I was staring at one of the most famous images of Santa Claus of all time — one by Thomas Nast, from Harper’s Weekly, 1881.

The good news was that we’d found Santa. The bad news was that he was floating in a giant tube of clear fluid, seemingly unconscious. The worse news was that he was completely naked, except for a festive red hat; his clothes and his magic sack were piled neatly in a darkened corner.

The jolly old elf’s nose was red, but not from cold — rather, from the brutality of a dozen boxes of Kleenex. Mucus flowed freely down his cheeks, and mixed with tears of agony. She folded her arms, pursed her lips, and declared: “You’re not going out this week.

She sighed and stepped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Turning around, she nearly tripped over some of the help. “Man, you little bastards are everywhere, aren’t you?” she mumbled to herself.

Every muscle in his body tensed for action, adrenalin pounding through his tiny veins, he crept down the stairs, keeping to the corners (where he knew they creaked less). He peered around the bottom of the stairwell into the living room, and there he saw a lean, bearded man, clad only in a loincloth and a crown of thorns. When he bent over the Xmas tree, Tony saw that blood flowed freely from his bare hands and feet. Before the cherubic prepubescent could stop himself, the words flew out of his mouth: “You’re not Santa!

The crucified figure had not been idle. A series of elaborate twists activated a cunning mechanism; the base of the cross blew apart, revealing a winding metal spring at the base. At the same time, there was a whir of machinery, a grinding sound of metal against metal, and a series of spindly steel tubes emerged from the head and arms of the cross; and as the jolly old elf grunted and arched his back, the giant laser-mounted pogo stick heaved into the air, leaving in its wake waves of devastation, and a merry, menacing cry of “Ho-ho-ho!