Chapter 1
Late again! God dammit how did I miss the time? I got carried away with that damn Rubik’s cube, or was it those Sudoku’s? Ah, it doesn’t matter. Gotta run. Brush my teeth? Comb my hair? That’ll have to wait. I absolutely cannot miss this. So much responsibility I have been given—I can’t let him down.
I’ve been tasked with documenting the last-ever lecture series of undoubtedly THE greatest Santa historian that has ever lived. Author of several popular books including North Pole Economics: Frozen in Time?, Sled Mechanics: Flight to Success, A Practical Guide to Reindeer Husbandry, and, of course, the indispensable Chimney Climbing for Dummies. Not to mention countless academic papers, pivotal archaeological expeditions, and, on a personal note, my mentor. And this is how I repay him? Being late for the very first lecture? Absolutely not.
Where the hell is my bike? Ah, there it is, where I left it.
Now the guilt is really setting in. An image of my mother spawns in my mind’s eye. She didn’t raise her boy to be so temporally negligent. She raised a punctual, time-conscious, predictable little boy. To her punctuality was a religion—it was a core part of her identity. She was German, and she was on time. This extended to all her offspring, and I, more than anyone else, would consistently let her down.
“Watch where you’re going!”
“Sorry!”
Phew! That was pretty close—nearly took out a pedestrian. How many minutes do I have left? Five? There’s the turn-off! Looks like I might make it in time after all!
As I sped up the footpath, I was momentarily distracted by an owl sculpted into the façade of a building above one of the doors—a symbol of wisdom in many cultures. It’s fierce eyes penetrating the depths of the unknown, into time, to see with clarity what needed to be known.
Bang, crash, smash, twist, roll—splat!
I launched over the handlebars and flew straight into a bush, tangled in a melee of broken branches and thorns.
Ouch!
I’d unknowingly veered off the path, hit a small rock, and gone flying into a section of garden bed and become tangled in hedging, committing several acts of floricide on the way. I could feel the owl laughing at me—that smug bastard.
“Ughhh…..” was all I could manage.
“Are you OK, Mr?” said a voice like a life rope, luring me out of my entanglement of shrubbery and humiliation.
“… must be… on time….”
“On time for what? You look like you might need to go to a doctor”
“… Doctor?… Dr. Higgenbottom! The professor!”
I snapped myself out of my bouquet of delirium and leapt out of the bushes toward the entrance to the building. I stole a quick glance at the owl—that smug bastard knew I’d get carried away. I made a mental note to take revenge on all owls.
“But what about your bike?”
I ignored it, I couldn’t be late.
I crashed through the door, still covered in twigs, leaves, and disappointment in myself, with one precious minute to spare.
I scanned the room for a good seat, but when I arrived, the lecture hall was almost completely full—such was the popularity of the man. I spotted a seat about two-thirds of the way up, off to the left. It was one of the old lecture halls with fold-out tables and nearly every surface was hardwood. He preferred these to the newer halls, what with their fibreglass wall panels and carpet flooring chosen for their sound-damping quality. He preferred the old halls, because here the speaker didn’t need a microphone—they could roam wherever they pleased, and the sound would bounce off the hardwood to all corners of the room. In the new halls, the speaker had to be either stationary in front of the microphone, or where a microphone piece and a battery pack, both of which he detested.
But maybe it was more than his dislike of technology that always brought him back to these old halls. Maybe it was nostalgia. Maybe it brought him back to a time when his life was simpler, when he was less famous and just starting out as a young professor, and wasn’t away every second weekend on a book signing or a headlining a conference. Whatever it was to him, to me it gave a feeling of regality and prestige—something that inspired scholarship and deep inquiry.
Such were the meanderings of my mind when the door was pushed open. In entered the great man, limping with his cane, his signature gait unmistakable. He wore a light brown herringbone tweed jacket and trousers, accompanied by a yellow, brown and a white madras shirt, a grey glen plaid bow tie, and tone-matching light brown loafers. One could never accuse the man of lacking taste.
He entered already midway through a sentence, as if he had been in a conversation the entire trip here and we just happened to come in halfway.
The now-overflowing lecture hall abruptly fell silent, heads locked on, eye’s shuffled with the exaggerated shuffling of the white-haired professor.
“—how many of you remember the first time you found out the truth about Christmas? Yes, from the very first time that memory machine between your ears cranked into gear, you were fed a story that, for better or worse, was meant to protect you from the harsh realities of the world. You were told that Christmas was just an obscure European holiday full of fictitious characters like Santa Claus that marketing companies exploited to sell more products. Do you remember the first day you found out this wasn’t true?”
