It was a difficult season for the old fellow.

All of a sudden, every good child in the world wanted big bulky gifts. Gold coins and sweets were passé...parents didn't like the effect on the young ones' teeth...the smaller innocents were prone to swallow the gold coins...health ministries all over the world were threatening injunctions.

Coal was still coal, fortunately. Easy to transport in the handy-dandy half-bottomless coal sack that hung outboard from the port gunwale of the Sleigh.

Some parent, somewhere, decided that Santa would personally supervise the manufacture and timely delivery of Johnny's bicycle and Susie's doll-house, as well as Dexter's laboratory and Hypatia's library. All too soon, every parent in the world expected this premium service. And the live animals!...Jee-zus Gawd! When each good child required dang-near all of his available cargo space for their own personal haul, even the best magical microminiaturization technique and automatic containerization technology could only cope with so much.

The North Pole shops, warehouses, foundries, and factories spread to an area that required fifteen additional postal codes. The brains of the world's best organizers and administrators recently deceased, were spirited out of their skulls and given a home in the Plan Machine. The infrastructure was completed by the Seabees with twice-stolen materials.

Every available elf, dwarf, hobbit, gnome, and sprite was pressed into service. Santa asked The Big Dude for some angels for asistance, but only one appeared for the job interviews. She looked real spiffy at the interview in her sparkly white gown (which she used later to her advantage, frequently, to hide in the snow and nap). She was Lulu Bell, Tinker Bell's little sister, she was between jobs, she didn't really like seasonal work, but she had reasons to be elsewhere real quick, so there she was, ready and willing to sprinkle pixie dust all over everything.

Aside from that little annoyance, Lulu worked efficiently at efficiency, whipping the dwarves into a fine productive fury in their foundries; shaming the elves into a sullen grudging creativity with their paint brushes; kicking the gnome porters into a long neat rapidly-moving queue; managing to find storage areas for all that merchandise (the sheer mass of which was capable of sinking the north polar icecap sixteen metres into the polar sea).

Santa put Lulu in charge of loading the Sleigh. Everything that was crafted that season had to be labelled, wrapped, shrunk, containerized and stowed on that hopelessly outmoded conveyance.

Rickety too, Lulu noticed. The load was stowed, lacking only the obligatory magic fir tree, as well as the porcine buttocks of the slave-driver. The runner on the left side wobbled a bit, and a sprinkle of pixie dust could have firmed it up, but the old bear forbade its use after the kennel incident. It wasn't her fault, anyway. That beastly badger had clawed and gnawed her pouch to shreds. It was the cooolest party that day, but Old Spoil-Sport just had to put the lid on.

The schedule had slipped. Rudolph's nose was giving him problems, so he took a healthy dose of Mama Claus' All-Purpose Remedy, and he hadn't woke up yet. Donner and Blitzen were fighting (again!), Comet and Cupid had wandered off together with Bambis on their minds, and Dasher had a tender hoof from the wind sprints he was running. The hobbit stableboys discovered a hogshead of mead, and shared the love with the remaining reindeer.

Lulu applied the hot burning fire of motivation to the rears of those poor befuddled beasts, and managed to harness them to the Sleigh. Finally, everything was ready for Old Wazzizname to do his thing.

The schedule slipped again. Lulu was in the process of bringing the fir-tree to Santa, sitting now in the Sleigh, when she saw the left runner collapse. The old fellow tumbled headfirst into a snowdrift. He popped his head out just in time to have it soundly clobbered by the butt end of the tree as Lulu sailed by.

"Ooopsie!" Lulu sang in her sweet lilting voice.

That meant, of course, unloading, finding some dwarves sober enough to fix, fixing, and reloading.

Santa unloaded: in a fit of rage, he lifted the right side of the Sleigh and tipped the whole works up side down. Packages flew everywhere.

Santa fixed: he froze three hobbits solid with his glare and bound them to the frame, with their poor fuzzy feet firmly lashed to the runner.

Santa reloaded: he threw, bashed, stomped and crammed all the packages into an untidy mass.

Lulu, still floating about with the tree hanging from her dainty fist, had this to offer:

"Can't do a damned thing right! If you pulled your head out and took just a bit of time you could do it right! If you didn't ban my pixie dust this never would have happened!"

She hovered, inspecting the sloppily loaded Sleigh, looking for a spot to deposit the tree.

"Hoi, you big fat sack of Stoopid, just where am I supposed to put this tree?"

* * *

And that, children, is why there is an angel on top of the Christmas tree.