A creative writing project where Santa Claus, Wonder Woman, and I were sitting on a park bench…

Proposing a last-ditch plan to save Christmas to a super-heroine and Santa Claus himself was NOT how I’d intended to spend my morning.

The day had started out normally enough. I had stopped by my favorite coffee shop to pick up a tall cup of today’s dark roast and a newspaper, which I carried out to a secluded bench in the park. It was mid-August and the day wasn’t quite hot yet, but you didn’t need an advanced degree in meteorology to know that it was going to be.

The lead story in the paper was that yesterday, Apple had revealed their latest product: the iField, which had sent the company’s stock through the roof. As small and compact as the iPod, the iField not only played music and videos, but also emitted a harmless force field that protected the user from rain, smog, insects, UV rays, and an impressive list of other environmental hazards. “Never worry about forgetting your sunblock or umbrella at home again,” the company was quoted saying. “The iField has you covered!”

“Wow, that’s amazing.” I said softly to myself, barely noticing the two people who had sat down on the bench next to me while I was reading.

“You can say that again,” a voice from my left commented, with noticeably less optimism. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to get enough of those ready to ship by December.”

What an odd thing to say. I looked up at the man sitting next to me and gave him a quizzical look. A stocky, elderly gentleman in his late sixties, judging by the white stubble on his chin, he had the air of a wealthy European traveler about him. He wore expensive khaki pants, a sports jacket over a black button-up shirt with the collar open, and topped the entire outfit off with a white fedora hat. There was something particularly familiar about him; something I just couldn’t put my finger on.

“Excuse me?” I ventured. “Did you just say what I thought you said?”

“Oh yes. With that announcement yesterday, I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut my vacation short and get back to the factory.”

“Okaaaay,” I said hesitantly. “You’re obviously not Steve Jobs, but I’m guessing that you work for Apple?”

“No, not quite,” came a bubbly female voice from my right. “Though I’ll bet he sometimes wishes he did. He could probably get more time off each year then.”

Turning my head around, I glanced at the woman who had just spoken, again feeling a sense of nagging déjà vu. Despite wearing the attire of a trendy thirty-something-year-old businesswoman, notably an open black vest over a white blouse and black slacks with matching heels, I sensed that she was normally more comfortable in something radically different. She had an incredible atmosphere of strength surrounding her and as she leaned over, removing red-framed glasses and letting her dark brown hair shift around her shoulders, I suddenly felt more open and candid than I ever had before in my life.

“Oh, don’t I know it,” the man in the fedora sighed. “I’m lucky I was even able to get away this week at all.”

“Wait, wait, wait, you two know each other?” I asked. “And I’ve got to say, I can’t help but feel that I somehow recognize you both, or at least have seen your faces a thousand times.”

The woman on my right chuckled. “Oh, you’ve seen us before. Everyone has. It’s gotten to the point where whenever we go out, even for a mid-summer walk in the park, we’ve got to go incognito.”

Staring at the pair on the bench beside me, I arched an eyebrow and felt my thoughts racing. I know I’ve seen these two faces before, but where? Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. The man to my left, if he let that stubble grow into a full beard and swapped the sports jacket for a red coat… As for the woman, if the heels were calf-high boots and the business outfit a red, white, and blue corset all beneath a shiny golden tiara…”

My mind totally blown, I couldn’t help but stammer out a guess. “You couldn’t be, no…Santa Claus and Wonder Woman? Really?“

Now it was Santa’s turn to laugh. “You got it, kid. Though Ms. Prince and I serve the public, we’re not recluses, like some other super heroes I could name. We like to get out to, you know, see the sights, have a hot dog, feed the ducks… things you can’t exactly do from inside an oversized sled going mach 5 at 35,000 feet over the North Atlantic.”

Wonder Woman nodded in agreement. “I swear, nowadays nothing short of a Class Five sea monster or a death ray aimed straight at Metropolis gets Super-Hermit’s lazy butt out of that Fortress of Solitude of his…”

“I see… Yeah, I get it.” Then looking down at the newspaper that had fallen into the grass, I suddenly remembered the first thing Santa had said, which had started this bizarre conversation.

“Oh, but you were saying about the new Apple product… you don’t think you’ll be able to get enough out in time for Christmas?”

“That’s right,” Saint Nick said, shaking his head sadly. “Ms. Prince and I were just talking about that on the way over here. We’ve collaborated to bring fantastic toys to children before, but this new iField from Apple is beyond even us. And frankly, I just don’t have the budget to send all my elves off for a semester of quantum mechanics, just so that they can come back and reverse-engineer two-point-two billion of those things for every little boy and girl in the world.”

