NORTH POLE – In response to Denmark’s announcement in October 2004 that it was exploring the possibility of claiming the North Pole as part of Greenland, which has been Danish territory since 1814, Santa Claus reportedly has spent the last year mobilizing his elves and buying military equipment, including long-range reindeer and armored sleighs, on the international black market. He may be trying to develop snowballs with rocks in them and other weapons of mass destruction.
The Danish foreign ministry said that any invasion of the area by the Danish army would be a “a cakewalk or at least a Danish pastry walk,” but Canada, which put in its own legal claim for the North Pole in the late 1950s, believes that it might not be so simple. “We couldn’t get around a baffling strategic problem,” said a Canadian Ministry of Defence official in Ottawa, “which was that even if our troops finally succeeded in reaching and occupying the North Pole, further maneuvers or probes in any direction
would mean heading due south, which could be interpreted as a retreat.” However, he admitted that the Danes have a major advantage in any confrontation with Santa and his estimated 27 divisions of elves. “The Danes have the option of releasing canisters of paralyzing Kierkegaardian angst behind Santa’s lines, which will make short work of his reserves of merriness, while all we had to throw at him was the temporarily incapacitating complete works of Robert W. Service.”