For centuries, Santa kept a journal.
This wasn’t Santa’s Nice and Naughty List.
He left that on his desk so elves who handled logistics could plan routes and shipping manifests.
No, this was Santa’s deeper thoughts, about life, everything else.
Things he’d done that never made the Rankin Bass holiday specials.
Famous people he’d met, and the ones he’d fucked.
Or done drugs with.
Santa wrote the book in code, one he’d never shared with anyone else.
Not even Mrs. Claus.
But every now and then, he’d forget, and the nosy elves would gossip along the production lines for weeks.
Author: R.
The Immortal Snowman
Frosty The Snowman was a happy soul.
Every Winter, he’d come down from the North Pole to visit.
He’d go to the Christmas pageant, year after year.
As the kids got older, they went off to college, or found jobs in town, and some settled down with families of their own.
One after another, generation after generation, they died.
Over time, Frosty’s face became lined with icy tracks from all of the tears.
Frosty The Eternally Sad, they came to call him.
He took off his hat, a kid smoothed out his face, and put it back on his head.
Frosty’s Horror
At the end of Winter, Frosty the Snowman usually went to the North Pole to stay with Santa.
But one year, he asked if he could stay.
“Yeah, we’ve got a freezer warehouse,” said the local grocery distributor. “It’ll let you see what happens around here.”
Frosty agreed, and on the first day of Spring, when he could feel himself sweating, he moved in.
The hanging sides of beef filled Frosty with horror.
But it was much too late to go North.
And despite moving to a frozen novelty display case at the grocery, he never sang or danced again.
Frosty the Pissman
Frosty the Snowman was made in his creator’s image.
Two arms, two legs, a head with two eyes and a nose and mouth.
Frosty wondered what would happen if the kids were to build him differently.
Three eyes? Rusty nails in his mouth as teeth?
Tentacles for arms… Frosty the Octopusman!
A giant, a woman, a dinosaur… the possibilities were endless!
Frosty sculpted some concepts and showed the kids.
“I poured some Mountain Dew soda on this one to stain it yellow, but if you all were to piss on me…”
The town council ordered Frosty to leave at once.
Frosty stares into the abyss
If you’ve never experienced the Aurora Borealis, the first time you do, you will fill with wonder and amazement.
Then the second time… third time… that sense of magic fades.
And you grow to resent your past self for its infantile amusement.
“Any fleeting joy you experience is just the endless horror taking a moment to catch its breath and come up with something new and worse,” said Frosty the Snowman.
Rudolf the Red-Nose Reindeer blinked, and he looked away from the light show in the sky.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong, Frosty?”
“Nothing,” lied Frosty. “Sure is pretty, though.”
Weekly Challenge #660 – Polar
Welcome to the 100 Word Stories podcast at oneadayuntilthedayidie.com.
This is the Weekly Challenge, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.
We’ve got stories by:
LIZZIE
“A polar front is approaching…” and I didn’t hear anything else.
Nowadays, it’s either too cold or too hot, too windy, too stormy, too something, too whatever.
The polar front is just another weather (aka stressful) event that comes for a visit to this quiet little country in the South of Europe.
The weather website mentions temperatures of 15C (that is 59F).
I think that’s OK. 15 degrees is not that polar.
Now that I think of it… if it starts to snow here, I’ll have to write something else about how silly I was for believing the Internet.
RICHARD
Attraction
They say opposites attract. I’m not so sure.
When I met my wife, we had plenty in common: Similar musical tastes, a shared passion for the same kinds of movies, and a range of interests we jointly pursued.
Now, according to her, we’ve somehow become polar opposites.
She’s an angel – I’m the devil incarnate. She’s always right – I’m always in the wrong. Her needs are paramount – mine, unimportant. And all her family and friends are wonderful, special people – mine are a bunch of losers and reprobates.
But I’ve learned one thing…
Opposites certainly do not attract!
SERENDIPIDY
I fed him to the polar
JERRY
Johnny looked out the window of his bedroom.
Across the snow covered yards.
Across the snow covered field.
Across the line of leafless trees with snow outlining their branches.
It was after midnight but something far away had awakened him.
