.”
“God almighty, Santa did all this? Jesus…"
"Yeah, and then he gets all the praise! He's the one appearing in the commercials, he's the one everyone writes letters to, he's the one that Coca-Cola has as a Christmas mascot! 'Cola delivery straight from a jolly Santa on the North Pole', my ass!"
"The North Pole, do you all live and work there?”
“Popular belief, but no. Greenpeace chased us away couple of decades back because Santa was hunting polar bears. So we had to relocate our operations down to Antarctica of all places! Maybe somewhere warm and sun like the Bahamas but no. Just another inhospitable place we have to work with no heating systems or warm food or even entertainment for that matter! They took it away back in ’79…”
“What happened in ’79?”
“Well, we had a special saloon we could go to on our days off – if we had any – and get a little ‘stress-relief’ if you know what I mean…”
“A brothel, right?”
“Dead on…”
“So what happened?”
“Well, an elf that goes by the infamous name ‘Ricky the Rapist’ demanded a little too much from the cheap women from Vietnam. He was drunk and probably high too, and wanted the poor girl to both blow him and let him do it in the rear for just five cookies. When the girl refused, he slapped her, pulled down her pants and did his business. The yetis dragged him away and kept him in the dungeons for weeks. When he finally came back, he has kept a cold, dead stare ever since… They took our brothels away and now we can only watch cheap Romanian sports channels on two-by-four TV screens far up in the corner.”
“Damn… that makes me really appreciate what I do here even though it is not that much…”
“Yeah, that’s why everyone is happy on Christmas: THEY ARE NOT US!”
The elf took one last sip from his glass of whiskey before he slapped some money on the counter and hopped down from the bar stool. The elf wished him a Merry Christmas and said he had to get his reindeer because he had double-parked on the roof. The bartender, feeling sad for the poor elf, caught him at the door.
“Hey, listen…” the bartender began, “Things have been a little tough for me lately… you think you could work here with me?”
The elf looked up in surprise but soon his eyes widened and a slight smile appeared on his face.
“Really?” the elf cried. “You… want me, to work here?”
“Sure, why not? It is Christmas, everyone needs a gift!”
“Oh, wow, thank you so much! I will quite from that bloody work I got at Santa’s and live here! You don’t even have to pay me, I can work for beer and cookies! Thank you so much!”
“Aw shush, don’t mention it. Just one lonely man helping another.”
So, the elf and the bartender went back inside the bar and happily served the people for the remainder of Christmas and their life. Season’s greetings everyone!
***
To anyone taking offense in this: it is just sillyness, something I made out of boredome... yeah you're not supposed to be bored on Christmas but I had already opened my gifts and all that, so I decided to clear my head. Y'all have a Merry Christmas and for those that don't celebrate it, have a good December 25th!