As you are probably already aware, it’s Christmas next week, so I’m feeling a little festive. So let’s take a peek at Isaac Asimov’s story “Christmas on Ganymede.”

This story was originally published in 1940, and can be found in the anthology Christmas on Ganymede, and Other Stories. Alas, however, I believe that the book is out of print, since i had a very hard time finding it.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

We start off with a guy named Olaf Johnson. Olaf lives on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, and works for the Ganymedan Products Corporation. It’s also the festive season, so Olaf has volunteered to decorate the place. His festive mood, however, is soured pretty quickly when he’s called to meet with his boss, Pelham.

Quick note: Ganymede was already populated when they got there, by a race that the humans call Ossies, since they look kind of like ostriches. The Ossies are used as cheap labor by the corporation. Everything about the preceding two sentences makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Anyway, Pelham lays down the reason for his ire: somebody has told the Ossie workers about Santa Claus. And it’s Christmas Eve. And the Ossies refuse to work unless Santa shows up.

Olaf was the one who told them about Santa, and Pelham wants Olaf to pretend to be the jolly old elf himself, because they have a quota they need to meet.

The first thing they realize that they need is a sleigh, which they happen to have because they thought there was snow on the moon at first. They manage to make it fly by basically putting anti-gravity devices on the bottom. Then they attach a large plank of wood to it to put their “reindeer.”

Which brings us to the reindeer, which Olaf is tasked with wrangling. With a lot of difficulty, he manages to bag eight spinies, some local quadrupedal fauna with spines on their backs. He gets them back to the home base, and they get the creatures drunk before putting giving them branch horns.

With this taken care of, they work on getting Olaf kitted out to play Santa. Which turns out to be rather difficult with the supplies they have: the coat is made of tissue paper, and the beard is basically a bunch of cotton balls glued together. The others decide that this is good enough, though, and order Olaf to get int and start falling.

Olaf, at this point, gets some very understandable cold feet, but relents when he’s told that if he doesn’t, he’ll lose his job.

So, he starts flying, and while he’s doing his thing, Pelham is talking with the Ossie’s leader. The leader shows him the “chimney” (read: a whole in the ceiling) and stockings that they made.

Meanwhile, Olaf’s flight isn’t going very well. This is because the spinies wake up and start freaking out. This causes the sleigh to, at one point, fly upside down and eventually crash. Olaf’s fine, if a bit dinged up, and starts handing out presents, which are actually ornaments that the Ossies think are eggs that will eventually hatch into little Santas.The Ossies are delighted, and can’t wait for Santa to come back next year.

Pelham is OK with this, since he thinks they’re likely to forget all about this by the time next Christmas rolls around. Until, at least, one of his underlings remind him that the Ossies measure their year by the moon’s revolution about the planet.

Which means that the Ossies are expecting to see Good Old St. Nick again next week.

This story is kind of charming in some ways, but honestly I found it kind of boring. You can tell that Asimov was trying to be funny, but the issue here is that wasn’t really his strong suit, and this is something he knows. As the man himself put it:

I was trying to be funny, of course. I had this terrible urge to be funny, you see, and had already indulged in humor in more than one story. Writing humor, however, is harder than digging ditches. Something can be moderately well written, or moderately suspenseful, or moderately ingenious, and get by in every case. Nothing, however, can be moderately humorous. Something is either funny, or it is not funny at all. There is nothing in between

So, yeah. There’s a reason Asimov wasn’t really known for his sense of humor.