Santa Claus was sitting on a chair with a Christmas tree-topped thermometer sticking out of his mouth. I, meanwhile, sat beside him feeling pity for the whole world out there, waiting for Santa to deliver their gifts at night, who would wake up to find an empty tree. I had already gotten my gift, but before he could deliver all his gifts he went down with fever!

‘God! The number of times I have told this man to wear adequate clothes, that hat is hardly anything!’

“Got it!” exclaimed an old voice. I got startled at first but soon realized that it was none other than Santa, who was beaming at me. “I know who will deliver my presents”, he said with twinkling eyes. Immediately, I felt a surge of happiness rush through my veins. “Who?”  I asked without wasting a moment’s time. “You, of course!” These unexpected words made my joyous smile drop in an instant. “How do you imagine me to do all that hard work?” I said, rage pulsing through me. Santa smiled. “You have my sleigh, my reindeers, my presents, don’t you think you can do whatever I can with them?” So, I grumpily walked towards the sleigh.

As I tried to move the sleigh, the reindeers galloped into the sky with such speed that my hat flew off! “AHHHHHHHH” I shouted for help, only to realize that I was flying a thousand feet above the ground! So, I had taken off the ground, but where would I deliver the gifts? With no option left, I took out my phone and turned on the GPS, at least this would be an effective way of navigation for now. Then began the confusing process of delivering gifts to the whole world. I had only delivered 24,444 gifts when I saw the first traces of sunlight, I rushed home wailing that I had failed to do my task; that I could not deliver gifts to all the 700,000,000 people of the world. But before I had given up and told Santa that I had failed, an idea struck me. I rushed to my bookshelf and took out all my books and asked Santa to make all the characters in them alive; literally everyone, from Lord Voldemort to Hulk (I really didn’t care if someone was evil or not) and demanded them to deliver all the remaining gifts to everybody else. They dashed off in different directions and I waited and waited for a whole hour until the clock struck 6:00 AM. Santa was on the brink of crying.  ZOOOOOM! All the characters rushed back into their respective books post completing their task. I cannot even express in words how happy I was! This surely was One Merry Christmas!

// This Christmas special fictional story has been penned by 9-year-old Shubhang Chakraborty as a part of a writing task given to the kids during our weekly creative writing classes //