Poles apart
I received a letter this morning, special delivery from the North Pole, and I thought I would share it with you all:
Dear Adrian
Thanks so much for your letter, which arrived today and compelled me to put pen to paper myself. I am sure you will be as sad as I am about my news, but I thought it only right that I should break it to you myself. I’m sorry to say that Santa Enterprises Inc and its subsidiary, Rein-Air, will stop trading on December 26th this year.
As you are probably aware, the business has been operating at a loss for some years now and we have been forced to realise that we simply do not have the means to continue into 2010. All outstanding orders will be honoured but the official receivers will arrive on Boxing Day to value the few company assets we have left and will then wind up the business.
There have been a number of factors which have contributed to our demise and I feel it only fair to explain some of these to you and our other loyal customers. Obviously it will come as no surprise that we have been hit very hard by the economic downturn: people just don’t have the money to buy expensive gifts anymore. That has a knock-on effect to production and we have had to lay off almost half the Elf workforce. The price of raw materials has rocketed too, making it uneconomical to manufacture key items at the North Pole. We did try to leverage the global markets and even sited a few factories around the world, in places like Africa, China and South America, but the Elves just couldn’t stand the heat and we found that the smell from their body odour was tainting the products.
The new landing strip we had to build turned out to be a bottomless money pit – you will recall that fuss about the old strip not passing Health and Safety regulations and being declared un-sleigh-worthy. We took out a loan to build a new sleigh-port closer to the coast, but we had not anticipated quite how quickly the ice cap was retreating and within months the runway was not on permafrost but on dry land!
Rudolf caught a nasty virus while holidaying on Mexico and so was unable to meet his responsibilities for stock control and materials distribution. This left us with his work to be distributed amongst his colleagues but they involved the unions and the whole matter got out of hand. To top it all, we had a bunch of climate change protesters demanding that we measure the reindeer for methane output, which apparently exceeds international standards and we have had to get them all fitted with ‘emission collection bags’ before they can undertake this year’s deliveries. That just added insult to injury after I had to fork out for special anti-glare visors for them, following that damning report by the Chief Medical Elf that their eyesight was being damaged by the increased light from all those blessed house decorations.
We have seen a massive tail-off in traditional toy orders over the last few years – kids these days just don’t want the sort of product that we are set up to produce. Oh, we tried re-branding but with very limited success. It seems that simply prefixing a product name with ‘i’ is not enough. We thought we might get away with iCandy and our new Post Office themed board game – iQueue – looked promising in market research but they never really took off. A huge linguistic misunderstanding left us with an over-order of iGlue, originally destined for the Eskimos – we were stuck with that for ages! The” iSaw, iScrew, iBang” carpenter set failed to capture anyone’s imagination. And of course, when we tried to branch out into consumer electronics we were sued by iTV.
Our traditional ‘main crop’ products are all now pretty much redundant – people just don’t buy their music in any tangible form these days and I defy anybody to wrap up an mp3 file with paper and a ribbon. Even the Christmas Number One (originally a marketing ‘opportunity’ that I came up with years ago) is now all electronic with hardly a vinyl disk passing hands. It is a travesty! Our long-running contract with Grannies Ltd was not renewed. We used to supply 93% of the world’s knitwear to elderly folk around the world, so that they could pass it off as their own, to the delight of nieces, nephews, sons and daughters, but who wants an Aran cardigan any more?
The divorce from Mrs Clause cost me dearly too. She is now living with her Civil Partner, Brenda, in Basingstoke. She claimed irrevocable breakdown of marriage after that nasty incident with the Elf – he really was helping me zip up my new Santa costume, that WAS a carrot in my pocket and his eyes were only watering because of the cold. And how dare she claim that I showed her no warmth? It’s living at the pole that is frigid, not me!
I’m not entirely blameless in the demise of my business I suppose. I haven’t kept up with current trends as I might have, but I always thought that tradition and family values would be enough to keep us going. I’m just not a creature of the 21st Century. For example, I received this letter the other day and have absolutely no idea what it is on about:
I’m going to send him an Airfix model of the Eifel Tower and a yo-yo, but I expect they will be returned! I mourn for the days when a box of Lego and some plasticine could keep kids amused for hours – but even commissioning that Top Gear bloke to do some extra promo hasn’t increased sales in traditional toys. Nobody is interested if it doesn’t plug in or download. Take last year, for example, we had over a thousand apples returned because they didn’t come with the latest version of iTunes!
My SOS (Save our Santa) appeal was a wasted effort – we had very few donations and those that did arrive were all in incorrectly stamped envelopes which ended up costing us more in postage fees than we made in total. We tried, we failed.
Anyway, we must look to the future. I know I will leave a gap in the market, but commercialism moves ever onward and I suppose I’m no worse off than that profiteer from Nazareth who thought he had the Winter monopoly a couple of millennia ago – and look where that got him! So I expect that next year you will be able to get everything you need for Christmas as a podcast.
I’m relocating to some new accommodation in Dubai – I heard there is plenty of property there going for a song. And even though the Christmas market has collapsed, I fancy trying my hand at oil prospecting – I’m sure that is an industry that will remain buoyant for many thousands of years to come.
Have a happy Christmas, and thanks for all your support over the last 42 years. Love to David.
Santa xxx
