Friday, December 24, 2021

Short story – “A Christmas Miracle?”

“A Christmas Miracle?”

It was parents in the Western Pacific who first raised the alarm.  They were either doing last minute wrapping, or their regular routines, when presents just appeared.  Soon there were videos that showed – at the stroke of midnight – presents appearing.  There was no jolly fellow leaving them.  One second there was nothing, the next, simple toys in basic wrappings. 

As the hours passed, there were thousands upon thousands of such videos.  And some even showed crude traps to try to catch whatever was doing this, all to no avail. 

Christmas Day ended with a million questions, but no answers.  For the following year it was the number one topic of heated debate around the world.  Some even claimed The Event was the cause of several government collapses. 

Would it be repeated next Christmas?  Untold resources were spent to better record the phenomena.  But on the day, no presents showed up.  This just raised more questions and more debate.  Decades later, the general feeling was that our response to the miracle had just got us collectively put on the Naughty List.

***

For the last few years, I’ve had wondered how the world would react if Santa became active.  The basic idea being the world would freak out.  It was a fun idea, but I had assumed it might have to be a novella, and I didn’t have time for that.  But the other day I was thinking about it and started seeing this ultrashort version.  While this turned out to be about twice as long as I had hoped, it is still way shorter than I had first imagined.

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