Geopolitics of the North Pole

The physical environment has always strongly influenced the flow of history, and the North Pole is no exception. For one thing, the North Pole’s cold climate severely reduced the need for refrigerators, which have an unfortunate tendency to fall on top of and kill people. This allowed the Eskimo population to flourish. The money saved from not buying refrigerators could be used to buy guns, a favorite Eskimo pastime, which makes them very dangerous. Also the long winter nights at the North Pole forced the Eskimos to trade light bulbs to the South Pole for extra light trapped by the Antarctic land mass during its equally long stretches of daylight. (This also accounts for the fact that light bulbs resemble penguins.)

The North Pole’s position on the International Dateline gave it Christmas twice per year (December 11 and March 3). This is appropriate since the North Pole also has most of the world’s green crude toy ore deposits. Teddy Roosevelt once described a lump of this ore as resembling “a gang of Gumby’s trapped for three hours in a microwave oven.,” a remarkable statement since he died decades before microwaves, Gumby, or even accurate time-keeping were invented. The point here is that toy ore needs to be mined and worked. Unfortunately, the one available labor source, Eskimos, refused to work in the mines, preferring either to hibernate or shoot their guns at anything that moves or snores.

During the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s when large scale toy mining and processing was taking place, the next closest source of labor for the North Pole toy mines was Canadian Elves who had formed the last wave of migrants from Siberia to America. Central Asia was their ancestral homeland, but in the late 1100s a chain reaction of events starting in Finland displaced them. Finland, of course, was the homeland of the Clowns who, contrary to popular belief, are a highly evolved subspecies of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (i.e., me). In addition to such natural features as their large red noses, shocks of brightly colored hair (to attract mates), and big floppy feet, Clowns are also endowed with brilliant minds and superhuman strength. Despite our desire to portray them as good natured and harmless circus performers, they are extremely dangerous. In 1180 their relentless leader, Jingles the Merciless (1178-1213) forcibly unified the Clowns and launched a campaign of conquest unparalleled in both its brutality and physical comedy. Using such unspeakable weapons as seltzer bottles loaded with Greek fire similar to our modern napalm), and catapults firing giant cyanide cream pies, the Clowns carved out a savage empire stretching from Finland to Vladivostok. The Empire of the Bozos (from the clown word meaning “pie throwing maniacs” even handed Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde a humiliating defeat. The Mongols in turn crashed into the Elves, half of whom fled into Siberia, the other half to North America, where they lived peacefully until the 1800s.

Elves were well suited to toy mining for several reasons. They don’t eat much. They are small and thus easy to push around. And they have big ears that let them hear any stalking killer penguins, a particularly large and vicious type of penguin that inhabits caves, and toy mineshafts. All that was needed was someone to lead the Eskimos in raids to capture the Elves. That someone was St. Nicholas (AKA Santa Claus).