Faking Santa?

For various reasons I won't go into right now, conspiracy theories have been on my mind of late.  The whole moon landing hoax conspiracy theory to be specific.  Make no mistake, the idea that the moon landings were faked is and always have been utter bollocks, but I'm always left wondering what other real events people believe were faked.  Well, according to some of the conspiracy nutters, everything, from Nazi concentration camps to the current pandemic have been faked by, well, them, in order to - well, they never really seem very clear on what 'them' are trying to achieve.  The thesis that the moon hoax bunch posit is that either the US knew that landing on the moon was unfeasible, or that something went wrong with the real mission, forcing them to fake the whole thing in a film studio.  (I'm not going to get into the technicalities of refuting this guff, other than to say that it certainly was technically feasible to put men on the moon in 1969 and that, far from planning a cover up in the event it all went wrong, President Nixon actually had a statement prepared for such an eventuality).  So, while pondering such things and desperately trying to come up with a Christmas themed story for The Sleaze, I asked myself what if these conspiracy theorists 'uncovered' that Santa Claus was actually being faked by 'them'?  Maybe even the whole of Christmas is just a construct designed to divert people's attention from something or other.

Anyway, what if Santa died, from coronavirus maybe, like in the NHS ad, would the government move to fake his annual activities so as to ensure that public morale during the pandemic doesn't take another knock?  Would they employ actors dressed in red suits to go down chimneys, or fake footage of his North Pole workshop in a TV studio?  Of course, what I'm grasping toward is the idea that conspiracy theorists are the sort of people who, having suddenly found out that Santa isn't real, assume that they had previously been duped by a high level conspiracy, regardless of the fact that Santa never existed in the first place.  Is any of this making any kind of warped sense?  Because, you know, I'm really at a loss for a Christmas themed story this year - inspiration is very hard to come by under present conditions.  It is either this or some kind of Brexit-linked story. You know the sort of thing - Santa banned from the UK because he's too continental, or all his presents are trapped in a container at Felixstowe, the search for a new 'British' Santa?  All possibilities, but I really have to come up with something soon and the faking Santa conspiracy appeals simply because it is suitably surreal, the sort of thing we've traditionally specialised in at The Sleaze.  I'll have to sleep on it and see if my subconscious can hone the raw idea into something more like a viable story.