Hi, my name is Steve, and I work at the North Pole, where I’m in charge of all the electronic toys. It’s a new division, and we only started about sixty years ago. It doesn’t have the status of the wooden toy division, but anyway, that's what I do. Now all the Santa Claus fairy tales just talk about Santa, elves, and reindeer. Well, there are a fair number of big people like me. Who do you think gets stuff off the top shelf, anyway? It’s us, big people.
I said I work at the North Pole, but after 1909, when the traffic became intolerable, Dr. Cook and Matthew Peary both came close. The workshop moved to North Greenland, where we wouldn’t be disturbed as often. It was during the move that the first big people came to work, not without some conflict. Some elves still think Santa made a mistake by adding us as workers, but on the whole, we’re accepted.
Now, for the last few hundred years, Santa has been gaining weight. In the fifteen hundreds he was kind of slim and well built, but he continued to gain weight until the early nineteen-thirties, when he started wearing his red suit. I’m not sure if Haddon Sundblom got photos of Santa sneaking into houses before he made his drawings for Coke, but he was close. Mrs. Claus was gaining weight too, until the late nineteen-fifties, when she started going on a diet and exercise program.
Some of you might remember Jack Lalanne exercise programs on TV in the fifties through the eighties. Well, Mrs. Claus was an early adopter, and boy, did she change. She went from two hundred sixty pounds to one twenty-five. When I grew up, she was a babe—not at all like the public perception of her!
By the time I was twenty-five, I quit caring that she was the boss's wife. Now the problem with lusting over Mrs. Claus is that Hubbykins works from home most days. There’s only one day that I know he’ll be out of town all day. Well, it's the day that Santa is distributing toys and gifts to all the good boys and girls around the world. That’s my day to spread Christmas cheer to Mrs. Claus. I’ve read that her name is supposed to be Jessica, but that is ridiculous. It’s clear that Santa Claus and his wife are of Dutch heritage, not English or American. Anyway, Johanna told me her name herself.