My Girlfriend is Santa Claus & Together We Must Stop the Christmas Apocalypse Based on a True Story

Among alcoholics, floozies, and degenerate authors of young adult harem genre fiction, waking in unfamiliar, subterranean places is quite common— just another average Tuesday, really. But to a friendless, kissless, handholdless, teenage incel like Peter, regaining consciousness in a mysterious place was a new and frightening experience. Shopping mall sounds swirled together in a whirlwind of voices and Christmas music. All was distant and indistinguishable.

When he opened his eyes he found, hovering over him, a beauteous beauty— with a complexion mimicking the purity of the purest alabaster— and hair so lush and black the deepest hour of midnight would envy her luxurious ponytail— and there was no detail upon her face that was not a work of art— so that even her diminutive white ears and their perfect conch-like interior was a thing of beauty— charged with raw eroticism. Her inhumanly blue, glacier ice eyes focused intently down upon Peter, and slowly he realized his throbbing head rested in her lap, and his spine rested on concrete in a dark hallway.

The magic of this romantic moment was interrupted with dread, as he realized he was back in the shopping mall. Her warm hands pressed against his head like a loving helmet, and kept him from sitting up. He instinctively put his hand over hers to remove them, but instead held them in place.

“Holy peppermint sticks, are you alright?”

“Wha happun?”

“You got run over by Zazhizuzezo.”

“Huh?”

“She was trying to rescue you, but she doesn’t know her own strength.”

“Whaa...?”

“In the woods. Zazhizuzezo. You screamed like a little girl when she charged at you.”

“Zazhi...?”

“She’s my reindeer. Thoroughbred, first class.” She brushed aside some of Peter’s hair and when he saw her palm it was red with blood.

“Why is there blood?”

“Because you’re bleeding,” she said. “Right here.” She touched his forehead and Peter felt his skull cave in like an eggshell pierced with an icepick. He screamed and clasped his hand over the wound. At least, that’s what a concussion feels like to a great big baby like Peter.

“Oh, does that hurt?”

“Yes!” he hissed.

Peter sat up and held onto his head as if it might twist off. They were in the back rooms of the mall where deliveries were made to stores. A dingy and dimly lit concrete hallway for freight elevators, surplus inventory, and escaping deranged customers. Kevin had shown him the place once before. Although this place felt oddly off, like wandering into the wrong bathroom where everything was reversed. He could hear hundreds of voices just on the other side of the wall.

“What’s your name?”

“Well, I have many, but you can call me Santa Claus.”

Peter looked up at her, and she was indeed dressed up as Santa, but she was young and slender as a nutcracker soldier, and lacking the big white beard— as young girls often lack. Her uniform was not a cheap Spencer’s Gifts costume for nymphomaniacs, but elaborate and textured like something out of a historic museum. Her red velvet frock coat was embroidered with golden holly and specifically tailored to hug her body. Copper buttons glistened like jingle bells. Her black riding boots appeared genuine. Perhaps she didn’t work at the mall and was just a die-hard cosplayer.

“Yeah... okay, sure.”

“Okay?” she repeated.

“Sure. Whatever.”

“Aren’t you happy to see me, Peter?”

His headache returned. He clasped a hand over his ear as though his brains were leaking out.

“How do you know my name?”

“Really?” She smiled. “Come on.”

“Are you from my school?”

She made a face like she was amused by his stupidity and said, “No.”

“You’re not my Tindr date, are you?”

“No. She ghosted you. I’m Santa Claus, from the North Pole.”

“You’re pretty thin for Santa Claus.”

“The stories of my weight have been greatly exaggerated, but thank you for noticing.”

“And you’re also a girl.”

“Mm hm. Always have been.”

Peter jolted out of his concussion— although, that’s not quite how concussions work— his brain was still shaken as boba tea, but now adrenaline sharpened his mushy mind. The lap pillow, the Santa role play, the general niceties and pleasantries— the paranoia within him wondered why any girl at all would treat him like this? It was truly strange and bizarre! And weird! There was surely an ulterior motive at play!

“You’re stalling until the police arrive!” Peter pointed an accusatory finger at the Santa girl. “Well you can’t hold me here, you filthy cosplayer! Citizen’s arrests only account for felonies!”

“It’s okay, Peter. You’re over 3,000 miles away from mall security now.”

“Sure. Whatever you say, cosplay girl.”

He stood up and his legs felt stiff with cold. The corridor spun one way, and his brain sloshed around in his skull the opposite way. He planted a hand on the wall to stop himself from falling over. Santa followed after, laying a gloved hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t believe I’m Santa Claus?”

“Are you serious?”

“I can prove it,” she said. “I know what you want for Christmas.”

Peter laughed. He wondered what stupid video game or electronic she would try to cold read from his mind. “Well then you know that I don’t want anything for Christmas.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “There is something you want for Christmas... but you’ve never told anyone about it. Because it’s not something that can be bought. Something no one in your family can give you. It’s something you’ve wanted your whole life. Every day you look for it. You go to bed every night hoping for it. And each passing year without it you feel emptier and emptier.”

She had circled round it again and again with her words, each sentence getting closer. Peter could feel what she was going to say, and waited for her to say it:

“A girlfriend.”

