Santa on Vacation
McClanes Save Christmas
Santa & Mrs. Claus rescued from hostage crisis
Santa and Mrs. Claus were enjoying the end of their summer vacation this year in Florida. They were renting a bungalow in Miami and went to see the last summer movie at the Kaseya Center, Top Gun, Maverick. They had no idea that their fun outing was going to be disrupted by eco-terrorists.
Santa said, “We arrived early to get our seats and I went to the refreshment stands to see if I could find something sweet to eat. That was when the naughty young people struck. They disabled power to the entire arena and booby trapped the entrances so no one could go in or out. Everyone thought they were just making a political statement by trying to hold the arena’s guests hostage.”
Local 10 news reporter Bill Crockett interviewed some of the other eye witnesses at the arena, including the famous John McClane who stopped terrorists at Nakatomi Plaza in 1988. Crocket asked, “Did you know right away?
McClane replied, “I was minding my own business, see? I retired from the NYPD a few years ago and moved to Miami to get away from my old cop life. Move to Florida, they said. Get some peace and quiet, they said. And that’s just what I was doing.
“My grandson and I came to see Maverick. Frank was going home to New York at the end of the summer. We were waiting in line for sodas, and I saw a couple of those green haired freaks and just knew they were up to no good.”
Mrs. Claus described the chaos in the stands. “The leader, a young woman, gave a crazy speech about how they were going to save the world from the rest of us, and said if anyone tried to rescue us they would detonate bombs wired beneath the floor.”
Crockett tracked down Frank Farrell (John McClane’s grandson) to get the rest of the scoop. Farrell said, “I followed the women through the service tunnel. I recognized their ring leader from YouTube. Big influencer. Eleanora Gruber was giving orders about selling some kind of bioweapon database they had stolen. When Grandpa turned up, we followed them to the docks. Grandpa said he should have known it was another Gruber. Things didn’t work out too well for them. What can I say? We’re the McClane family.”
When the sale went sideways, Eleanora tried to use her remote detonator, but something went wrong, and she exploded along with her boat in the Miami harbor. Police later discovered that she had stolen the database from a love struck computer specialist from Langley, Virginia.
As Santa and Mrs. Claus were packing up their sleigh for home, Santa said, “The McClanes are definitely on the nice list this year. They saved Christmas! Yippee-Ki-Yay and Merry Christmas!”
Letter Bot Returned to Lab
The Letter Response Team at Santa’s Workshop is scrambling to resend several hundred letters to children who wrote Santa with their Christmas wish lists.
“We received a higher volume of correspondence than normal this year,” explained Gilbert Fairylight. “We decided to use one of these new conversational AI bots. ElfTech designed one for the workshop called HollAI.
Fairylight explained that everything went well in testing. “The first one hundred letters looked great, so we set up the automated mailer. We left to get cocoa and cupcakes while the AI worked on the next batch of letters.”
“When we came back, we found that HollAI had mailed several hundred children. We read the letter it was currently working on and discovered that it was promising everyone coal for Christmas! It didn’t matter what the children had written or if they were on the nice list.”
The Letter Response Team used Elf Magic to recall all of the erroneous letters. “It could have been a disaster,” said Fairylight. “We ended up working double time to rewrite the responses the old fashioned way. In cursive with Elf fountain pens.”
