The Christmas That Was Not by god must be atheist

It was a crisp winter night. The snow crackled underfoot, and the stars and the moon shone like diamonds against the black velvet of the night sky. The town was fast asleep.

Kriviryanskaya, the mayor's wife, got up to take a painkiller. She had been plagued by migraines, and the full moon, especially when it happened on Fridays, exacerbated her condition.

She went to the window of their bedroom to look at what caused an incredibly loud, booming noise, and she saw a... what? it was not a meteorite. It was not an airplane. It was nothing. It was a long-haul sled, pulled by six reindeers in the sky, surrounded by two Russian-made fighter jet planes, signalling with internationally accepted flight patterns to the six-horsepower aircraft to proceed to the nearest landing strip at hand and land. The defenseless sled slid along the night sky toward Nikita G'yureyev Airfield, the only airport in town.

Kriviryanskaya rushed back to the bed, and shook her snoring husband's shoulders: "Sasha! Sasha! Igor Nutreyevich G'evuska! Get up! Get up!" The mayor sat up, rubbing his eyes. "What is it, Kriviryanskaya Ivanovna?"

"There is an unidentified flying object being forced to land by the federal airforce, and I can identify the object."

"Go back to bed," said Igor to his wife, but that moment the telephone rang with the alarm signal. Igor picked up the phone. "Yes?" Kriviryanskaya Ivanovna watched her husband and she heard the agitated voice on the other end of the line but she could not make out the words he was saying. "Yes, I'll be down there a.s.a.p.," said the mayor, "send a limousine over, please," and he hung up the phone.

"What was that?" asked his wife.

"I'll be darned if I don't get darned," said the husband, "They did force a UFO to land. Get me my housecoat, I need to say my morning prayer."

A half hour later the limousine with the Mayor aboard, sped toward the G'yureyev Airfield. Upon arrival the ground crew directed his car into a hangar.

The mayor stepped out of the car. There he was, the sole rider of the strange aircraft: red robe, red hat, long white beard, black boots and a pot belly. Behind him, a cargo full of candy, toys, books, soccer balls, Barbie dolls, and a million other types of things, all neatly and nicely wrapped in red-white-and-green colour themed wrappers. Some had a bow and a ribbon around the packages.

The reporting officer snapped into attention, and said to the mayor, "Sir, we got him, sir!!"

"Who is he?" Asked the mayor.

"So far we did not get that out of him. He said he is Santa Claus. I doubt that that's his real name. He may be related, however, to Santa Ferenc, the Hungarian poet." The mayor, in his excitement, nonchalantly bit off the head of a desperately flapping bat he had pulled out of his front pocket. "Santa... Santa Fe, Santa Na, Santa lot of money to my son in college." He was trying out different contexts for the expression to see which would sound the most plausible explanation for someone to choose this code name. "Bring him to me," he commanded.

Santa was brought forward, with his hands in handcuffs behind his back, and screaming blue murder with his face totally red with his anger. Or maybe it was totally red anyway.

"Release me, you idiots! I'm Santa Claus! I bring gifts and toys to children at Christmas! If you don't let me go, billions of children won't get any presents this year!!"

The mayor furrowed his brows. His deep, meaningful, philosophical, dark and shaggy Russian brows. "Sir, you are under arrest for violating Gruz airspace. What were you thinking, flying into our country? Without a permit, without a prepublished flight plan, without international air signalling and communicating equipment mandatory for all air crafts, and mainly, without even an emergency signal radio transmitter?"

"Sir!! I'm effing Santa Claus! Who are you? What international open-air mental asylum did I lend in? Do you have no idea who I am? I mean, look at my clothes, look at my cargo, look at my reindeer! What other entity can fly a sled pulled by reindeer? Huh?"

"Sir, please calm down, or else I have to put a gag order down your throat. So... what intelligence are you seeking, who sent you, what technology powers your vehicle?"

"I can answer some of that," replied Santa, "the intelligence I am seeking is above 70 IQ points, which I haven't found here in anyone, including in you; no disrespect. Nobody sent me, I'm forced by tradition; and the technology I use is the power of wishful imagination."

"That's a load of machination," said the mayor. "Imagined objects can't fly."

Santa's eyes bulged out. "Wot? Are you king Suppid? Of course imaginary objects can fly. Magic carpets, for instance. Turul birds. Mythical dragons. Imagination."

"Yes, but none that anyone can detect with an instrument. For instance, with a radar or a camera."

