So my wife’s friend from College posted to Facebook about getting coal for the kids and where to acquire it. This got me thinking. The Kringle supposedly get all the naughty boys and girls a lump of coal for Xmas. There are an estimated 1.8 billion children under the age of 15 on this planet. Even if only 1 in 10,000 (not an unreasonable number) were deemed horrible enough to just get a lump of coal; that would still require nearly two hundred thousand chunks of carbonized plant matter. Now I assume that Santa would want lumps that had some heft to them so that stockings would sag from the chimneys and appear to have something in them, because otherwise it would look as if he left nothing at all. I figure each nugget would need to be at minimum, one pound to accomplish this. So we are talking, at minimum, every year he would need to procure 100 short tons of coal. This is a lot of coal. If he were to actually produce this much coal, he would be in the top 20 producers in the world. He would most certainly qualify for a buyers discount.
Then I wondered, why coal? Why not poo, or a dead animal? 100 tons of poo is just a lot of shit, and then there are probably good luck religious symbols that go with getting a dead animal in your stocking near the winter solstice. Then it dawned on me. Santa spreads Christmas cheer, coal is still fuel, it was a primary heat source in 19th century cities. He is still at least giving the nasty little shits something useful, just not a toy. My suspicion is the whole coal thing was started by some upper class parents as a threat to their spoiled offspring. So every year Santa spends billions to make sure even the shitheads have heat for a few hours. Even though individual coal furnaces haven’t been popular for a long time.
The Kringle has a secret, it’s the thing that many of us have yet to realize. If your progeny is horrible enough to get on St. Nick’s docket of depravity and receive only a 1 pound lump of coal; then you can bet that the little darling is going to try every way conceivable to set that swelling of slack on fire. Santa knows this, in fact he’s counting on this. He’s been supplying coal to the destructive dickens for the last few hundred years; it’s expensive, and it is not very green. The hope is that they take you and the house out with them. Not only will this eliminate one nefarious nursling and their boneheaded begetters, but it will be one less house to visit next year. Thus he saves not only the cost of the coal, but time and expense for delivery while leaving the world a slightly more pleasant place.