5 Months Until Christmas

Greetings, friends! Today we mark 5 months until Christmas – and yet another great day during Christmas in July.

As maybe you can tell from our chats this Christmas-in-July thing means a little down time for us. But there still remains a lot of work going forward on Operation Merry Christmas.

I’d like to update you on some of the things going on at the North Pole that have nothing to do with Christmas in July.

Such as Santa’s sleigh.

We haven’t said much about the sleigh and North Pole Flight Command has not either. Yes, they did put up the tracking map at SantaTrackers.net for tracker elves to follow the test flights of Santa’s sleigh. But they really haven’t given out a lot of information.

I will share a little update for you here: things are going FABULOUSLY well.

The sleigh is only on Version 2. This question came up last week at SantaTrackers.net.

Some elves over there asked because last year there were so many changes made to the sleigh during the test flight season. This year there has so far only been one change – and it was a small one – and since then there haven’t been any others.

I talked to Elf Buck Sanchez about it over at Flight Command – only because I could not get any of the sleigh pilots or designers to actually answer my questions. Last year really spooked those elves. They don’t want to see anything go wrong with this sleigh this year and they are watching very closely everything they even say. Those guys can be a little superstitious.

But Elf Buck told me that his observation has been that this year’s sleigh has so far beat every expectation. In fact, he said it is as close to perfect that he has ever seen in a sleigh. It is fast, it is stable, even when loaded and flying at high speeds in bad weather.

There are five months until Christmas and yet Buck tells me the sleigh could be flown by Santa TODAY if he wanted – that’s how well it is going.

That’s great news. Especially for me and my department.

Not a lot of people appreciate what the Public Relations Department has to do. We deal with the problems. Last year, when the sleigh was having all that trouble, it was something of a nightmare to deal with that news all summer long. People were upset and when people get upset that is when my department goes to work.

A good example is that situation the other day with Mr. Bergeson in Sector 5. As you have heard one of our elves mistakenly thought he was Santa and tried to have him brought to the North Pole.

Mr. Bergeson was understandably upset. Elf Agent X did a nice job calming him down and helping him to understand it was a mistake. Even still, I had a chance to talk things over with Mr. Bergeson just to make sure everything was okay.

What a great guy. He was so very nice to me and he even offered to stand-in for Santa should he ever need a body-double or something like that. He’s a real believer.

In fact, I got to talk to him about the tracker elf program and guess what? Mr. Bergeson is our newest tracker elf! His goal is to see Santa in his sleigh come Christmas Eve.

Not every situation ends up as well as it did with Mr. Bergeson. We appreciate when people understand that the North Pole can make mistakes.

But make no mistake about Santa’s sleigh this year. It is well ahead of schedule. You can take that to the bank. It’s gonna be ready for Santa – and Mr. Bergeson – come Christmas Eve.