Tales of Santa Claus, part 1

Throughout the last bunch of years, I have been meeting up with Santa Claus in often strange places and under strange circumstances.

Now, we all know that Santa has a list of good girls and boys, and we all know that he lives at the North Pole. But there are some things about Santa that not everyone knows. I will share with you some of the things I have learned about Jolly Ol' St. Nick.

Santa actually has three places that he stays at. Ironically, each one is called "North Pole". North Pole proper is where Santa, Mrs. Claus and the elves spend more of their time, making toys for the aforementioned good girls and boys.

Many people do not realize that Santa himself likes to keep his toymaking skills sharp. So nearly every day, he spends a few hours in the toyshop making toys. Santa is really cool about it, too. The elves are encouraged to learn new ways to make toys and make different kinds of toys. So Santa actually asks the elves to teach him some of these new techniques and stuff.

The biggest reason for his honing the craft of toymaking is in case Santa accidentally drops a bag of toys or if one of the reindeer accidentally step of them. Santa needs to repair the toys so the children don't get broken stuff!

Santa shared a story with me one time, which he called "the great Tickle Me Elmo fiasco". As he was speeding through California one year, one of the fighter jets that often escort him (see www.noradsanta.org), got too close and caused some unexpected turbulence. As a result, the bag that carried Tickle Me Elmo's fell thousands of feet, crashing into the desert.

This also happened to be the year that Tickle Me Elmo was all the rage, and EVERYBODY wanted one! So Santa told me that he had to fly around the surrounding areas and sprinkle emergency sleeping dust all over the place, to ensure he had enough time to fix the toys before delivering them!

He then called a few of his elite elves - who stay on shift for all of Christmas Eve just in case anything like this happens - and sent Donner and Blitzen off to retrieve the elves while he got started with the repairs. In a flash, all of the Tickle Me Elmo's were repaired to their original condition, and delivered only an hour later than expected!

So who knows... maybe YOUR Tickle Me Elmo was one of the bunch that Santa tells stories about!

More tales to come...?