PHNARR! PHNARR! PHNARRRRR!

When the Wish Machine malfunctioned for the thirtieth time that morning, honorary Elf ‘Roy’ Romero let out a weary, prolonged moan, and began to bang his head violently against the steel conveyer.

Ever since he had been rotated onto Gift Production from the comparatively serene Behaviour Profiling department, he had been plagued with problems. From the outset the Wish Machine seemed intent on working against him, jamming at every opportunity, so that he’d had to call Engineering down three times for E.I.M. (Emergency Investigative Maintenance). It wouldn’t be so bad if the darned contraption ran on anything other than magic, but noooooo – can’t have any of that nasty pollution hanging about at the North Pole, so magic it is. It took three heaped scoops of Rehabilitated Anti-Gremlins to be shovelled into the service hatch on the side of the Wish Machine, to unclog the jam. An hour of downtime later, two surviving Anti-Gremlins clawed their way, retching, from the guts of the machine, amid an enormous cloud of sulphurous smoke and with an extra set of genitalia each.

That’s the thing with magic. Tricky, unpredictable stuff.

So you can imagine Roy’s exasperation when the Wish Machine threw up yet another present jam, to the sound of a large burlap sack containing a few thousand terrified Anti-Gremlins thumping its way across the factory floor, towards the nearest exit.

It could only be Christmas time…again.

‘Okay, everybody. Take five!’ roared a stooped, anomalously tall Elf called Sir Manfred, the Floor Supervisor, who strutted constantly along the aisle between Gift Production and Ribbon Tying. He paused, mid-strut, at the Wish Machine, where Roy tried feverishly to avoid his eye. Sir Manfred scowled at the half-filled hopper at the end of the Wish Machine, and heatedly scratched something down on a clipboard which he jammed back under his arm.

‘Never send a Brownie to do an Elf’s job,’ he muttered, before strutting off like the world’s most bad-tempered, and outrageously attired turkey.

Roy killed the power to the machine and moaned again. It was hard enough for a Brownie such as Roy to live up to the expectations of an Elf, and harder still to work in the manufacturing hub that was Toyland amongst the many thousand other true elves who were also trying to prove themselves. Now he could expect to be downsized to something as mundane as Battery Insertion, or even worse, Stable Maintenance. And according to Factory Floor legend, that Reindeer stink NEVER comes off. Individually, each reindeer wasn’t so bad, but as a whole the five Donner’s, three Vixen’s, THIRTEEN Dasher’s, four Blitzen’s, eight Comet’s, seven Cupid’s, six Dancer’s and a pair of Prancer’s…not to mention the uniquely gifted Rudolf…the whole herd should have realistically been banned under the Geneva Convention.

But that’s nothing compared to the ‘other one’. Reindeer number fifty. The one that was never mentioned in any of the stories or songs or featured on any Christmas card or internet gag site.

I’m talking, of course, about ‘Dave’.

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