SANTA AND THE MAGI

A silly yarn involving Santa Claus and three wise(ish) men

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. Life can do that to even fat pseudo-jolly men like him.

“What's got into you?” asked the grossly overweight and borderline ugly Mother Christmas, adjusting her bucket-bra with a practised hand.

“You have!” he retorted.

She put one hand on each side of where her waist might have been had she been of normal female construction 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 anyway!”

“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 getting endlessly under my feet!”

“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 back then: drinking, sleeping, watching Jeremy Kyle, drinking some more, dozing off and spending glorious hours on the loo with the Sporting Times and that tatty copy of Fifty Shades of Grey you leave in there!”

“My copy?” she growled, the question sounding like a threat.

“Well it isn’t mine!”

“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 like the knell of doom, reverberating everywhere until every molecule of the place shook.

“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 and with parchment maps spread on their humps.

“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 like I might understand you!”

“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. “It’s mine!”

“Well, you must excuse us. We are known as the three wise men or The Magi, 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 twinkling up there, 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 and the GPS would be all out of kilter.”

“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 of my annual vacation!”

“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. “I’ve never had one, not since your accidental vasectomy! Why you sayin' I have?”

“I wasn't, sweet petal,” murmured Santa. “It was these blokes implying there might be a question over your morality.”

“What they sitting on?” demanded his gross wife, suspiciously. “I've never seen reindeer as tall as that! And I ain’t never been immoral with nobody, so ‘elp me!”

“We've got gold, frankincense and myrrh,” put in the third wise man. “We've been searching for ages and to tell the truth we’re all three of us almost totally knackered.”

“Centuries,” confirmed the second one.

“Millennia,” admitted the first.”A really long time,” he added for emphasis.

“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 if he actually had any, and there's no other attractive blokes in this neck of the woods for me to turn to for back-up.”

“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 and signal when we get there. 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! The whole world in one night, and the best I can manage is the speed of light!”

© Peter Rogerson 21.12.12, edited 21.12.16