I hauled my old snowmobile out of the garage, loaded it on a flight to Oslo and thence to Spitzbergen and, after stocking up with several tins of bully beef and some cans of Sprite Light, I set out across the frozen wastes of the Arctic, guided by my Boy Scout compass and that unerring instinct that always leads me to the smell of cooking food.
Surely enough, ten days later, with the needle of my compass desperately trying to point straight down, I saw Santa’s igloo with smoke coming from the chimney, spreading the delicious aroma of frying seal chitterlings into the cold, crisp air.
Parking my snowmobile outside, I crawled through the entra\lce tunnel of the igloo and knocked on the frozen reindeer skin that served for a door.
“Come in,” Santa said, in his booming voice.
“Ah, my friend from Athens. What a pleasant surprise.”
“You remember me! ” I said in surprise.
“Of course, how could I forget! You drank practically a whole bottle of Black Label last time you were here. how you ever got home I’ll never know.”
I smiled ruefully.
“That raw blubber you gave me to eat made me rather thirsty,” I lied. In actual fact, the raw blubber had been so revolting that I had been forced to drink the whiskey to get the taste out of my mouth.
“I see you have a stove,” I said, eyeing the gas stove with the sizzling frying pan on it.
“Yes, it’s a present from Julia Child. She came to visit me last year.”
“You gave her raw blubber to eat?”
“Yes. It’s all I had. And then she said she’d send me a present. Can you imagine that? The first time anyone has ever placed me in such a role reversal situation. I was moved to tears. And then this magnificent stove arrived, with several gas bottles, all parachuted down by Scandinavian Airlines on one of their polar flights. I wonder what made her think I needed a stove?”
“I can make a pretty good guess, but never mind. Tell me, what sort of presents are you sending out this year?”
“Sending? I’ve sent them already.
It’s three weeks to Christmas but when you think that my reindeer sleighs travel at 40 miles per hour with a following wind and that the driver has to stop and untangle their antlers every six miles or so, we need as early a start as we can get.”
“Oh, then the presents.for Greece are already on their way?”
“It’s funny you should ask, because just this morning I got a message from the Greece contingent that the sleigh with the presents for the country’s top personalities collided with a U2 over Minsk. The reindeer became a hopeless jumble of antlers and hooves so the driver jettisoned them and glided down to the outskirts of Minsk where, unfortunately, the sleigh sank in a bog. But let’s eat now. I think these chitterlings are just about done.”
We sat at a block of ice that served for a table and although the chitterlings looked most unappetizing, they were in fact delicious. We washed them down with Sprite Light laced with Aquavit and ended the meal with freeze dried instant coffee.
“And what were the presents you had for Greek personalities?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing much. I had a note from Andreas Papandreou saying he wouldn’t mind a 20-year-old Scandinavian girl to remind him of the good times he had in Sweden, seeing how Dimitra was now pushing 34 and ready for the scrapheap, but all I had for him was a year’s supply of Geriatric vitamins. Mitsotakis, in his letter, said the thing he wanted most was a premiership but I compromised with a biography of Margaret Thatcher. I had a three month’s supply of Complan for Evert, a hairnet for Tsovolas, an eyebrow comb for Karamanlis, a set of Great Books for Koutsoyiorgas as he’ll have plenty of time for reading , a copy of Dale Carnegie’s books for Sartzetakis; a complete set Mikis Theodorakis record albums for Florakis and a permanent American Base PX Card for Kyrkos.”
“I’m sure they’ll all be most disappointed not to get those presents,” I said.
“Isn’t there any way they can be retrieved from the bog in Minsk, or perhaps replaced?”
“Replaced is out of the question. I’m not made of money, you know. But if they can tear themselves away from the Greek scene and go looking for their presents in the bog, I’m sure a good many people in your country will be only too glad to help them along.”