"Well, sir, that leaves the naked eye still capable of seeing the flight of imagination," replied Santa. "Have you checked on your radar people? Did they report me buzzin' around your city?"

The mayor got taken aback a bit. "Well,... no. No radar reports." He turned to the commanding officer who arrested Santa. "Did you take photos of him, or fingerprinted him yet?"

"Yes, sir, no, sir, yes, sir!" Snapped the commanding officer into attention.

The Mayor got a bit perplexed. He thought to himself, "How do I interpret no sir, yes sir?" And then tentatively asked Santa again: "If you are imaginary, how can you move parcels that you allege you do?"

"Well... let's see. On one hand, I learned it by example of scammy adverts on the Internet. Their deliveries are done only by imagination. On the other hand, it's the work of a marketing genius. NOBODY, absolutely nobody will take me seriously, and thus I 've eliminated all potential and possible competition. I snipped competition start-ups in the bud, by proving with bank records and forensic accounting expert's audit reports, that I make no money and receive no tangible or negotiable side benefits. Other than maybe the favours by the lovely Mrs. Jones, and by the lovable Miss Elvira, and by the loving Ms. Ripplestein, and... oh, but I digress. I am not a challenge to anyone, because they take my imaginary nature as a given and something that nobody can take away from me. So... in other words, wherever I go, whichever way I fly, whatever chimney I descend down, my reputation and my essence precedes my existence. And how do I power my aircraft? Young man, if you insist, I have no choice but to tell you that imaginary things are much more powerful than real things... you can argue and prove the existence of real things, but you can't prove the non-existence of imaginary things. The pen is mightier than the sword. Communism and Hitlerism both started on simple but powerful, albeit fundamentally flawed, intellectual premises. Need I go on?"

The mayor pondered this for a minute or two, then said, "then you are saying that imagination includes physicality? Like your toys and presents are not imaginary, they are real, and yet you move them? what gives?"

"Oh, sir, that's really easy to explain. Imagination does not include physicality, but it is influenced by it, and can have an effect on it. For instance, how do you explain your sensation of pain? Your elbow hurts. What is pain? It is more than just a nervous impulse; it is not merely physical, it affects your behaviour, because you are motivated to get rid of pain, due to its profound effect on your mind, psyche, which is also imaginary. You DO things to avoid pain. You alter the physicality surrounding the pain, and thus you alter the imaginary pain. This you can see: that pain, although there is no physical connection between the sensation itself and real, physical things, affects the world's movements more than in a virtual manner. A physical thing causes physical changes. An imaginary thing causes physical changes. And physical changes cause change in imaginary states. Let me put it another way: if something happens due to something else, that something else does exist, does it not? Of course it does. If it did not exist, then it would have a zilch effect on things. So if you do something due to an imagination, such as pain, then the pain does exist, although there is nothing in the physical world that you can point at and say with confidence, "this is the physical manifestation of pain"."

"All right, all right. You exist, with your bloody reindeers and with your sled. In the imagination. Fine. But that does not exempt you from obeying the law and therefore I arrest you on the charges of all kinds of breaches of the mandatory regulations of air travel. Men, take him away."

"No, no, NO!" Shrieked Santa. "You are making a huge mistake, sir!! You take away the motivation! The joy of imagination! The wonder of tell-tale figures, who work wonders according to human's emotional-moral motivations, to reinforce the existence of a moral world order in a world where it does not exist, yet is needed!"

The mayor, having reached his capacity of thinking, put his hands over his ears, and sang aloud, "LALALALALA..." to block the voice of Santa, lest he catch the mayor on another logical loophole.

So Santa was taken to the local jail; the reindeer examined by veterinarian medical professionals, then fed and given water; the sled buried deep in the frozen Russian tundra, so deep that nobody in town would know about it, and the toys and other gifts were put in the evidence room of police vaults to await trial if necessary.

The mayor took the limousine home, where his wife was anxiously waiting. "What was it, darling?" She asked. "OH, nothing, just a complicated hoax by the engineering students, as they are wont to do things like that, and they even hired an astute philosophy professor to explain the inexplicable." He said. "Let's go back to bed."

That was on Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning a billion little kids woke up, rubbed their eyes, and ran downstairs, only to find nothing under the Christmas trees in their homes.

And the mayor got up too, rubbed his eyes, and turned to his wife in bed, who... who... who had become a black-ash skeleton overnight, with her parchment-like skin loosely hanging off her bones; the love that had been there but never in the realm of physical things, had vanished.

And Santa in his jail cell had a second helping to a shot of kontushovska.