h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In these days of austerity, shouldn't the government be looking to restructure Santa's delivery empire? Surely he doesn't need that many reindeer, and I believe far too many agency elves are hired in at a greatly inflated price. What's more, overall efficiency could be improved if we operated a slimmed-down Father Christmas.

Present supply could easily be outsourced to the likes of Amazon and Ebay. The delivery network could be diversified and put in the hands of Yodel, Royal Mail, DHL and UPS (please God, not Home Delivery Network though).

A review of Santa's traditional refreshment supply could be reviewed and if necessary, put into the hands of Wetherspoons and so on.

Using agency elves may prove to have been a good move though, because they will not be getting huge redundancy payments.

Do it.

PP.

And to bring it all properly up to date, the insurance companies could be encouraged to offer crappy present protection policies.

It won't matter if you get socks, jumpers and peculiar liqueurs any more. Your CPPP will have that covered.

PP.

And then we can have endless phone calls from shysters wanting to sue them for miss-selling CPPP.

Oh endless Joy .NOT.

You know all those guys you see in shopping centres dressed up in red suits? Well...they *are* privatised Santas.

THAT needs to be clamped down on. Proper licensing arrangements for Santa franchises. We need to have a proper standard set so that things like this:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-25399416

don't keep happening.

PP.

I'm all for outsourcing Santa to a call centre in Chennai, with a small front office in Krakow.

It may not save money, but it would keep me in a job.

Would we be better off dumping Santa altogether and reverting to age-old solstice celebrations? The materials we would need for celebrating are low-tech to no-tech. Yule logs can be reused the next year if they don't burn up all the way, and the ashes can be scattered on people's lawns for fertilizer in the Spring. Reindeer are not native to most temperate and tropical locales, so why risk harm to them by allowing them to fly all around the world on Christmas Eve?

And who is Santa really? Do we have his fingerprints on file, so we can cross-check them against Interpol's database? For all we know, he's wanted for crimes against Wotan, Zeus, and other gods dating back thousands of years. There's probably a good reason why he hides out in the Arctic and only comes to the rest of the world one night a year. If he's as innocent as most people suspect, why does he not show his face when the sun is shining?

[Tip[toes away ]

I'm not keen on Santa as a tradition / sales opportunity on a personal basis, but the marketing opportunities are undeniable.

Solstice celebrations are something of a niche interest, but I can see that there are certainly commercial prospects are something that a subsidiary of us here at Santa International Corp might be interested in.

PP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-30568053

"Twelve people dressed as Father Christmas invaded the pitch during a football match between Cheltenham Town and Portsmouth.

Gloucestershire Police said they were ejected from the ground by stewards and their names taken by officers."

I wonder what name they gave?

There's plenty of commercial potential for wreaths and other decorations. Not to mention the Christmas tree farms that you sometimes pass when you're out driving.

Santa's using drones this year. He's already got this one sussed.

51% of the British believe Santa should not be allowed into Britain according to today's papers. He is yet another EU immigrant coming to the UK to steal jobs and live off the micro-foodbanks stocked with items donated by small children.

The government minister responsible issued a statement: "We need to send a warning to Santa and all European welfare cheats. Our Fairer Britain policy ensures that every person born in this Britain can look forward to eating like an old Etonian. Santa will find that," She went on to say, "food banks do not exist."

How do old Etonians eat, assuming that they eat any differently from anyone else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullingdon_Club

"What’s behind Santa’s bloody rise? Three leading elven labor activists offer a class analysis of the North Pole “gift economy.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/the-class-struggle-in-the-north-pole/

http://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/the-class-struggle-in-the-north-pole/

"Gangs of reindeer were sent out to elf villages to tear up farmland, which they were well-suited for given their antlers. The constant disruptions to food production left many of our people with no choice but to go work for Santa." [from Jacobin link]

Farmland? At the North Pole? Who farms in such a cold climate? Even the Vikings had to give up on their settlement in *southern* Greenland after the mini-warming passed. Granted, grasses and mosses and lichen can grow during the summers, hence the reindeer's ability to find food six months of the year, but farms? I doubt it. At least, on a scale that would allow elves to eke out survival. The Inuit depend on caribou and seal blubber. You could, if you had to, live on mice as the wolves do, but agriculture is a pipe dream.

I have it on good authority that the elf race has spent the last five or six generations changing their genome so that they can be indistinguishable from humans. Yes, they are that far ahead of humans in technology, otherwise they would not have been so useful to Santa. They had computers at least 100 years before humans did, but they soft-pedal that fact nowadays in order to assimilate.

Once in a while, an elf's ears will revert to the old formation, but there are numerous capable elf plastic surgeons who, free of charge, reshape the ears to conform to human shapes.