From the Desk of Mr. E. Jargon

                                                                                   Mr. E. Jargon
                                                                    Jargon, Nabbem and Run
                                                                                           Unit 12
                                                                              24 Currency Way
                                                                                   North London
Mr. S. Claus
Santa's Grotto
The North Pole
NP2 5DE

03/12/2007

Dear Mr. Claus,

I am happy to open this letter with good news.  My PA and I have been reading the letters of the past two hundred years that you have collected for me, and I am pleased to confirm that they will be useful at trial.  We have here clear proof that millions of children invite you into their homes each year; no jury on earth would convict you of breaking and entering with this evidence.  I think we should refer heavily to the letter from Miss Annabelle Happenstance, dated November 5th 1922, which states: ‘I hope you enjoyed the mince pies that I left for you on the kitchen table.’  Frankly, my opinion has always been that this charge was never going to stand up anyway.

The charges of paedophilia, I am sorry to inform you, have been presenting more difficulty.  My PA has been scouring the globe for character witnesses, and I am afraid that your suggestion of using older people who received gifts from you as children is not really workable.  Emphasising the fact of you having travelled to malls and shopping centres worldwide, and taken children onto your lap in exchange for gifts for the better part of the twentieth century, would be counter-productive to your case.

The police are being very vague about when they plan to dissect your laptop.  They say they are waiting for an expert to become available; apparently it will be ‘in a day or two’.  If you were being truthful when you told me that you had not downloaded any incriminating images, that will of course work in our favour, but I am still concerned about the ‘list’ you mentioned.  As you know, every one of your employees (I cannot stress enough that it is politically incorrect to call them ‘elves’ - please refrain from doing so) has agreed to attest to what you say you mean by ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’; but even if your assertion proves to be correct I am afraid the prosecution can still use it.  However honourable your intentions, it is nonetheless clear that you have been observing the behaviour of the children of the world since December 26th of last year at the very latest.

At this I must pause, and urge you not to be overly alarmed by the content of this letter.  As your solicitor, it is my job to prepare for the worst, but we still have two weeks before your trial and I have not given up hoping for the best.  There is potentially some more good news.  In spite of the evidence against you, my PA has been able to find some possible character witnesses, and I might just be able to get you off most of the paedophilia charges.

We did have a little trouble in tracking down Babushka, but my PA flew out to Russia at the weekend and - after a long search - found her wandering in a forest in the middle of nowhere.  She seemed only too happy to take a little time off in order to appear as a witness.  She tells me that you and she discussed your plans for spreading happiness amongst children at Christmas time, and swears that you never expressed any intention of behaving inappropriately towards them.  No one will believe that Babushka would break her word on the Bible, as she is clearly a devoted Christian woman, having spent over two thousand years wandering the Russian landscape in search of the baby Jesus (I hadn’t the heart to tell her that she was a long way off in terms of both time and space).  The prosecution may ask her why, if she loves Jesus so much, she gives away all the presents she has for him to other children; but I shall prepare her for that distinct possibility.

I met with Ms. Babushka this morning, at which time I had my PA make a few phone calls and try to get hold of one of your fellow saints to act as a character witness.  The news is good; she got hold of none other than St. Peter, who has said that he admires you greatly and will be ‘only too pleased to let the court know the altruistic qualities it takes to become a saint’.  He is confident of convincing them that no man harbouring desires to engage in sexual activity with children would have been awarded sainthood.

At the very least, I am hopeful that these witnesses’ testimonies will help us to avoid a prison sentence.  However, I am not hopeful of you keeping your job.  For a little extra tacked onto the end of my fee I am prepared to push for your employment to continue, but it would be unrealistic to rate your chances at more than about forty percent.  I know that this will anger you, and I hope that you will have calmed down by our next meeting.  You need to remember that I am trying to help you avoid a prison sentence; losing your job was always, to be frank, something of a best case scenario.

In her spare time, my PA has been travelling around the world with a petition to keep you in your current position.  So far we have only just over four million signatures, which may sound like a lot, but if you think of the population of the entire world you will realise that this is next to nothing - and to be perfectly honest, about half of the signatories will be dead anyway by the time your trial commences.  Most of them are very old.  They remember you with fondness, and my PA informs me that some of them wept mournful tears for the days when they would hang up their stockings, and you would leave them an apple in the toe and an orange in the heel (or some such mawkish twaddle).  This gave me the idea of getting doctors and the BBC involved, as they are currently crusading so relentlessly against childhood obesity, and I have even asked my PA to get in touch with whichever member of the government decided that sweets and chocolate should no longer be advertised during children’s television (as is the case in the UK; I do not know whether you heard the sad news of the demise of the after-school Children’s ITV show, which is no longer able to fund itself due to this loss of advertising).

My PA is on the phone to famously interfering TV chef Jamie Oliver as I type, but I would urge you not to hold out too much hope on this.  My spies inform me that the prosecution have a counter-petition, which is rumoured to hold upwards of three billion signatures already.  What is worse, the signatories are all children and therefore not nearly dead, as are most of our supporters - and of course they are the very people whose futures this issue will affect.

An opinion poll is currently circulating the internet, and countless children have been lured to click on it with the promise of a free ringtone (and an MP3 player to a few very lucky winners).  Most of these youngsters agree that the gifts you offer at Christmas are ‘boring’ and/or ‘naff’, as they tend to require some effort of imagination and an attention span of longer than three minutes.  There is also said to be some confusion among children as to how your toys connect to their computers, and a great deal of bafflement when they discover that they in fact do not.  The prosecution will suggest that your merchandise is outdated and does not appeal to modern-day children, and therefore your contract should be terminated.  Your replacement is already being discussed among officials; popular candidates include Mattel, Nintendo, Cartoon Network and Bill Gates.

We shall discuss these matters, along with any concerns you may have, when we meet this Friday.  In the meantime, I suggest that you think about what you will say to the prosecution when you are asked why you deem it necessary to take children onto your lap in order to hear what they want for Christmas.  You will inevitably be asked this; it is the first thing I would ask you if I were on the prosecution.  I suggest that you promise to adapt your services for the twenty-first century, in the unlikely event of your being allowed to continue, and offer in future to take the children’s orders via intercom through bullet-proof glass.  You must be seen to reach the conclusion that you only need to hear the child’s wishes, and that physical contact is unnecessary.

If you have any queries before our next meeting, please contact my PA on extension 2512.

Yours sincerely,


pp. Noelle Dogsbody


Ebenezer Jargon (solicitor)