Santa Worried About Reindeer; Anxiety Spreads at the North Pole

With liftoff just a couple of days away, Santa is worried about the health of the reindeer. Over 600 of them have now become ill with what we have started referring to as the Sleigh Bell Virus. I caught up with Santa just a little while ago.

“We’ve never had this many sick reindeer at one time before” Santa told me. “This could be a major problem for Operation Merry Christmas. We always have some extra reindeer on standby but there is no way we can replace all 600 of them. I’m going to review the plans this morning to see if we can eliminate some of the resupply sleighs by increasing the loads on some of the other sleighs. We also may have to look at eliminating some of the spotter sleighs. It’s always nice to know what I’m going to run into but I can get a pretty clear picture from the new weather radar on the sleigh. I’ll know more once I talk to Elf Victor.”

In other news Elf Wally is reporting a major incident in the Wrapping Department overnight.

“The powered tape dispensers went crazy” Elf Wally told me. “They just started shooting tape out everywhere. The tape got all over the elves and they ended up getting stuck to each other as they tried to run away from the machines. The tape also got all over about 1,000 gifts that had just been wrapped and were waiting to be transported to the storage room. It took us 5 hours to get it all cleaned up and those gifts now have to be unwrapped and rewrapped. Instead of fixing the powered dispensers we are going back to the old fashioned way. We will measure and cut the tape by hand.”

Things are a little tense and worried at the North Pole right now. I’ve never seen so many things go wrong at the last minute like this. Mrs. Claus is really starting to crank out the sugar cookies in the kitchen, which is kind of like adding fuel to all the elves. She is trying very hard to keep everyone positive.

— Elf Ernest