Santa’s Workshop Publishes ‘Sustainability Guidelines™️’ for Christmas Gifts

Dear Parents,

We at Santa’s Workshop^TM are deeply committed to providing Christmas products that put smiles on kids’ faces while also fostering a sustainable future and protecting our planet. Recently, in an effort to live up to these goals, we convened a board meeting of our most senior elves, reindeer, parts vendors, and the polar bears from the Coke commercials. During this meeting we developed a set of Workshop Sustainability Guidelines^TM that we plan to use going forward as we continue to endeavor to provide children everywhere with the Best Gifts Ever^TM each Christmas.

Below we are publishing the new guidelines as part of our continued effort towards Transparency, Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion^TM. You will also find a copy of these guidelines posted at our many worldwide Popup Santa Stations^TM (available at participating Macy’s, Dillard’s, and Barnes and Nobles). Please keep these guidelines in mind as you discuss ideas for Christmas with your child.

1. No slime.

We at Santa’s WorkshopTM recognize that we live on a planet with finite resources. Recently we convened The Special Panel on Glue, Contact Solution, and Baking Soda (the SPGCSBS), which most parents will know are the most common ingredients in many do-it-yourself slime recipes. We highlight here findings from page 329 of their Special Report of the Special Panel on Glue, Contact Solution, and Baking Soda (the SRSPGCSBS):

We find that glue consumption has risen in the last decade by 3,204,398 percent annually. Last year more glue was used in making slime than has ever been used in all other arts and craft projects for the last 150 years (this figure includes the massive amount of glue that was used to paste macaroni to paper in the late 80s and early 90s).

The panel also estimates that by 2025 only 1 percent of all contact solution produced globally will ever make it into people’s eyes. And it is not only environmental sustainability that concerns this panel. Our findings also suggest that by 2030, Elmer’s Glue will be the largest and most profitable company on Earth, with a market cap equal to that of the entire technology sector. We find this to be an economically troubling outcome and are committed to products that serve more than the narrow interests of Big Slime (e.g., Elmer’s, Johnson & Johnson, and Arm & Hammer).

In light of these findings, we believe the responsible policy is to stop providing slime and/or slime precursors to children on Christmas. In a recent focus group we found that parents were fully onboard with this new policy.

2. No Lithium Powered Devices.

As members of a historically exploited group, our elves are in a special position to understand the indiginous voices in the global community who are often ignored in the pursuit of profit margins. One need look no further than the protests in places like Tagong, Tibet, where the Liqi River is being lost to leaks from local lithium mines. We will therefore not deliver any gifts on Christmas that contain lithium batteries.

(Please note that due to a filtering glitch in our Salesforce system we will also be unable to deliver lithium, even as a medication, for Christmas 2019^TM, which surprisingly continues to be a rather popular stocking stuffer for parents. We regret any inconvenience and hope to correct this problem ahead of Christmas 2020^TM.)

3. No plastic.

Folks, we here at Santa’s Workshop^TM were at the forefront of the plastics revolution. We were early adopters of providing Cabbage Patch Kids for Christmas even as many toy stores were continuing to push porcelain dolls. But just as we were one of the early adopters of plastics, we’d like to be at the vanguard of people looking beyond plastic. We are therefore committing to reducing plastic in our toys over the coming years, with a goal of Zero PlasticTM by 2027 (or sooner). Instead, we will be returning to those classic (and more eco-friendly) materials of yore: wood, cotton, lead, and mercury.

4. Email only.

We are no longer accepting paper letters at our North Pole P.O. Box, which will now be used solely for receiving our hard copies of Toy Enthusiast Quarterly and National Geographic (we have digital versions for these magazines—how the hell do we stop getting the hard copies?!?! — HELP!!).

We understand that for children composing an email to the North Pole (santa.claus@santasworkshop.np) is not quite the same experience as writing a wish list by hand, stuffing the paper into an envelope, and placing the letter in a mailbox. But the process of flying all those letters up here by jet releases enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to melt 100,000 square miles of the Arctic ice sheets. If your child is less excited about sending his or her list by email, we suggest trying to add some excitement by letting them include some Christmas themed GIFs, like this hilarious clip of a hoverboarding Santa gone wrong!

(Note: Please parents, remind your kids that we are really just interested in their list. We don’t need four paragraphs of introduction or sentence after sentence of Santa Claus sycophancy. If little Jennie really feels the need to provide a 3,000 word back story on her tragic circumstances in the orphanage we suggest she tries to pitch her piece to Reader’s Digest. Also, due to the recent attempts at phishing our notoriously gullible elves, any emails with attachments will be automatically deleted.)

5. No more naughty list.

Technically, this isn’t a sustainability guideline. But we believe that a modern organization cannot separate sustainability from diversity and inclusion. In an effort to promote the latter, we have decided that henceforth we will no longer be keeping separate Naughty and Nice lists. Instead we will maintain a single list with the names of all kids, who, no matter how problematic, will be qualified to receive gifts. That said, we will continue to track their behavioral status as “naughty” or “nice” for purposes of internal data analytics.