I need capital!

Santa Claus, founder and CEO of Santa Claus Industries, has announced that he will be filing for chapter 11. With liabilities of over 300,000 million and assets of only $1,245 Santa says that he really has no choice.

“The business has changed” said Santa.

It used to be I was the only game in town.  And I was younger and had a good time delivering presents to all the boys and girls.  But lately?  The competition from Amazon is killing me.  And I’m older too. Last year I wasn’t able to finish Christmas until December 27th.  I have a lot of parents suing me over this.

Compounding Santa’s problems was the ticking time bomb of employee pensions. With the average age of elves at 52, and with half the elf workforce already in retirement Santa had to funnel money originally slated for research and development to paying his former employee’s pensions.

“I wish I was a tougher negotiator” declared the downtrodden Santa.

My instinct told me that having to fund my employee’s retirement was a bad idea.  I mean, they have private IRAs they can and should be investing in. But the union negotiator told me that funding the elves’ pension would be “compassionate.”  So like I sucker I agreed.  And here I am now.  Compassionate?  Let’s see how compassionate the elves feel when the factory shuts down.  Goodbye pension!

The final straw for Santa was his attempt to modernize the process of asking for presents with the Santacare.gov web site.  Under Santacare all boys and girls had to register with the web site and enter information about themselves such as where they live, what presents they wanted and whether they had been naughty or nice.

But Santacare was plagued with problems from the beginning.  Children who attempted to register were greeted with a message that the site was temporarily down.

I don’t know how this happened.  I used the best and brightest web designers. These guys had worked with the government, for god’s sake.  They told me they could have the site up and running by October 1st.  So October 1st comes along and bam – the site crashes.  I had to take it down and promise to have it up and running by December 1st.  Well it’s after December 1st and it still isn’t running.  I have children calling and crying saying that they can’t register.  Many sadly will have no presents on December 25th. 

Experts who have examined Santacare.gov complain of the lack of security build into the web site.

“It’s a hacker’s paradise” said one.

Indeed the personal information that children entered is often used against them. Many children who declared themselves “naughty” had their personal information sold to Google.

“Now whenever my daughter goes online she’s bombarded with ads for vibrators” declared an irate parent.

With Santa bankrupt and his North Pole factory going into receivership many have called upon the government to take over Christmas.

Despite opposition from Republicans it is expected that a bill will be introduced to nationalize the holiday.

“I’m all for private industry” said Mitch McConnell.  “Except when the Democrats aren’t. Then I’m against it.”

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