From: Lovino Vargas

To: Santa Claus

Dear Santa Claus,

Stop. Drop pencil. Grab eraser. Erase.

Dear St. Nick,

Stop. Drop pencil. Grab eraser. Erase.

Dear Creepy Guy in a Suit,

Erase.

Dear Creepy Guy Who Seeks for Children's Butts On His Lap,

Erase.

Listen, you fat fuck.

Much better.

Don't you dare throw this letter out. You better read it. And by you, I mean YOU, old man. Not one of your stupid elves, not Rudolph, not your fat fucking wife, YOU. So if you don't read this, I'm coming after you.

Okay.

So. I'm Lovino. My last name's not important - you probably know it anyways. Aren't you, like, the chubby, old, perverted version of Jesus? No? Oops. If that was blasphemous, I'm sorry. Please don't add that to the list of horrible things I've done in my life. I know I have enough on that list to go to hell in the afterlife, but still. And don't give me that shit of you not being perverted. You see children when they're sleeping, you know when they're awake. Trust me, Santy, that screams out PEDOPHILE to any normal human being.

Anyways.

When I was little, I used to write letters to you all the time, when I was still living in Italy. My mom made my little brother and I do it every year, and to be honest, I always liked doing it. I mean, you never replied or showed any fucking sign that you actually read my letters, but still. My brother would always ask for the same shit every year. Pasta, pasta, and even more pasta. And a cat. And guess what? He always got it. Not from you, you lazy bastard, but from all my relatives. Me? I asked for world peace. And for more tomatoes. And for my parents to actually treat me like I exist. Well, only one of those things happened. I couldn't really complain, though; those tomatoes were fucking delicious.

So thanks for that. That totally made my life better. When I was about nine years old, my family decided it would be a swell idea for us to move to America. And, uh, yeah. It was pretty fucking terrifying, the whole moving to a completely different world, living in a place so different from yours, with a different culture, and religion, and people, and thoughts and ideas and feelings and different accents and different languages. I knew I wasn't going to fit in at all. I ended up being some kind of loser kid at school, y'know? I got bullied a lot. I had no friends. I sucked at classes, except for music. Girls ignored me. Teachers ignored me. My parents still ignored me. Sometimes, I wished I was American, so I could be just like everyone else and people would actually treat me like I belong in their group. Pretty pathetic, huh? And then I started caring less and less about everything. I cried a lot, too, before I went to sleep. Every day, I always ended up finding something about me that was just so stupid. My stupid, ugly accent. My stupid, ugly skin. My stupid, ugly hair. My stupid, ugly body. My stupid, ugly nose. My stupid, ugly eyes. I'd fall asleep hating the littlest things about myself.

My parents ended up getting a divorce. My mom left and took Feliciano, my little brother, with her, so I was stuck with my good ol' dad. We never really were close, my dad and I. He never really bonded with me, I never really spoke to him. As the years went by, it felt more like I was living with a stranger rather than someone who helped with the existence of me. He was never at home, either. Always at his job or out doing some more work, or drinking, or partying, or finding other women, and just not being there for me. Sooner or later, I thought, Forget it. He's nothing. You can do anything you want to achieve by yourself.

And I was sort of right. From the ages of thirteen to eighteen, I was digging myself a tunnel. I got a job. My yearbook pages started looking like a résumé. I got National Honour Society, English Honour Society, French Honour Society...the list went on. And I was so proud of myself. I was still treated like shit, but none of that mattered anymore.

Until my dad started drinking. He's always been drinking, but in my last year of high school, that's when my pleasant, bubbly high came to a halting crash. He was driving me home after school one day - shocker, I know - and he was telling me all out of the blue that his ex-wife, my mom, was getting married to some new guy. I didn't really care about that, she can do whatever she wants. Besides, it's not like I'm even living with her anymore. It wouldn't be affecting anyone but Feliciano, but he probably looks forward to having a new daddy. So I pretended to be surprised, but not disappointed. And for some reason, my dad was fucking furious.

"That bitch," He was snarling in Italian. "That fucking bitch, going off and marrying some other man!"

"Hey, hey," I remember myself saying, getting a little pissed that he was talking about my mom like that. "Mind your own business."

"It is my business," My dad shouted, and started hitting the steering wheel with his fists. "I swear, I'll kill that bitch, I'll kill her, I will." And that was all he managed to say before we swerved hard and collided with another car.

Yeah...things escalated pretty quickly at this point. Um, well, I ended up getting taken to the hospital with my dad. I was okay-ish - just lost a lot of blood because I'd taken a blow to the head. I hear it took about fifty blood donors to get me back to normal vitals. Can you imagine? Fifty strangers with the same blood as me, blood that doesn't belong to me now runs through my veins. But anyways, I ended up with only a concussion and some pretty nasty bruises on my arm. I think I still have a scar of when a shard of glass sliced me across the forearm.

My dad...?

D.O.A.

Dead On Arrival.

Yeah...I don't mean this to be the shittiest, most depressing Christmas letter ever sent to you, old man. Sorry if things took a huge turn. I'm just telling you what happened. Like it or don't like it.

We had a nice funeral for my dad. I didn't make a eulogy or some shit. I didn't speak. Neither did my mom. My brother did, but only for a few minutes. Just the plain old, "He was a great man, and a great father", blah blah blah. Other shit that wasn't exactly true.

