The Boys Who Tried To Disrupt Santa Claus

A Tribute To A Poem By Ogden Nash

In Silicon Valley there lived some boys,

Who loved inventing brand new toys.

With hearts mostly in the right place

(and personalities from outer space)

They’ve change the world and our nation

With some snappy innovation.

Newspapers became obsolete

With the invention of the tweet.

Need to stalk high school friends?

Facebook is useful to that end.

Apple put supercomputers in pockets.

Elon Musk is building rockets.

Uber outpaces cabs by far

And next it’s coming for the car.

Cars soon will drive themselves

If it’s up to the Valley’s Christmas elves.

Don’t like stores — that is fine.

Amazon invented Prime.

Don’t like using cards of plastic?

So many mobile payments are fantastic.

All the achievements made the boys pause

Could they do better than Santa Claus?

As Christmas loomed in 2016

The odds of disrupting Santa seemed keen.

Sure, the flying deer come through

But drones are fast and they fly, too.

Elven help gets Santa by.

How can that compete with advanced AI?

And what if North Pole security gets broken?

Has Santa heard of data tokens?

With the responsibilities he’s got,

Shouldn’t he have his own chatbot?

And all this giving stuff away

Has not he not heard of Apple Pay?

Santa’s great, but he’s analog

Delivering presents in a big yearly slog.

The boys of tech said we can do better,

With the toys, gifts and ugly sweaters.

Funny thing about old Nick,

When challenged, he responds right quick.

They heard the crunch of sleigh and hoof

Crisply alighting on the roof.

And what did they see that dropped their jaws?

A fireplace full of Santa Claus!

“Disrupt me, you must be joking.

What on Earth are you people smoking?

Wait, don’t answer, I already know,

California just made it legal to sell and grow.

Point is: I’m a magic creature.

Your specialty is neat tech features.

You think you’re better than best,

Because you’ve had some nice success?

What about the times you fail?

Google, didn’t you try to do payments via Gmail?

Amazon, I like your drones,

But did you forget the Fire phone?

Yes, I’ve heard of Apple Pay.

“Meh” is what I have to say.

But then, you’ve heard that one before.

Stop laughing, Samsung, did you think I’d ignore

The fact a bunch of your phones exploded?

Trust me, guys, it’s all been noted.”

The boys of tech felt their shame spike

When Santa was done dropping the mic.

But Santa told them not to fret.

It was OK, just don’t forget

That their inventions are often key,

But Santa will always be the holiday OG.