Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

not a creature was stirring, not even a… a… Uh, crap…

What’s something nasty that rhymes with “house?” “Louse?” That could work.

Let’s try this:

Twas the night before Christmas, when through each city

a strange creature was stirring, to make life shitty.

Better?

Well, at least it’s true. There is a strange creature stirring: me. I’m an Elf. I’ve been fired… on Christmas Eve no less! And, I plan on fucking up Christmas royally.

Why?

Well, besides being fired, Christmas just pisses me off. Let me explain. (Settle in. My villainous backstory is going to take a minute, but hang around. It’s a good one.)

My name is Mary.

That’s right.

Mary.

Let that sink in a minute. I’m an Elf. I was born in The North Pole, and my parents thought to name me Mary. Like, couldn’t they have maybe considered that Mary was not the best name for a girl in a Christmas-centered society?

“Mary? Like, ‘Mary Christmas?’ Ha ha, that’d be a great nickname for you,” said every idot I ever met. Ugh!

Everywhere I went I heard “Mary Christmas!” here and “Mary Christmas” there. This went on all year round, and it only got worse when Christmas approached.

So, naturally, I grew up with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I would get into fights all the time. I had very few friends, and they were all losers like me. My one saving grace was that I was smart, brilliant even. “Yeah,” I thought. “Mock my name, you little shits. I’m graduating at the top of the class. You can all kiss my merry ass!”

The one subject that I happened to excel at most was magic. I’m a badass magician. Spells just come naturally to me. I can whip up an incantation or a curse at a moment’s notice. This was clear to everyone after I turned one of the brats in my class into a polar bear. Everyone made a big deal about it, but she had it coming. And, anyway, they figured out how to turn her back to normal after a few weeks. (Though, she did have a lingering craving for rare meat from that point on.)

Following “The Bear Incident,” as it came to be known, the teasing lightened up a bit. People were scared of me. Either they did their best to act nice around me, or they snuck away as I approached. They used to chant my name. Now, they whispered it. I felt both powerful and lonely, which is a seriously dangerous combination. Seeing this, the higher ups decided it was best to find a job for me that would keep my mind occupied and keep me away from the general public as much as possible.

I went into Research and Development.

You see, The North Pole is a one-factory town. Everyone ends up working for the big man in some way. If you’re lucky, you end up a manager on the toy lines. If you’re unlucky, you might spend a century sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. There is no space for free enterprise or small business development. Your future is pretty much set from the moment you are born. Most Elves take comfort in that. They have job security and all that. I hated it. I wanted to be free to do my own thing, but at least I got to experiment with my talents while working for the man.

The R&D lab was full of egghead Elves with a talent for making magic. We would come up with new toys or with new ways of improving production. The elite got to work on the delivery team. Their job was making sure that the sled was ready to roll and that the time manipulation needed for the big man’s trip worked flawlessly.

I started to rub people the wrong way almost immediately. For example, I pointed out early on that we could easily use a few spells and some machines to automate the entire toy production line. My managers explained to me that this would be bad since it would put thousands of Elves out of a job. (Fucking communism.) They tried me on new toy design. That lasted for a while, but eventually I started to notice that none of my toy designs were being approved for production. When I asked my managers what was up, they explained that my toys were “unsuitable” or “dangerous” or “actually not toys but horrible curses.” Eventually, as they were running out of places to put me, they bumped me up to the delivery team. I excelled there for a while, but I started asking a few too many questions.

“Why does it need to be a sled? Why do we need to keep these smelly reindeer around? Why not use a teleportation device instead? For that matter, why do we stop time for only one night a year? We could stop time for the Elves on production to give us all the time we need to make the toys, and then we could just spend the rest of the year doing whatever it is we want to do.”

The answer was always “Tradition.” That’s the way it was done. The big man was not about to change it.

Eventually, I got sick of it all. I decided that I had slipped on reindeer shit for the last time. Something had to change.

After throwing back a few too many drinks over lunch today, I stormed into the big man’s office while he was in the middle of preparing for the big delivery. I started ranting and raving about glaring inefficiencies in production and workers rights and a bunch of other annoying crap. Then, I said the unspeakable; I accused him of running a factory of brainwashed slaves for his own twisted amusement.

That was the last straw. He fired me on the spot and called in the guards to drag me out.

But, I was ready for them. I had my new time manipulation tool primed to go if I needed to make a quick getaway. I flipped it on, and the world froze. I slid past the statue-like guards and headed for the secret archives. I needed some answers, and the secret archives had to be where they were hidden. It was the only totally off limits place in the head office. I broke in and started reading. I had all the time in the world to read as much as I wanted, so that’s what I did. I only stopped when I became too disgusted to go on any further.

The story I found explained how my ancestors had been driven to the ends of the Earth by the spread of mankind. Although we were a powerful species, we were quickly being outnumbered. We needed a refuge. Eventually, my people found the big man. He seemed a kind one, very giving by nature and possessing a real soft spot for children. Seeing an opportunity for survival with him, my people came up with a plan. They decided it would be best if they resembled children to gain the big man’s sympathy, so they transformed themselves with a permanent glamor, leaving our race looking forever trapped in childhood. Then, they approached the big man and made a deal with him. They would help him make toys and give them to the children of the world. In return, he would provide them with a safe haven. The idea was that so long as the Elves were associated with a good man like him, they would not need to fear the hostility of humans anymore.

