These are busy times--and so it happened that on Christmas Eve, before a cheerful fire, I was reading through a stack of documents on the many ways in which the United Nations is encroaching on our lives, with plans to regulate, tax or otherwise meddle with the climate, the Internet, outer space, economic development and democratic freedoms.
Overwhelmed by it all, I finally turned to the more pleasant pastime of re-reading the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, with its ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. I got as far as the final visitation, in which Ebenezer Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and standing in the graveyard, looking at the grim epitaph on his own tombstone, asks, "Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?"
At that point, warmed by the fire and lulled by the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree, I fell asleep and dreamed a dream in which I sat at my desk, gazing into my laptop at an article dated Dec. 25, 2015--target year for a multitude of U.N. Millennium Goals. It read:
Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus.
But that was before the United Nations got its claws into Santa, which, as history records, started to happen in 2009.
Back then, whatever the disputes over "Merry Christmas" versus "Happy Holidays," Santa was still a one-man symbol of individual enterprise and privately-based, Christian-affiliated good cheer.
Without apology, he preferred the North Pole over the South, ran a mono-cultural Elven workshop, dealt in environmentally unfriendly lumps of coal and on his appointed night flew a team of eight reindeer around the globe while buying nary a carbon offset.
His gifts were given with more regard to the wishes of children than to biennial planning cycles. And despite his global reach, he neither signed onto nor complied with a single U.N. treaty, convention or program.
All that might have been overlooked by the U.N., many of whose members don't bother to observe any of its requirements either. But, to the horror of almost the entire U.N. system, especially its Human Rights Council, Santa did something that could not be ignored. He engaged in religious and culturally judgmental gift-giving, unilaterally punishing the naughty children and rewarding the nice.
Reports began leaking out of assorted U.N. committees, hinting at the threats posed by Santa to the causes of fairness, neutrality and international consensus. He was blamed for religious frictions among civilizations, for trying to sneak Western values into other cultures and for jeopardizing the efforts of everything from the U.N. Environment Program to UNOOSA (the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs).
The capper was a study produced by the U.N.'s Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announcing indisputable scientific findings (despite disagreements among the scientists themselves) that emissions from Santa's workshop up north were contributing to the melting of the polar ice cap. When mobs of protesters dressed in polar bear suits stormed UN Offices in Oslo, Karachi and Damascus, demanding that Santa be handed over, the secretary-general felt compelled to act.
Summoning all 192 member states to a resort complex in the South Seas, the U.N. convened its now-famous conference on "Santa Modalities." There, speaking on behalf of the Group of 77-plus-China, Cuba's envoy argued that Santa was an imperialist relic of the colonial order.
Pakistan's delegate, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, urged that the U.N. take immediate measures to end Santa's selectively religious and ''xenophobic'' overtones. Emissaries of Zimbabwe, Iran and Cameroon moved for emergency action. The secretary-general himself declared a Santa crisis and wrote a series of impassioned op-eds, explaining that the cause of world peace and progress required a U.N.-modified Multilateral Santa.
This led to the establishment of a U.N. Santa Secretariat, which organized a series of meetings chaired by Libya and held in Cairo, Beijing, Brussels and the Gaza Strip. The outcome was a new UN treaty creating the Sustainable Authority on Nondiscriminatory Transnational Activities (UN-SANTA).
Thanks to strong support from a new U.S. administration dedicated to working with the world community, UN-SANTA was swiftly ratified by the U.S. Congress. Under terms of the treaty, U.N. peacekeepers were dispatched to the North Pole to relieve Santa of his duties and escort him to the Hague, to await the decisions of the U.N. World Court (where, process being what it is, he is waiting still).
Santa's former administrative responsibilities were parceled out between the U.N.'s Santa Secretariat, based in New York and a newly created U.N. Framework Convention for Santa Change (UNFCSC), based at the South Pole, with regional offices in Vienna, Montecarlo and Pyongyang.
In the interest of fairness, the UNFCSC hired a global staff of gift-giving experts, tasked to compile and submit annual reports aimed at ensuring that all UN-SANTA presents would be morally neutral, culturally amorphous, eco-approved and consistent with U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
Because Christmas was felt by some to be exclusive rather than inclusive, Santa's old delivery schedule was initially moved to coincide with the annual opening of the General Assembly in New York, and then--due to volume considerations--spread across the entire fiscal year.
His workshop was folded into U.N. procurement operations in Copenhagen, Rome and Dubai. Mrs. Claus was relocated from the North Pole to a position of permanent obscurity as a fund-raiser for the UNICEF office in Riyadh. The elves were assigned to the U.N. Development Program's capacity-building operations in Niamey and Pyongyang. The reindeer, their antlers symbolically sawed off, were bronzed and installed on the U.N. grounds in New York, near the Peace Bell.
Today, UN-SANTA carries on with a staff of thousands, including gender experts, on-site monitors and country program officers. They travel the world, networking, conferencing and disbursing to every child--naughty or nice--what has become today's standard annual gift of a U.N.-embossed carbon-offset certificate, each representing a stake in a future Chinese wind farm.
In the best U.N. tradition, the bulk of this effort is bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers, but the administration is overseen by political appointees of the General Assembly.
At that point, dear Reader, my dream was interrupted by a tremendous thud somewhere high in the chimney. Yanked back to the present, I awoke with a start, and while Old Saint Nick made his rounds, resumed my reading of the tale in which Scrooge understands the perils of the path he has been treading, and turns aside to a happier future.
