Season’s greetings from your old friend Santa! My, my, it seems the Christmas season comes a bit earlier each year, doesn’t it? Yes, it certainly does. And with the hours ticking away until we make the Yuletide gay, jolly old Saint Nick has a very
important message for all his boys and girls.

So, my dear children, no matter what’s on your wish list this year, gather ’round and listen close! Because unless you deliver $100 billion in unmarked bills to the North Pole before Christmas morning, I will detonate dirty bombs in five major cities
across the globe!

Do you know what a dirty bomb is, my sweet little ones? It’s a scary contraption that can be easily deployed in a major population center to make all your mommies and daddies very, very sick. And even though Santa loves each and every one of you very
much, if his demands are not met, he won’t hesitate to unleash holy hell on unsuspecting civilians in random locations all over the world.

Santa’s workshop hasn’t been making any dolls or train sets this year. My goodness, no! My elves have been hard at work enriching plutonium into payloads that can deliver a virtual second Chernobyl of radioactive death and destruction to any
metropolitan area Santa chooses. Oh, yes, indeed. Rudolph’s nose will be glowing this holiday season, but not because it’s magic, if you catch ol’ Kris Kringle’s drift! Ho, ho, ho!

Why, all poor Santa’s asking for is a measly hundred billion smackers. ’Tis the season for giving, is it not? And the only Christmas surprises St. Nicholas wants for you are stockings full of candy canes and gumdrops, carolers singing festive songs,
and a cheerful dusting of snow—not a devastating series of blasts in a city center, the screams of sickened citizens, and radioactive fallout blanketing your neighborhood.

Just imagine that! It’d be a veritable winter wonderland—a nuclear winter, that is!

Oh, I bet your mind is racing trying to guess where my explosive little presents are tucked away. Could they be hidden beneath the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree? Or stuffed inside a plump goose in the cellar of a central London restaurant? Not even
the smartest mommies and daddies at the top intelligence agencies will be able to guess in time. Ticktock, ticktock! Perhaps you’re doubting the credibility of Santa’s threat? Then maybe Santa should send the code word “Prancer Midnight” to his
elves and have them detonate the radiological dispersal device they’ve planted in the Shanghai airport.

Don’t think being a well-behaved little girl or boy will spare you. Cesium-137 doesn’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice—especially not the highly enriched kind my little helpers obtained from the Chechens. One lump of that in your stocking
will make your holiday hearth so warm and bright it melts flesh.

Ho, ho, ho! My willingness to shed the blood of innocents is unwavering!

And do you know what else, my sweet sugar plums? If the world’s governments don’t hand over the desired sum, these dirty bombs will only be the beginning. So you better pay up, you better not cry, or your skin will slough off as you die, because
Santa Claus is coming to town with a hydrogen bomb if he is not compensated in full, and before the year is out he will rain down nuclear hellfire on the world’s most densely populated locales.

Anyway, I should get going. I still have a lot of “toys” to cobble together in my workshop if I’m going to make this Christmas one the world will never forget. So God bless you, every last one of you—unless, that is, you’re one of the
unfortunate souls who might taste the horrors of a nuclear holocaust. All those little ones can do is pray the grownups in charge choose to comply.
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