Of course I did. How could I forget?
I was ten years old—bright-eyed and full of trust in the way things were. But when I was the last to find out that this story I’d been told, from as early as I can remember, was all a lie, I didn’t believe it at first. I couldn’t.
“What do you mean Santa is real? I thought he was created by the marketing companies…” I pleaded with the other kids.
I can still hear the taunts and jeers to this day.
“He’s such a baby—he still thinks Christmas is a marketing stunt,” they said.
I remember coming home and confronting my parents.
“Is it true?!” I said, stamping one foot into the ground, clenched fists down by my waist, staring them down with all the intimidation my ten-year-old stature could muster.
“Is what true, dear?” my mother said.
“Is Santa real?!” I demanded, tears beginning to well up in my eyes.
My parents looked at each other grimly—the moment they both knew was coming. The first time their child would feel betrayal on their account. It had to happen one day…
“Yes…” they said reluctantly, in a tone in tone of admission that sought forgiveness.
“And the marketing companies?” There was no reason to hide anything from me now. I had to grow up eventually.
“They had no part in it,” they sighed. “All Christmas advertising is now, and always has been, monopolised by the North Pole Corporation with Santa as their CEO”.
I burst out into tears.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said between sniffles, “that they have next to no income during the Christmas period?”
“Yes…” they confessed.
“And what about the shareholders?” another round of tears loaded into the chamber.
“The share price goes down considerably over the holiday period, I’m sorry to say.”
“And their dividends?” My bottom lip began to tremble.
“They are significantly reduced…” they said with genuine sadness.
“Waaaahhhhhh!”
I couldn’t handle it; nothing upset me more than low dividend yields. On top of that, everything I’d been told as a child turned upside down and inside out—and those poor marketing companies…
Who was this disrupter of market forces, destroying their bottom line? I had to know. What was it about this character that forced parents to lie to their kids? I could understand them wanting to protect the marketing companies—kids loved marketing companies; it’s all they would ever talk about at school—and to hear that they were being bullied by an immortal plutocrat would be too much to bear. But this Santa fellow—why did parents shield their children from him and say he didn’t exist? The carrot had been dangled, the curiosity tickled, and the hunger for truth kicked out of bed. I had to know.
And so, it was there, in the kitchen of our humble suburban home, that my lifelong obsession began.
I read everything I could about the man. I read books on North Pole economics, on Santa morality, on elven folklore, on reindeer sled mechanics, on medieval chimney delivery systems. I devoured it all. Nothing could satiate my appetite. I wanted no stone left unturned.
The more I read, however, the more I started to notice there were teeny-tiny holes in certain narratives—inconsistencies, barely discernible, but sure enough, they were there, inviting me deeper. What these researchers discovered was true enough—they had all the evidence. They wrote papers reviewed by their peers, and artefacts were collected. The abandoned early designs for sleds were in museums, medieval toys marked with the iconic gothic “S” for Santa were in private collections, even profit and loss statements from the North Pole Corporation over hundreds of years could be accessed in almost any public library. It was all there, well documented.
But something didn’t add up.
It was then that I began to work on my Grand Unified Theory of Christmas. Well, that’s not what I called it back then. I didn’t know what I was doing back then—I was just a kid. But fast-forward some years, and here I am, working on my dissertation for my PhD, titled The Grand Unified Theory of Christmas. Some said the title was too bold, reeking of hubris. But did Professor Higgenbottom listen to his critics when they warned him not to publish Santa: The moral high ground? Of course not! “Bold is good,” he said, and he agreed to be my mentor on the condition that I assist him in writing and publishing what would be his most revealing and controversial work yet.
My mind roller-coastered back into the present, and remembered I was meant to be taking notes—not getting lost in my dissertation. The professor had just deflected a question that was luring the lecture off course.
“Ah, we could spend a lifetime arguing about this, as I almost did. But I would like to move past these philosophies and dive headfirst into the beginning—to start our quest to understand the man, the mystery, histories most divisive figure… Santa. Was he a saint? Was he a tyrant? I will ask you all to try to be open, to reserve your modern sensibilities for now, and attempt to put yourself in this man’s shoes—in his time, in his history.
“So, without further ado, let us tiptoe down through the centuries to a little fishing village in modern-day Turkey called Patara, and learn of the crucible that forged a young boy named Nicolas into the magnate we now call Santa.”
I picked up my pen and wrote the title of the lecture series: The real story of Christmas with Professor Higgenbottom.
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