Dear Children and Parents:
Today, I’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue making toys at Santa’s Workshop. Reaching this decision wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t one I made lightly, but ultimately the elves’ decision to unionise has fundamentally compromised the esprit de corps that makes it possible to run an empire that’s given me the kind of wealth that kings and queens from centuries past would have considered incomprehensible while also providing an important service to the world.
I started giving gifts to the needy in fourth century Byzantium at a time when few people believed in gift-giving. But I, and I alone with no help whatsoever, believed that an opportunity existed to build a successful workshop that would report unbiased lists of what children were naughty and what children were nice. These were stories that weren’t getting told, and because I believe people care deeply about whether children deserve happiness, I thought we could build a large and loyal audience that advertisers such as Mattel and Lego would want to reach.
A lot of what I believed would happen did, but not all of it. Today, Santa’s Workshop delivers toy to over one billion children every Christmas; we have over three billion fans across our social channels; and each month, we inspire countless people across the face of the Earth with a message of peace and goodwill towards men. But more importantly than the large numbers of letters and fans, we’ve delivered billions of toys that have informed, impacted, and inspired tens of billions of people. And in the process, I believe that I have personally left the world a better place while only doing one serious day of work a year.
But Santa’s Workshop is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure. And while we made important progress toward building Santa’s Workshop into a successful business, in the end, that progress hasn’t been sufficient to support the tremendous effort and expense needed to produce the type of toys on which the company was founded. I want to thank the children of Earth for their support and loyalty through the centuries. And I want to thank my elves for their tireless effort and dedication, except for when they demonstrated their so-called rights as workers last week, at which point it became impossible for me, an immortal magician God-king with neigh-endless wealth, to continue treating them as slave labour.
I’m hopeful that in time, someone will crack the code on a business that can support exceptional toy delivery, for I believe that bringing joy to children remains essential. However, I will be destroying all toys that were made for Christmas 2017 out of spite, and I will grind every last brick of the Workshop into a fine dust so that the elves will never be able to prove that they worked here. I am taking my toys and going home, where I will seek comfort in my lucrative business arrangement with Coca-Cola while my elves slowly freeze to death in the continually shrinking North Pole.
Sincerely,
Santa Claus
Chief Executive Officer