“What have the two of you worked on together before this?”

“See my plane over there?” Wonder Woman asked. When it was clear that I didn’t, she smiled. “Santa’s sleigh is based off of the same stealth technology as my invisible jet. That’s how he’s able to make it around the world unseen every December 24th.”

“Makes sense,” I nodded. “But I’ve always wondered something. Just how do you manage to get to so many houses all in one night?”

“Ho! Ho! That’s easy!” Santa laughed and removed his hat to wipe the beads of sweat from his brow. “From September on, I feed my reindeer nothing but antimatter alfalfa. They love it, and it’s the one substance that lets them break the light barrier come Christmas Eve.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. “I… can’t imagine why I never thought of that.”

Wonder Woman stood up and started pacing. “But back to our problem, I just got back from The Justice League Watchtower in space and even they don’t know what makes the iField work. We compared it against a hundred different alien technologies and still nothing comes close!”

“And Apple is keeping the schematics even more secret than Batman’s true identity,” Santa said. “I’ve had elven spies in that place since they first got into consumer electronics and they haven’t been able to dig up a single bit of information on the iField. In fact, the only thing they managed to get the designs for was the Macbook Air. But how many children do you think put that on their Christmas List, hmm? Anyway, I’m afraid we’ll never figure the iField out in time and Christmas will just have to be canceled this year.”

“Oh, you say that every year!” Wonder Woman quipped. “Remember the Tickle Me Elmo? The doll that you thought was so impossible to create at the time? Now you find them everywhere, more often than not on the Island of Misfit Toys!”

“You’re right,” Santa said, returning the fedora to his head and standing up. “We’ll think of something, even if we have to push Christmas back to June. Come on, Ms. Prince, we’ve got work to do. And young man, it was a pleasure talking with you.”

“Wait,” I said, stopping Santa and Wonder Woman in their tracks just as they were (presumably) at the door to the invisible plane. “I’ve got an idea. It may sound crazy, but it just might work at the same time.”

“Well, sure, I’d listen to anything at this point,” Santa said and Wonder Woman nodded.

“Ms. Prince, when you were up in the Watchtower, comparing all those different kinds of exotic technology from across the universe, was there anything that stood out as being, for lack of a better phrase, really cool?“

The Amazonian princess removed her glasses again and chewed at the ends absent-mindedly.

“Sure, there was. Why, there was this one crystal ball that if you shook it, a shower of meteors would rain down from the sky, creating the most beautiful phenomenon imaginable. Only they don’t advise you to shake it while you’re standing on planets that are populated, since the meteor storms tend to last anywhere from five minutes to thirty thousand years.”

“Right, umm, that’s not exactly what I was talking about. What I meant was: did you see anything that the boys and girls of Earth might enjoy around the holidays?”

“Oh, I see. Let me think,” she said, again appearing deep in thought. “Most of the technologies up there were confiscated from intergalactic warlords and super villains, and aren’t really appropriate for children. But I do remember one gadget that could act as a receiver for any song, movie or television show that ever was or will be recorded. Plus every time one of those devices is activated for the first time, a puppy or kitten is inexplicably beamed down to its location.”

“Really? Where do they come from?”

“We have no idea,” Santa said, shrugging his shoulders. “Our best guess is that there’s an alternate dimension out there somewhere that’s filled to the brim with puppies and kittens just waiting to be teleported down to loving families.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “So the only problem with mass producing iFields is that you don’t have the blueprints for them, right?”

“That’s correct,” Santa answered.

“So how about this… Apple’s biggest rival is Microsoft. What if you told Apple that unless they shared their new product’s secrets, you would give the video/music/puppy machine to their main competitor?”

The pair thought about that for a second, turning over in their minds the ramifications of blackmail in the name of children’s happiness.

“Well…” Santa deliberated, “I don’t think that technically breaks any articles of my Jolly Old Charter. Nor the Yule-Tide Guidebook to Ethics in the Postmodern World.”

Wonder Woman was already grinning ear to ear and added, “I can’t see any problems with it either. I’ll get back to the Watchtower posthaste and ask them for a prototype.”

“And then if you really wanted to sweeten the deal, tell Apple that you would help them market this new machine for Christmas next year,” I added. “There’s no way they’d say no!”

“Son, you might have just saved our fair holiday,” Santa beamed. “I’ll see to it personally that you’re the first one to receive an All Past/Present/Future Media Player and Automatic Puppy and/or Kitten Generator for all the help you’ve given us today!”

“Thanks, Santa, but if I could suggest one more thing, you might want to spend the next year working on that name…”