To: All Earthbound Mortals
We, the staff and executive board at The North Pole, issue this urgent holiday request: Do not play any Christmas music until after Thanksgiving!
This is not an attempt to be some kind of bah-humbugging buzzkill. Yes, there are plenty of real-life Scrooges out there who try to put a damper on the holiday spirit for purely selfish reasons, such as fearing the vulnerability necessary to experience childlike joy, or lacking the emotional capacity to enjoy Wham!
This is a matter of public safety, for Santa Claus and for yourselves.
Santa has a sixth sense attuned to these repeated musical shout-outs, much in the same way many religions believe that God can hear their prayers (except, of course, Santa is real). It is imperative we observe the appropriate time to ring in the season, as that “ring” is the alarm bell which awakens Santa from his 11-month slumber.
It used to be just a few precocious local radio stations prematurely spinning holiday ditties or department stores jumping the gun on switching up their Muzak, anomalies easy enough to quash with a strongly-worded cease and desist letter. But thanks to every obsessive Christmas carol-lover with a Spotify account (coupled with the opportunism of that Billboard Chart–savvy Mariah Carey), songs siren-calling to Santa are being played and sung earlier than ever before.
And this seemingly unthreatening early adoption of yuletide cheer has very real consequences.
When Santa is abruptly roused by your increasingly unseasonal streams of “Santa Baby” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” he becomes disoriented and violent. Imagine prodding a hungry grizzly bear mid-hibernation, months before the spring thaw—and then asking it to handle distribution logistics for an Amazon warehouse.
Upon this untimely autumnal waking, his Eternal Being instinct kicks in—a roiling, subconscious urge to traverse the globe bringing gifts to children. Compelled to escape the Polar Compound in the middle of the night, his bleary eyes are confused by the misaligned constellations and the Northern Lights. With no sack of toys to dole out on his back, he grows frustrated, lumbering about the upper latitudes idle and aimless, a feral juggernaut of chaos.
We’ve had reports of Santa kicking down entire groves of evergreens, scaling housetops and ripping the shingles from the roof, gnashing his teeth at toddlers and frothing at the beard. His voice garbled and raspy, tries to “Ho ho ho” but instead emits an eerie, gasping “Huaf huaf huaf!”
Historically, when all went according to plan, Santa would be gently coaxed out of his bed chamber by the hums of “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” emanating from the hearts of wish list-writing children. But time, and commercialism, have shifted that schedule.
Since the mid-20th Century, we have, under the supervision of elfin physicians, piped an incrementally louder loop of “Here Comes Santa Claus” into his ears starting in mid-November. From his groggy, cocoa-withdrawal state, our Resuscitation Team immediately infuses his blood with a steady IV drip of peppermint essence to calm his nerves plus a cocktail of flying reindeer steroids to get him lucid enough for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the first and only glimmer of daylight he has seen all season.
For the next few weeks, Santa is relegated to light admin work on the Naughty or Nice List and a physical therapy regimen similar to astronauts returning from a year aboard the International Space Station.
But unfortunately, the “new normal” has become that there is no normal. Just this September, some TikTok teen put Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” on repeat while they worked out some banal choreography. By mid-October we were forced to fly in a team of large mammal tranquilizer experts from the San Diego Zoo to take down Santa as he punched his way through a village of igloos.
No child should fear Father Christmas, but now the traumatized children of Alaska’s North Slope do.
We have tried our best to contain his destructive behavior to the polar ice cap, but the radius of Santa’s unwitting mayhem only seems to grow. We’ve spent millions on damage control and issued formal apologies to over a dozen remote towns throughout Scandinavia.
Santa needs his rest in order to embark on an exhausting Christmas Eve gifting marathon fueled by plate after plate of cookies before returning home to collapse milk-drunk in his underground lair, left undisturbed until the following year.
So please, leave the pre-December Christmas music rotation to our team of highly-trained professionals. No one is more excited to say “‘Tis the season” than we are. But ‘tisn’t the season just yet.
Sincerely,
Jolly Tinselstrand
Senior Communications Elfficer
The North Pole, Inc.