The other elves and I used to speculate about what went wrong with Santa Claus. Jolly Ol' St. Nick must have spent one too many years staring at the blinding snow or living through those long interminable stretches of night and day that you get at the north Pole. Whatever it was that drove him over the edge, nothing could have been so horrible as to prompt the depravity he eventually exhibited.

The first time we saw an indication of the madness was when Santa told us we would be getting new work clothes. We were excited because we had been laboring in the same clothes for maybe one or two hundred years. When the giant crates arrived, all the elves gathered in the main workshop. Santa opened the crates with a crowbar and out spilled all manner of, what I later learned was, S&M/B&D clothing. Rubber outfits with strategic areas cut out. Leather chaps and underwear. Things with chains on them. Masks with zippered mouth openings. We gaped in shock then laughed nervously. Santa rarely made jokes but what else this could be?

He spoke at length about how hard we worked and how he wanted to reward us. He claimed that we would be much more comfortable and these clothes would be "less constricting." I did not know what to think. Santa had been a father and a mentor to all the elves and our lives at the North Pole, practically living in that famed workshop, were rather sheltered. Santa had never led us astray so if he said that this is what we should be wearing we could not think but to go along with him.

The subsequent few weeks were awkward and embarrassing but we elves are a maleable people. We soon acclimated to the new clothing and resumed our toy making. With the shop better heated, I even grew to enjoy the feel of leather and rubber against my skin.

About six months after the new "uniforms," Santa began to discipline the elves much more harshly than he had in the past. First it was a vicious verbal berating whenever we did something wrong and Santa always found something wrong. They were scathing horrible experiences by which Santa systematically broke our will and our desire to question his decisions. Then came the whippings and electric shocks with cattle prods and battery clamps but by that time we were so overwhelmed we could offer no resistance in any form.

He took to randomly torturing the reindeer by shocking their antlers. He made the elves tie them down with massive chains and poke at them with pool cues.

Our work deteriorated and our output of toys diminished. Luckily, Santa had long since stopped caring about that. He traipsed in one day with as he said "a new bold plan." We were to create a line of Christmas sex toys.

Saint Nick had a cocaine habit. It got so bad he would fly down to Miami weekly to pick up a kilo. The reindeer were sick and haggard from constant flight and Santa kept Blitzen doped up on heroin for no apparent reason. Dancer died of heat stroke while waiting in the pounding Miami sun for Santa to complete his transactions. Santa just unhitched the corpse and flew back home leaving Dancer's body to rot on the street.

To come down from the cocaine high, Santa would load up five or six elves and fly off to a strip club where he would cry into his beer and a stripper's naked behind about the cruel fate life had thrust on him. "Nothing is fair," he would scream out. Then he would shove another twenty into the dancer's crotch and down another bottle.

He would make us drink beer until we would vomit by threatening to leave us in what godforsaken hellhole he had chosen to spend the day carousing. A couple of us tried to escape on these trips but we were always caught by that magical man. And when we were caught, the nightmare had just begun. Weeks alone in a pitch black room with only the occasional scraps of food tossed into the cell through a hole in the ceiling was the best you could hope for.

I spent an entire month in one of those pits. When I got out, Santa was so pleasant his request that I be in one of his Christmas pornos with Mrs. Claus seemed almost normal. All of the elves knew that as long as he was directing his movies he would be calm. That calm was a heaven sent time of peace. I eagerly accepted.

Santa directed the movies clad only in a red leather g-string that cut under his massive belly, a pair of black thigh-high boots, and a beret. He would walk around screaming into a megaphone although the room was only 20 feet on each side. When he was filming we were required to call him "Woody Allen of the North Pole" under pain of unbearable punishment. The last film Santa made was an ode to Bananas with the now famous scene of thirty-two naked elves heaped up in a giant mass, dressed as revolutionaries, raping the captured dictator to death.

Life at the workshop went from horrible to worse. Santa stopped any pretext of being a part of Christmas but he would not let us stop constructing the Christmas sex toys. Giant mounds of the devices were soon scattered all over the frozen wastes surrounding the shop. They grew and grew over the years until satellite imagery regularly mapped them as small hills.

My most vivid experience of that time is when the evil, drugged, sex crazed Santa partied with Michael Jackson and a bevy of cancer ridden nine year old boys. Santa had invited Jackson and his little friends to the workshop to rest in his newly constructed "playroom." No one to this day knows what horrors befell those children.

One particularly bad night Santa called the entire population of the workshop into the barn that housed the reindeer. He spoke at length about how television was destroying civilization while drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels. His soliloquy rambled from topic to topic --- the European Monetary Union, the game of squash, why he liked Cathy Lee Gifford, Oreos.

Finally he wound down. We stood silently, grateful we would be able to leave soon. Suddenly, he called Rudolph over. It was, we thought, to be just another random act of degradation. Rudolph went to him and Santa order the reindeer to stand still no matter what happened. Then Santa removed a huge battle axe from beneath his cloak. The punishment for disobeying was to be severe he exclaimed in his loud guttural voice.

The jolly fat man walked in front of the terrified reindeer with the glowing nose. He removed his cloak leaving the axe in his right hand. He turned around and dropped his pants. Then Santa sat on Rudolph's bright red beaming nose. Santa Claus called to his wife to look into his mouth and tell him if she could see any light. This is when Prancer snapped. The enraged reindeer lunged at the squatting epitome of Christmas and attempted to gore him with his sharp antlers. But the psychotic Santa was too quick. He cut Prancer down with one blow of the battle axe.

All the other reindeer rushed Santa in a desperate act of revenge, but they were doomed. The half naked man swung the axe furiously and in what seemed like an instant it was all over. There were reindeer parts scattered throughout the barn. Blood covered the walls and soaked the floor. As punishment for what he perceived to be mass treason he fed us nothing but uncooked maggot covered reindeer meat for weeks.

Santa had taken to sitting in a green vinyl recliner watching television for days on end. He grew his hair out into dreadlocks and topped his head with a large black knit cap adorned with yellow, green and red stripes. His beard was a sooty grey spotted with chunk of decaying food. His unwashed clothes reeked of alcohol, feces, and vomit.

Consuming handfuls of Prozac like they were M&M's was his favorite pastime and he would do this until his heart burst. He would chuckle a bit then grab another forty pills and a bottle of beer. Such piddling problems did him no physical harm being the magical nearly immortal creature he was.

We knew the only escape from this rung of hell was to utterly destroy the insane Santa. The problem was: how? A being that can devour pickle barrels full of cocaine and heroin laced with LSD and walk away is a formidable foe. No traditional attack would work. What we needed was a miracle. What we got was a high yield nuclear weapon smuggled out of Kazakhstan by the Russian mafia.