“Yeah, and what are you gonna do? Stick one under the tree for me? Or maybe tell me to be myself. That one day someone will realize what a great guy I am, and I just have to wait another five or ten or twenty years? Just be single into my twenties and hope I get lucky? Get the fuck away from me.”

She grabbed his wrist and arrested him. He tried to shake it free but she gripped tight. With the speed of a kung-fu master she grabbed his jacket collar and held him face to face.

“Peter, for goodness sake, listen to me. We don’t have time to make you believe in what’s right in front of you if it’s going to take this long. You are a naughty, stupid, cruel boy, and you’re the only one who can stop the Christmas Apocalypse. It’s coming, and when it hits the North Pole wont be the only casualty. You are going to help us, Peter. You’re going to do it because it’s the nice thing to do.”

Peter— not believing a single word— waiting for the punchline— saw tears glistening in her eerily blue eyes, and then things made sense.

“Oh...” Peter said. “So you’re a crazy person.”

Santa pulled her black ponytail over her shoulder in contemplation, then brushed it back behind her. “Peter, I...”

But Peter was gone. Away to the exit, he flew like a flash, dashed down a dark hallway and leapt over some trash. Santa pulled out her SCR-536— a military grade walkie-talkie the size of a milk carton and shouted, “Security! He’s running!” Into the door he plowed, expecting to be spat out into a department store or the plaza itself, but beyond it was an entirely new realm. No stores or shoppers at all, but a fantastical factory built on dreams.

Colossal candy colored machinery chugged away with whimsical Willy Wonka bullshit in every corner. Perfectly polished and spotless, conveyor belts laden with iPhones, Nintendos, and Asus gaming laptops disappeared into wrapping machines and came out bow adorned in metallic gift-wrap. He ran past steam engines, Stirling engines, engines the size of freight trains painted like candy canes, and encountered strange girls dressed up in translucent painter suits, their faces covered with respirators and goggles, wielding airbrushes. Peter vaulted over a conveyor belt as the deranged Santa girl followed in pursuit, shouting “Lockdown! Lockdown!”

And somewhere a big red button must have been smashed, because the factory flooded with emergency lights and the crying ostinato of a klaxon. Now in a warehouse, Peter dodged strangely festive forklifts wrapped in Christmas lights, piloted by tall and slender blonde girls with pointy ears. An elf turned sharply to avoid him, jack-kniving, and her pallet carrying a metric ton of cocoa powder spilled free. The air exploded with clouds with chocolate dust. Covered in cocoa, Peter wiped the culturally-insensitive chocolate mask from his face, and watched in horror as blast doors of solid chrome steel lowered over the exits, sealing him inside this Rube Goldberg hell.

Caught in a trap, nowhere to go, he found a ladder heading up and frantically climbed it. Below him several blonde elves pursued with Santa Claus not far behind. He ran down a trembling catwalk. Gawking girls far below pointed at him, only to realize that he couldn’t get down without falling into captivity. So he leapt to a window, accompanied by a symphony of gasps, and broke the frosted glass and climbed outside into the frigid winds.

The winter sky glistened with spectral curtains of blue and green like the tails of a spectacular phantom stretching to a world beyond. Amazed as he was, Peter’s heart froze with a fear that he was in fact very, very far from home, and seeing no way down the building, he scrambled up onto the roof and towards a trio of smokestacks. A dead end. There was truly nowhere else to go.

Surely his cell phone would confirm his whereabouts! He smashed the recalibrate button and felt his mind stretch like taffy as his country whisked away. North, north, north the cursor flung, and as the GPS zoomed in on the Earth’s arctic bald spot, Peter muttered to himself, “No, no, no, no, no, no no…” with increasing alarm, until he was shouting, “No! No! No!” with hysteric disbelief. There were no countries, no roads, nor landmarks of any sort. The GPS only showed a single message, ‘You’re in the North Pole, dumbass!’

He rubbed some warmth into his hands and fought against the winds. Santa and several blonde elven girls climbed up the roof on all fours and stood up before him.

“Peter...” Santa Claus said. “Why are you running?”

“What is this place? And don’t say the North P—”

“You’re in the North Pole!” Arctic winds whipped Santa’s voice away. “This is our home! Come back inside where it’s safe!”

He looked at the other girls cornering him. They were all elves: lithe and graceful. Dressed in green hussar jackets like an all female battalion of nutcracker soldiers. Above their perfectly blonde heads, the aurora borealis glimmered in falling snow.

“Holy shih tzu. There’s no effen way… you really are Santa Claus.”

Peter took a step toward her, but a snowy roof is not a safe place to walk, and so he slipped and tumbled like a toboggan down the side of a mountain. The girls shrieked, but not as loudly as Peter himself, as he tried to sink his claws into anything, but only came up with handfuls of snow. At the very edge of the roof he snatched a string of electric lights, but Christmas lights lack the tensile strength of climbing ropes, and so he plummeted, swung out like a retarded Tarzan, and hilariously ragdolled down a snowbank. And right when he thought the fall had finished a grotesque thunder rumbled from beneath. Blasted in the face with ice, suddenly underwater, he swam in darkness among spectral blue iceberg foundations. Down he sunk. Down, down, down, fast under the frozen surface, flailing helplessly.