SANTA AND THE VIRGIN BIRTH

Now let me see ... there are two myths set around December 25th ... which one is this?

Santa Claus was having a good time.

It was his holiday break (April, sun shining, world waking up) and he had been invited to a party. Everyone who was anyone was there: all the greats from myth and legend. Cinderella was sporting her best pair of glass slippers, the Sleeping Beauty was yawning, Robin Hood was behaving badly with a deceased Tudor Royal (minus her head �" he enjoyed poking his hand round in gaping necks and pulling out bloody odds and gory ends), and a little girl wearing a red cloak was carefully tattooing a big bad wolf's chest with a splendid image of her own backside using a red hot screwdriver.

Santa was doing nothing in particular, enjoying the ambience of an exhilarating annual gathering.

There were one or two absences. Moses hadn't been invited because it turned out he'd lied about climbing mountains and Christ's invitation had been lost in the post by an alcoholic wedding guest who spent most of Eternity seeing double.

And Santa was quietly sipping champagne and having a deep and meaningful conversation with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt (long since deceased) on the subject of poisonous reptiles when a mischievous female Greek Goddess slipped a little pill into his booze. It dissolved almost instantly, and from his first sip from the polluted glass the room changed in an entirely predictable way. The pill, after all, was chemical.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” he boomed, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!”

“What's the matter, Santa?” asked Cleopatra, but what he appeared to hear was a kind of muffled “Do you fancy sex with me, Santa?”

“With you?” he leered, “'f course I do! Come on, angel tits! Le's go for a liddel walk on the quiet side? Le's go an' do stuff of a sexual nature in my liddel boudoir!”

Fortunately for Santa it came out as little more than an incomprehensible mumble and Cleopatra muttered about old men getting drunk, and wandered off to seek more intelligent conversation, which she found in the company of Hannibal Lecter.

“Hello handsome!” breathed an intoxicating voice in Santa's ear.

“Who're you?” he slurred, turning slowly to face her. “I don't know why, but I'm pished...” he added.

And he felt it. The room had become multicoloured, the movements of the people within it gaining a dreamlike quality where the edges of things blurred with the edges of other things, and ripples of slashing rainbows permeated everything. The whole effect was a Santa who started swaying from side to side, his huge paunch echoing a disastrous tsunami and his beard becoming uncharacteristically floppy.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! I feel f-f-fantastic!” he crowed.

His new companion giggled. “I'm called Aphrodite!” she told him. “I do things with men... fun things. Do you want me to do fun things with you? We could have the time of our lives! And if you play your cards right you could put me with child!”

“I'm pished...” he informed her.

“Drugged, rather,” she grinned.

“Pished.” he confirmed. “My whole head's swimming with thish and that and the other. Come, old child-woman, let's to bed! You and me an' anyone else who cares to join us...”

“You're disgusting!” snapped Cleopatra, drifting past him.

“I'm Shanta!” he bellowed. “An' this fancy floozy wantsh me to do stuff!” He indicated Aphrodite with a leer and a slur.

“Oh, her,” scoffed Cleopatra, wandering off towards Oliver Twist. “You poor child,” she murmured, “I'd give you a great deal more whenever you wanted me to.”

“I'm with you, Santa,” whispered Aphrodite. And she led him up a staircase, a long and winding one, until they reached an upper room. Inside it there was the biggest, most luxurious feather bed that Santa had ever seen. The air was filled with a sweet and clinging perfume, and the deep piled carpet was luxury itself.

“Bed...” he leered, and half-fell, half ran to the gigantic bed.

“This is lovely,” he muttered. “I could sleep here for ever!”

“You might have to!” sneered Aphrodite. “Call yourself a saint! Santa Claus! I think not!”

But Santa was snoring.

He had always been prone to falling asleep at a moment's notice, and this bed and its soft and inviting covers, the almost suffocating aroma, they were more than any old invitation. They were the veriest, most insistent beckoning, and the fat old man responded.

OoOoo

Next morning he awoke with Aphrodite lying next to him, her young lithe body like total temptation.

“Good morning,” she whispered.

But Santa was feeling far from well and her whisper was deafening.

“Sshh!” he hissed �" but that was deafening too.

“I'm pregnant: look!” she giggled, and exposed a bloated stomach for his examination. “You did this!” she added.

“I … what … when? Yes, when?” he stammered.

“Last night, with your willy,” she breathed, and she didn't even have the grace to blush. “You're going to be a daddy!”

“Me? Don't be so daft!” he said, ignoring the throbbing in his head. “What is it? Nobody grows a bump that quickly! And don't say it's a phantom pregnancy!”

“No, sweetie, it's real!” she trilled.

“No it isn't!” he insisted. “There's no such thing!”

“A virgin birth, then.”

“Now you're being silly!”

“There's a precedent!”

“Maybe there is, but I always think drugs are involved when people waffle about virgin births, and anyway there's one thing you don't know...”

“Sweetie, you can't wriggle out of it!”

“How did I manage it, then?”

“You mean, being in the state you were in? You're a manly man, Santa: that's how you managed it!”

He sighed and shook his head. “Have I told you about my accident?” he asked.

“Accident?” She paled. “What accident?”

“Long ago. Back when surgery was in its infancy and there wasn't any anaesthetic.” he whispered, the memory painful. “The sleigh runners ran over my testicles back in 1789, and gave me a very painful and actual vasectomy before anyone had thought of them.”

Aphrodite flared up: “You're lying!” she spat at him.

He shook his head sorrowfully. “No I'm not,” he murmured. “I'll show you if you like. I've still got quite a nasty scar and very knobbly �" er sphericals. You must have wondered, probably asked yourself the big question...

“Why do you think there aren't any little Santas around?”