My dad didn't die a hero. He didn't die valiant, didn't die bold, didn't die this great, admirable idol of a young boy. He died dangerous and stupid. That's it. That's all there is to it. Apparently, he was also drunk on that day he drove me home from school, to put the cherry on top of the ice cream (vanilla ice cream, because that shit's the bomb).

Sometimes I go back to my dad's grave and put flowers over the dirt. Sometimes I tell him about my day. And sometimes I like to pretend he can hear me. And sometimes I like to pretend he cares. I know he never did, and you know what, old man? That's okay.

Because not all of us are fortunate enough to have two parents together, in the same house, and alive. No, my mom didn't invite me to live with her after my dad passed away. I was on my own. I was old enough, anyways, to live on my own. I went to university. Fuck yeah, I applied to my favourite university, and I fucking got in.

Anyways, ugh. Sorry to bore you. My life's not exactly wonderful and happy like a lot of other peoples' is. This is the life I was given. And maybe all this crap that was handed to me over the expanse of my life was pre-determined, kind of like what John Calvin spoke about (but nobody believed that bastard anyways). I don't know. You tell me, old man. Am I delusional? Am I stupid? I don't really expect you to answer that. Oh well.

So Santy, you old fucker. While you sit around in your warm, cozy house and sip hot chocolate from a gingerbreadman's asshole, thinking you're all that, I'm here to tell you that while you appreciate your fat, chubby belly full of delicious food, and your beard is all groomed and shit, and your wrinkled dick is being taken good care of by Mrs. Claus (IT HAD TO HAVE BEEN SAID. JE NE REGRETTE RIEN), I myself am appreciating the stale pizza I'm going to have after I finish writing this. I appreciate the university exams I'm going to be taking at the end of next month. I appreciate the sound of water dripping from the bathroom sink down the hall because I know my boyfriend Antonio never turns the faucet off all the way. I appreciate the sound of the metal shovel scraping against the concrete sidewalk. I appreciate the sound of nails scratching down chalkboard. I appreciate the feeling of warm arms around me whenever I wake up. All these things that I don't think I would've appreciated in another universe, I appreciate. I could've died that day along with my father, but I did not.

TL;DR. Okay, okay, so I guess I'll get to the part where I actually tell you what I want for Christmas this year. First of all, I don't want you to get me anything. Okay? Nothing. I better not see anything under my fucking tree in the next couple of days. If I see anything there, I'll fucking ship it back to you. I know where you live. The North Pole isn't the most populated place on Earth, bitch.

What I do want you to do is this: I want you to send Francis Bonnefoy's baby girl a teddy bear. I know she's been born with serious heart problems, and just recently she's been taken in to the hospital, and I know she likes bears, so send that French fuck's daughter a bear to make her happy in her last moments.

Secondly, I want you to give Matthew and Gilbert a new refrigerator with fresh food in it. They have a big family, and using food stamps isn't going to help them for much longer. For the holidays, the least you can do is give them all a big family feast, with turkey and stuffing and the whole shebang.

Thirdly, I want you to give Alfred and Arthur a stereo. I know how much Alfred loves to dance, and that bastard's always been wanting to dance at home with Arthur, so just be nice and give them that so they can be happy.

That orphanage two blocks away? Repair their furnace so every room can be warm during the cold season.

The children's hospital? Make Spiderman do the window-washing sometime soon. The kids'll love that.

The homeless man sitting in front of the café? Give him a hat and some mitts to keep warm.

You know, I could totally ask you to just give the less fortunate people money, but, I don't know if you know this, but money can't buy everyone happiness. So just this once, coming from a twenty-five year old man, I just want you this Christmas, to give everyone something small but priceless. Let the old lady at the nursing home be visited by one of her children. Let the little boy with stage-four cancer play in the snow one last time. Give the stray cat outside a warm place to sleep on Christmas night.

I'm smarter than you think, Santa. I'm not asking you to make miracles. Christmas is the spirit of giving without a thought of getting. It is happiness because we see joy in people. It is forgetting self and finding time for others. It is discarding the meaningless and stressing the true values. I might not be considered to have a 'lucky' life. People might even pity me and feel sympathy because I don't have a 'good' life. Sometimes people think I have a horrible past. And you know what I think about that? I just think about how lucky I am.

I'm living. I'm breathing. I can blink and cry and shiver and giggle and smile and see and feel and hear and touch and smell and taste, and not everyone can. I only have one person in my family right now, Antonio, but I am still lucky. Because not everyone has what I has. And Christmas isn't about getting whatever you want because it's Christmas. Maybe, Santa, Christmas doesn't come from the store, but from the heart.

As a final note, I just want you to give little things that will make those less fortunate than me happy. Think about it as a gift from me, a former asshole, to them. And you'll have to pay for everything. Don't worry, I'll give you an I.O.U. next year.

Merry Christmas, you fat bastard.

Sincerely,

Lovino Vargas

To: Lovino Vargas

From: Santa Claus

Dear Lovino,

I read your whole letter, you naughty, swearing young man. You can forget about the I.O.U., son.

Buon Natale, good-hearted one.

Sincerely,

Santa Claus

A/N: Merry Christmas, everyone. Be thankful for what you already have. Don't forget that someone is thinking about you during this blessed time of year.