Last year, Santa got Microsoft Office for X-Mas. Part 1

Back in the old days, Santa used to get hundreds upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands of hand-written letters from children during the winter holidays.

Then Santa started dropping computers down chimneys (I know cause he left my sister and I one) and children began typing their Santa letters. Jolly ol' St. Nick really liked that because as we all know, children's penmanship is sometimes difficult to read.

Some years later, homes became web-enabled. And children would send Santa emails.

The problem? Santa didn't have internet access. After all, there's not much in the North Pole besides a barn full of reindeer and some elves. So Santa would have to send elves down South to public libraries and print shops where the elves would print out all of the emails and bring them back to the North Pole. This, of course, made last-minute requests difficult to fill.

Sometime back in 2005, one of the major internet providers installed some cables near ninety degrees latitude and Santa's workshop was online! To celebrate, Mrs. Claus bought Santa a computer for Christmas (or "elves made Santa a computer;" whatever).

"A computer! For me?" Santa asked. He was so used to giving them to video-game-obsessed tweens that he never even thought to get one for himself.

But with emails being so easy to send, Santa got even more letters than he had ever gotten before. Not to mention that some children would email him daily! So the amount of letters that Santa was receiving nearly quadrupled.

Santa didn't sleep. Santa didn't eat. Santa would spend all night checking his email and printing out letters and making piles of "good" and "bad" requests.

So the next year, Mrs. Claus gave her husband the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office because that's what big, American companies used.

"It has a spreadsheet so you can sort your lists electronically," Mrs. Claus told her husband. "And all those emails you get? They'll automatically be filed into good and bad!"

Brilliant! This computer could automatically sort and create charts and make schedules! Santa could focus more time on toy quality like in the old days before the population boomed (so many naughty children having children).

So sometime in February of 2007 (Santa spends January vacationing in Florida because he's old), the elves and Santa set up the new computer.

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