The iron tracks at the railroad crossing stretched north past the horizon.
To the south a distant light wavered coming nearer.
It was a powerful black engine with white steam poring into the sky above it.
The passenger cars followed behind.
Johnny smiled as he lifted the window and edged through to the ground below.
It was the Polar Express.
TOM
Home From the Hill
The polar coordinates showed he was high and outside. Ben executed multiple thruster corrections. A pulsing blue vector “X” nudged in line with a pulsing red vector “X”. The high pitched response speaker cut off, which made deep thought a bit easier. Ben feed the new polar coordinates in to his right input panel. A green X appear on his heads up. “Not my favorite mode of descent,” he mused to ships board computer. “Like you had an opinion, monkey boy.” A tongue of flame set the landing pad a glow. “Me nail banana” hooted Ben. “Not impressed.” chided Sexy.
JON
Words
By
Jon DeCles
It’s easy to get obsessed with things you don’t understand. Rond got obsessed with the word polar. Thought at first that bipolar disorder meant having too much negative and positive energy at the same time. Sat still for almost a month, doing absolutely nothing. They took it for meditation, which it might have been.
Found out the Earth had a north and a south pole and booked a tour of Antartica, then headed north. The Inuit talked about polar bears, but Rond heard bare instead of bear, got confused about magnetic and geographic and was found meditating, polar and bare.
NORVAL JOE
Billbert scratched his head. “Are you telling me that you and Mom have superpowers?”His father blushed. “Well, actually, just your mother. Not me. I married into the family.
PLANET Z
Fierce winds ripped across the endless snow and ice.
Listen to the windmill generators creak as they power the station.
You can look out the window, but you won’t see anything.
The night never ends in June… it will be months before the sun rises again over the South Pole.
We walk through tunnels from one insulated hut to another, checking readings and conducting experiments and analysing samples.
At night… well, during the evenings, we cook dinner and play cards.
And no hiding any aces up your sleeve, either.
Cheating gets you one minute outside, where it’s a hundred below.
Goodwill to not all men
The Smith Family was poor.
Not every-kid-has-a-cell-phone-and-gold-teeth bullshit poor you hear of, but real poor.
So poor, at Christmas, the oldest kid would get the new clothes, and then gift their stuff to the next-eldest, and so on.
“We may be poor, but we’re proud folk,” said Father. “No child of mine begs from that Goodwill.”
So, on it went, one to another.
The baby of the family always got worn-out rags.
And, eventually, cholera.
When the baby died, they buried him naked in the backyard.
“Just in case another comes along,” said Father, patting the dirt with his shovel.
Santa’s Sweatshop
“How can it be a sweatshop at the North Pole?” yelled Santa. “It’s fucking cold up here! Too cold to sweat!”
Which was true. Santa hadn’t bought coal for the furnace for a century.
The elves bundled up in blankets as they worked the assembly lines.
If they didn’t lose their fingers to frostbite, they lost them to bandsaws or sanders.
The maimed were sent over to the infirmary.
Which was nothing more than a shack to sort out who was dying and who could work again.
The dead, outside, buried by snowdrifts, their corpses picked at by starving rats.
Look the same
Santa’s elves all look the same.
They’re clones, grown in birth tanks in a lab under Santa’s workshops.
They’re poured out, dried off, injected with memory-rich protein bases, and sent through automated speed-training to learn the skills necessary to make toys.
When they’re ready, they join the assembly lines to make toys.
There’s always openings available, because clones only last a few years.
Eventually they wear out, or get injured or maimed, and they’re harvested for their memories, and pulped into a nutrient fluid.
Which is then piped to the birth tanks, where a new batch of elves are growing.
Itchy Sweaters
When I was young, I remember getting “practical” presents for the holidays, like socks and underwear and sweaters.
The worst sweaters ever.
Not like the soft, warm, and comfortable sweaters other people had.
These were itchy and uncomfortable and didn’t keep me warm at all.
“But it looks so good on you,” my mother said.
“I feel fucking itchy and cold,” I said. “I’m a person, not your fucking dressup doll.”
She sent me to my room without dinner.
I climbed out the window, went to the back patio, and set the sweater on fire.
The fire kept me warm.