The plan worked, our people survived, and centuries passed in peaceful servitude. Then, came the rebellion. The working Elves demanded their freedom. They wanted to live as their ancestors did, as a free and mysterious race. They were brutally put down by the Elves in positions of power. The old histories were erased and replaced by a fairy tale of peaceful coexistence and gleeful service. From then on, young Elves were indoctrinated with these lies and forced into slavery, all in the name of keeping the peace and surviving.

Well, fuck keeping the peace, and fuck just surviving. I want to live. I want to be free. If trying to live free means we risk extinction, then that’s just fine with me. Better to die in battle than scrape along in bitter servitude forever.

So, I came up with my own plan. Rather than attempt a hopeless rebellion against the big man and his goons, I decided I would go after the heart of our twisted society, Christmas. If I could wreck the big man’s reputation, if I could kill Christmas, then there would be no need for toys anymore. There would be no work for the Elves. They might start asking questions. They might start demanding freedom. The rebellion might just happen on its own, then.

Yeah, it might be a long shot. And, yeah, I might really be doing this just because I got teased too much as a kid and my boss just fired me.

Nevertheless, fuck him, fuck Christmas, and fuck you! I’m burning this motherfucker down to the ground if I can!

So, I ran and grabbed a bunch of stuff. I stole The List, planning on targeting the naughty ones first. I took all of my old prototype toys from R&D, the nasty ones that they dreaded. I loaded them up on the sled along with some new goodies I had created in my off hours, the type of shit that would have gotten me fired for sure if anyone had seen it. Then, I left a letter for the big man and his cronies to see before I departed on my mission.

“Dear Santa,” it read.

“What I want for Christmas this year is the destruction of The North Pole, but don’t go to any trouble over me. I’ll handle it on my own. In fact, you get to take it easy this year. I’ll take care of the big delivery all by myself. I’m sure the children of the world will love you after they see the toys I leave for them.

“If you don’t know what I mean by that, then ask the R&D department about my little experiments. Tell them that I’m finally putting my prototypes into production. (I only wish I could see their faces in that moment.)

“Oh, and don’t try to follow me. After all, I’ll be done before you can stop me.

“Yours truly,

“Mary Christmas

“P.S. Ho, Ho, Ho!”

I let time run just long enough for them to find the letter, freak out, and run to stop me. Just as they reached me in the sled as I sat waiting there wearing his goofy red hat and smiling like a demon, just as I saw the utter terror and desperation in his eyes, I froze time and blasted off into the cold, leaving behind the stinking reindeer and my rotten past at last.

Now, it’s time for some mayhem.

***

Later on, I think back on the whole journey. It seems like a dream now, an endless night, but it all really happened. Let me describe it to you.

***

As I rode south to North America, I had time to do some preparations for my gift-giving. I pulled out a couple of tools of my own invention.

First off, I set up my state-of-the-art Magic Toy Factory, which is basically a magic 3D printer with a scanning function. All I have to do is stick a toy in it, and it can produce endless copies of it, each one an exact duplicate of the original down to the molecular level. I started pumping out copies of my prototypes immediately.

Next, I pulled out my Chrono-Viewer, which is basically a screen linked to some very cutting edge time manipulation spells. With it, I can get a brief glimpse into the future. It’s a bit on the probabilistic side, meaning that the futures I see are only likely to be true, not 100% accurate predictions. Thank goodness for quantum fluctuations and the enduring potential for freewill. I planned on using this little darling to check if my toys will be having their desired effect (i.e. total chaos).

Finally, I pulled out The List. I set my coordinates for the nearest naughty child and let the autopilot lead the way.

It was going to be a long night. In normal calendar time, it would last months, but in big-delivery time, it would be over in a few hours. I could be back in the North Pole before anyone had a chance to stop me, but I had no intention of returning to that frozen hellscape ever again.

Still, I wanted a glimpse of how my former coworkers would react to my trip. I flipped on my Chrono-Viewer for a test to see what the immediate future looked like for the North Pole. I was greeted by a somewhat hazy moving image of Santa chewing out his guards for being so lax as to let me escape with his sled. He ordered my old manager to counteract my time manipulation device with the bigger, more impressive looking device in the main office. I smiled as he reached for the machine. He twisted the dials and immediately dropped to the floor in a pile of oversized clothes, having been instantly reduced to infancy. My booby trapping of their time device had worked like a charm. It still functioned just fine, but it did have a bit of a time leak to it now, spilling out anti-time all over anyone who operated it. Thankfully, the device had a safety on it that immediately shut it down if anyone affected by it entered “critical youthfulness.”

“I did warn you about trying to stop me,” I said to the screen.

My old manager, now reduced to a bawling baby, was carried away as some of his assistants started looking for diapers. They would need to leave him as he was for a few days at least until the anti-time charge on him had dispersed, or else there might be unexpected side-effects to ageing him up again. The rest of the R&D crew shook their heads as they examined my handiwork. They were simultaneous impressed and terrified. No one dared touch the device after that.

Satisfied that I would be safe from North Pole interference, I focused my attention on the list. It was time to start pairing up my toys with deserving kids.