The Battle of Forbe's Creek, Christmas Eve edition

I asked Jon what I should write about and he suggested the heroic last stand of Santa's elves against the invading penguin horde.

So...

It was a bleak night that night. We were surrounded and outnumbered, and even Santa look worried. How had it come to this, you ask? Sit back and I'll tell you.

It had all started the Christmas morning the year before. We elves were celebrating another successful Christmas Eve deployment when the spokespenguin of the Penguin Guild asked to see Santa in private. We didn't know what the conversation was about, but we knew it was serious when the spokespenguin stormed out with the rest of the Penguin Guild behind him. The P. G. went on strike a few weeks after that, but that didn't worry us as none of us could figure out what the P.G. actually -did-. Things went on as usual and we continued working busily in preperation for the upcoming Christmas.

Then it happened.

We had just finished making the last of the teddy bears in the toy shoppe when there was a knock on the door. Poor old Johnson was the one who opened the door just as the candy cane bomb detinated. Candy shrapnel went everywhere, some was even imbedded in the teddy bears. I crawled over to where Johnson had fallen. He looked pretty bad. I wiped the powdered sugar off his brow as he tried to speak.

"It...it was...the penguins!"

So. It was to be war between us.

We quickly staged a counter attack, but the penguins had moved on. They were masters of ambush, with the skill in the arms that we never could match. Skirmish followed skirmish but we hadn't made any progress. Now it was Christmas Eve and we were huddled in the back room of the toy shoppe, loading last year's gumdrops into our candy rifles. It looked pretty hopeless. We weren't the kind of elves that were in those Lord of The Rings movies; we looked pretty much exactly like the Keebler elves, not suitable for fighting.

Then, just when things were looking the bleakest, Santa came in. At least, we -thought- it was Santa. It was hard to tell under all the hand grenades, camo and sunglasses.

"We end this, now."

And we did end it. We blew those penguins into the next Kingdom (let them terrorize the leprechauns for a while). Peace returned to the North Pole, though Santa never spoke of that night again. None of us like to think about it, but it's important that we never forget.

Guns don't kill people; Penguins with guns do.

(Merry Christmas!)