SANTA AND THE MAGI

When one Christmas legend meets another....

Santa was in a black mood.

Oh, I know that he is supposed to be endlessly jolly with many a ho ho ho on his lips, but sometimes he could be irascible to the point of becoming very moody.

“What's got into you?” asked the grossly overweight and possibly ugly Mother Christmas.

“You have!” he retorted.

She put one hand on each side of her waist and frowned at him. “And what might you mean by that?” she grated.

He shrugged. “It's just that all I want is a day off and I've got to work tonight,” he replied.

“But you only work one night of the year!”

“So what?”

“Well, there are loads of people who'd swap their forty hour weeks, fifty week years, for a one night shift!” she told him. “After all, you lounge around for the rest of the year!”

“So what?” he repeated. “It's what I was trained for,” he added. “I had to spend three glorious years at the University of Bedrock way back in the good old days, getting my degree in slobbing, and I appreciate what I learned! I want to get the benefit of everything they taught me: drinking, sleeping, watching Jeremy Kyle, drinking some more, dozing off and spending glorious hours on the loo!”

“Pah!”

Santa was about to make another telling retort when the bell indicating that someone was at the front door tolled throughout the Ice Castle.

“Bloody doorbell,” he grumbled. “I mean, who's struggled over a thousand miles of Arctic tundra to ring our bell?”

“I have,” boomed a foreign voice when he pulled the door open.

Standing there, about to press the doorbell a second time, stood three men in archaic Eastern dress sitting on camels.

“Excuse me,” said one of them in a language Santa couldn't understand.

“What you want?” he asked in his own language. “Talking gobbledegook at me!”

“Oh? So you speak this tongue?” asked a second of the strangers in a very pronounced and barely understandable accent.

“Of course I do!” growled Santa.

“Well, you must excuse us. We are known as the three wise men, and we are lost,” explained the third stranger.

“Where are you supposed to be?” asked Santa, suspiciously. There were several tons of very expensive gifts in the Ice Castle and he figured that these strangers might really be crooks, after them.

“We are supposed to be here,” sighed the first stranger. “You see, we're following that star and it's led us here.”

Santa looked into the sky to where he was pointing.

“That's no star!” he exclaimed, “that's a satellite in geostationary orbit! Without it my mobile phone wouldn't work.”

“But it led us here,” explained the second wise man. “And we need to see the baby. We have gifts for him.”

“Baby? What baby?” demanded Santa. “There's no baby here, unless the missus has been naughty whilst I was away basking in the sun and eating ice-creams during the glorious long summer months!”

“What you saying about me?” demanded Mother Christmas, her belly wobbling like a tsunami about to roll over the doorstep.

“These blokes are looking for a baby,” explained Santa, “and they seem to think that satellite up there has led them to it!”

“I ain't had no baby!” she barked, wiping a globule of snot from the end of her nose. “Why you sayin' I have?”

“I wasn't, sweet petal,” murmured Santa.

“What they sitting on?” demanded his gross wife, suspiciously. “I've never seen reindeer as tall as that!”

“We've got gold, frankincense and myrrh,” put in the third wise man. “We've been searching for ages.”

“Centuries,” confirmed the second one.

“Millennia,” admitted the first.

“So if you could point out where we might find the baby we'll happily leave you in peace and go and worship him,” murmured the third.

“There's no babies here!” shouted Mother Christmas. “We don't do babies! My old man here is so fat there's no way he could manage the sowing of the seed, and there's no other attractive blokes in this neck of the woods.”

“Me fat? You're a fine one to talk!” almost exploded Santa.

“But the star...” stammered the first wise man.

“The satellite,” corrected Santa. “I'm afraid you're miles off course if you're wanting a baby. The best I can suggest is you make for Iceland. There might be a maternity hospital there, and maternity hospitals mean babies.”

“Where's Iceland?” asked the second wise man.

Santa sighed. “I guess I'm off to work,” he muttered, “I'll tell you what: follow me if you can. I'll go to Iceland first. It's quite a long way, but I'll cope.”

“If we have to,” sighed the third wise man. “Lead on, Macduff!”

“The name's Santa!” growled a still grumpy fat man. “Wait here and I'll get the sleigh. Then you'd better stir your camels into action: I don't half have to shift!"