What Happened to Santa?
Absurd Geometry Field Notes No. 55
When I was five, my older brother was standing by the window wishing out loud for some specific toy. I told him to stop asking Santa for things because Santa didn’t exist.
My mother overheard us and corrected me immediately.
“Santa does exist,” she said. “He’s just as poor as we are.”
At the time, this explanation made perfect sense to me. It accounted for the discrepancy between demand and fulfillment without requiring a total collapse of belief. For years, I accepted it as fact. But as I got older, the statement began to raise additional questions. Was Santa actually poor, or merely under-resourced? Had he retired? Had the elves unionized and brought the whole operation to a halt with impossible demands? Or had Santa simply been priced out of the North Pole altogether, forced to relocate to the South Pole after rent became unsustainable, only to forget to file a proper address-forwarding request?
I decided to investigate.
What I found was not magical.
The workshop is still operating under its original production model. Nothing has been updated. There are no Mac computers, no scanners, no automated systems, and no meaningful accommodation for changes in market demand. Each December, the letters arrive by the thousands, and the elves receive them with a level of optimism that, at this point, can only be described as negligent.
Each elf is assigned a child’s request and sent to the warehouse to fulfill it.
This is where the collapse begins.
A modern letter contains items such as PS5, Nike shoes, iPhone, Labubu, and other terms that, to the average workshop elf, appear to be either gibberish or the names of unfamiliar demons. The elves run the orders anyway. They check the shelves. They search the bins. They climb the ladders. But nothing in inventory corresponds to anything the children are asking for.
The warehouse remains heavily stocked in wooden clogs, rag dolls, carved ducks, spinning tops, whistles, and other products from a bygone era when a child could still be devastated in a simpler way.
It is not that the elves are unwilling to adapt. It is that they were trained as carpenters, doll-makers, and woodworkers. They are artisans. You cannot take a fourth-generation wooden-horse craftsman and expect him to begin manufacturing gaming consoles in the fourth quarter.
Even if retraining were possible, it would require years, enormous capital investment, and a complete restructuring of the workshop’s capabilities. The North Pole would need engineers, microchips, plastics manufacturing, software development, international shipping agreements, and a legal team.
There is also the matter of intellectual property.
Santa cannot simply begin producing unauthorized versions of branded electronics, designer shoes, and copyrighted toys based on handwritten requests from minors. The legal exposure alone would be catastrophic. It is entirely possible the workshop has remained deliberately obsolete in order to avoid litigation.
Children experience this as neglect.
What they do not see is an aging seasonal operation, frozen in time, attempting to meet contemporary desire with carved ducks.
This is why so many letters go unanswered.
This is also why, from time to time, a child still receives an orange.