AN ANTI-NATIVITY STORY

Once, without the city limits of Royal David for a welcome change, long long ago, long before post-industrial neo-isms had destroyed photo-synthetic-dependent life on the planet, long before Empire building had used up all exploitable fossil fuel (except hemp), long before state-capitalism's appropriation of old folk narrative, but just in time for the Christmas market, there lived a hirsute Northern European gentleman in a red & white Coca Cola-sponsored uniform with a bent for compulsive consumerism and philanthropy. His name, like his gift-giving, was self-evidently seasonal.

Known as Sir Nicholas Fairfax-Worthsthorne, The Lord Protector of Yule, to the implausibly English in LA, as Saint Nicky to the overfriendly, as Mr Claus on insurance policies, as Sir Sleazalot, following a spin operation that backfired like a rain forest on bio-diesel, or as plain Santa to jobbing screenwriters and Americans, Father Christmas had since time immemorial filled his sleigh with the most environmentally friendly fuel propellant (un)known to man: supernatural gas.

It had been the best kept secret ever. However, in the light of the legendary fudge at the 2007 Bali Conference on behalf of the world's most profitable businesses and the US State Department, Santa saw the need to go public.

Essentially supernatural gas only worked if you believed in it. Truly believed. Just as your kid did in Wonka-Vite, tooth fairies, or flying snowmen. The purity of the moral code was what made it work. Adults tried prayer. No good. Belief in God didn't do it. The ideology and ritual. Clogged up the flow-thru apparently. On the other hand, pure, unadulterated child-like belief without any added rational discourse worked like a three-leaf clover strapped to the back of a black cat on St Patrick's day, being careful to avoid the ladder and making it through a graveyard full of cluster bombs near the Israeli-Lebanese border. That’s to say, like a very lucky charm.

One morning, all three and half billion believers, children and cyclists mostly, woke up to find a 14-gallon drum of supernatural gas (SG) at the bottom of their beds. Inexplicably, two billion agnostics wet their pants.

The believers set to work straightaway. They badgered, pestered, rallied and siphoned SG into anything they could find, except at first cars and trucks. Favourite make-shift vehicles were: Bedknobs & Broomstick-style four-poster beds, bath tubs (gold taps a must), turned-up tables, inflatable bananas and Edwardian perambulators - not to mention the classic magic carpets. Stock options in Persian rugs and furniture stores soared. Sofas, which had clichéd so swiftly, were cool and retro again within weeks. The most fashionable trend was amongst cyclists, who at weekends had taken to cruising former motorways in wheeless and engine-less 4X4's. As conventional fuels were priced off the road, SG being supplied free by elves, combustion engines became passé overnight. The public highways were abandoned, turfed up, drawn on, partyied on, and eventually converted to land for food and shelter.

The non-believers, or the Thomases, were rendered ineffectual, weak, divided, doubting and stationary. Road reclamation was very nearly about to reach critical mass. The developed world was almost on the point of having more recycled road than automotively-dominated tarmac and concrete, when the Thomases and their oil-company backers were saved by their big idea. Their coup de Graceland Tennessee.

They founded a new church. They got the notion of promulgating Santa Claus as an official faith. The Church of Santa, like those of Scientology, Seventh Day Adventism and The Poison Mind, took off in a major way. The competing theologies of Astrology, Marxism and Jedi were outstripped. Clausism became a full-blown religion with its own code of behaviour, its own ideological superstructure, its own capital assets, its own property-rich, tax-light elite with their very own stake in education, in investment, in biological and chemical weapons, and in the afterlife. Official tours to Santa Heaven could be booked online.

On the money markets, purity of belief slumped overnight. Innocence went through the floor. And SG went with it. Its shares plummeted like a feather coated in black tar on the morning of the world's worst environmental disaster. The bottom fell out of gas.

The rest, as they used to be able to say, is history.