4 Weeks Until Christmas

There are just 4 weeks left until Christmas and things here are so busy at the North Pole. I don’t even know where to start.

I guess I’ll tell you first about Trixie, my reindeer. I got to see her this week for Thanksgiving. She came home with the others from the test flight teams of Santa’s sleigh.

She is doing well but I’m a little bummed for her. She will not be participating in the reindeer games next week. Trixie qualified and was going to run but her work on the test flights of Santa’s sleigh is just too important for her to miss. She and thousands of other reindeer will miss the games this year.

That was a surprise decision. But things are not going well with those test flights and I guess it’s time for “all hands on deck” to get that sleigh right.

That sleigh is causing worries in the other areas of the North Pole. Over at the Wrapping Department there is kind of a to-do about it too.

You see, it is their job, after presents are wrapped to handle some details about how stuff gets loaded onto Santa’s sleigh. Elf Vladdy is the loadmaster and even though they have not, of course, even started loading the sleigh he’s very worried about something he calls APW. That stands for “average package weight”, which is a metric of some importance, I guess.

Vladdy says the APW is up 7 whole ounces this year.

I don’t know why that matters but he’s been in meetings with Santa and the hot shot elves at Flight Command to alert them to this big problem. I talked to Elf Buck, flight director over at Flight Command about it, and he says that 7 ounces is a big deal when you are talking about the billions of presents Santa has to deliver. Basically the heavier presents are the fewer Santa can carry and the fewer he carries the longer his flight takes.

Anyways. Presents are heavier this year. That’s got to be good news for somebody, right?

Anyways.

While the reindeer games are going to start soon there’s another thing going on that will occupy folks. Starting Monday, we line up for our annual shots over at the North Pole Clinic. Their big worry is not about Covid-19 any more but the bigger threat to the North Pole: The Bah Humbug Bug.

That’s a virus of a different sort and it crops up every five or six years at the North Pole as a problem. It saps the Christmas spirit, which is a pretty bad thing for an elf to deal with.

So we get this shot for it. Not my favorite thing to to, honestly.

But…I’m told the Bah Humbug thing is not expected to be a thing this year.

What do you want for Christmas?

My friend, Elf Hugo at the North Pole Post Office, reminded me to tell you that you don’t want to wait much longer to send a wish list in to Santa.

So, you’ve been reminded.

Toodles.