I wonder what Santa’s cut-off date for naughty/nice evaluation.
Is there a Period of Performance?
What metrics does he use to reduce the widely distributed spectrum of “goodness” to a binary naughty/nice system? Is it a weighted list? Do acts have a “naughty” or “nice” score associated with them? Is your value a running average of the cumulative values of your actions? Are intentions, knowledge, and environment taken intp consideration? What tooling does he use? He must have a sophisticated surveillance system to be able to observe the actions of all children 24/7. Not to mention the computational power to process that data. and think of how many elf analysts he must employ – or the racks upon racks of machine learning tools. I theorize thay Santa’s workshop does not produce toys, but instead profiles everyone based on their levels of naughtiness.
Instead, vast subterranean factory lines produce the billions of tons of toys each year. He doesn’t fly a sleigh, instead, a massive subterranean logistics network of drones, elevators, and minecarts distributes gifts in parallel – and the nerve center is located at the north pole. It’s like Amazon Prime, but for lizard people.

Oh, right, and he’s a lizard person. No normal human could survive or escape detection for that long. I don’t think it’s even a he.
It’s a vast, subterranean brood mother, fed by cookies. And the elves are it’s spawn. It is old, old enough to defy classification. It’s true purpose is to propagate – it exchanges gifts for cookies and milk to feed it, judging based on advanced ai and machine learning. Or perhaps it IS an AI and uses calories for energy- perhaps we should be giving it butter, since per pound it has a higher energy density. Perhaps it requires the specific blend of nutrients in cookies and milk?
Long ago, San D’Klass settled in to it’s monitoring station, it’s many eyes watching datafeeds and building and adjusting statistical models. It’s many mouths chewing cookies lubricated with milk fed to it by it’s brood.
It is an eldritch horror, but a benevolent one, guiding us to some unknown purpose with gifts as children, then abandoning us as we age. Searching, ever searching, for something it has not found. For a paragon – a perfect score of “nice” – and an antagon, a perfect score of “naughty”. It searches for the Ones foretold by prophecy, the christ and the antichrist, so it may devour the world at last. So it may have an answer, at last, to the one question it could never answer – “what is my purpose?”

And that is Santa Claus is terrifying.