“There ain’t no Christmas on Ebenezer-6! Never has been.” Stephania exclaimed, “No Hanukkah, Kwanza, or Europan Colonization day either. None of them winter holidays are allowed here.”
“But why?” Rob cocked his head.
Rob had only been on the planet a few weeks when he naively asked his coworker, “Stephania, why isn’t there any Christmas merchandise in the company store?”
“The corporation gives the boss some ridiculous quotas to meet. You give extra days off, you don’t meet the quotas. Plus, if you start encouraging that, people start expecting seasonal bonuses to pay for gifts for their loved ones. It’s just bad for business,” Stephania explained, “As long as your living here, you’d best forget you ever even heard of Christmas.”
Rob returned to his small, single bedroom house dejected. He needed this job, the pay was excellent, but Ebenezer-6 was such a gloomy place. And now he was told he couldn’t celebrate Christmas, of all things. In his 24 Earth years of life, across three different planets, he had always made time to celebrate Christmas. He looked up into the night sky and wished deeply that something would change.
The mineral rich, orange planet Ebenezer-6 was owned and controlled by the Cole-Stocking Corporation. The world was a combination mining and factory colony, occupied entirely by company workers and their families. Aside from the main enterprise, the colony included a company store, school, and other essential amenities all run by the corporation. There was no specific corporate rule against holidays, but many of Cole-Stocking’s planets chose to outlaw them for productivity’s sake.
The man in charge of Ebenezer-6, Timothy Smit, had never been fond of Christmas or other holidays, even before he found himself running the colony. It always seemed pointless to the serious-minded Mr. Smit, and bright holiday lights hurt his eyes, so he was more than happy to ban the holidays the moment he was transferred to Ebenezer-6 in the name of increased profits. That was almost 30 years ago, and now almost no one even remembered Christmas existed except the occasional new worker from off-world.
Mr. Smit lived in a mansion at the outermost part of the terraformed section of the planet. He returned to his home on December 24th, not even really remembering the significance of the date. He fell over into his favorite chair, exhausted from a day of meetings, only to notice something on his coffee table that shouldn’t have been in his home. It looked familiar, something from his childhood, but he couldn’t immediately place his finger on it. It was a doll, clad in a bright red with a long, white beard. Finally, it hit him that the toy in front of him was a relic of Christmas, a symbol of the hated holiday. Furious, Smit threw the doll against the wall. The doll slid down the wall and landed in the corner of the floor, undamaged by Smit’s wrath. Wanting answers for this incursion into his home, Smit called for his butler.
“Where did this… this… thing come from?” He shouted.
“I don’t know, sir,” The butler said, “I’ve never seen it before.”
“Of course you haven’t! It’s a forbidden symbol!” Smit yelled at the top of his lungs, “When I find out who put this here, they’ll find themselves out of a job!”
“I’ll ask the rest of the staff if they know anything, sir.”
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Timothy Smit paced the room, furious at the Christmas decoration on the floor. The butler returned later that evening to tell Smit that nobody had seen the doll before, or seen anyone outside of the usual staff enter or leave the room. Smit tried his best to push the whole incident out of his mind. He picked the doll up and placed it in a nearby trash bin before heading to bed.
At midnight, the spaceships came. Smit was fast asleep, and had no idea that three alien crafts were hovering right outside of his home. From each craft came a beam of light, shining directly at Smit’s room. The bright lights awoke Smit from his slumber just in time for him to see a trio of shapes descending into the room from the beams, phasing through the walls of the mansion. Smit rubbed his eyes and stared sleepily at the three aliens in front of him.
The visitors lined up in a row at the foot of Smit’s bed. On the left stood a short, green humanoid clad in a silver spacesuit. Its facial features were completely androgynous, and its build looked like that of a child. In the middle was a massive creature, standing roughly 8 feet tall. This creature was a mass of limbs, with at least a dozen legs and four arms emerging from a fuzzy torso. It had no visible neck connecting its extremely hairy head to its massive chest. Smit couldn’t make out the creature on the right, an amorphous, shadowy blob, constantly changing shape.
The middle alien carried something in one of its four hands, holding it out for Smit. It was the doll from earlier.
“No.” Smit whimpered, “This is some kind of dream. It’s not happening.”
“Merry… Christmas…” The middle alien said slowly, speaking in a deep booming voice but clearly unfamiliar or uncomfortable with English.
“Merry Christmas.” The other two aliens chanted in unison, the short one in a high pitched voice and the shapeless one in a gravely tone.
“No! I don’t want any!” Smit shouted, “There is no Christmas on Ebenezer-6! Get that through your skulls.”
Smit looked at the shapeless one on the right.
“Do… do you even have a skull?” Smit stuttered, puzzled by the creature’s anatomy.
“Merry Christmas.” The three chanted again in response.
“Why are you here?”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Say something else, damn it!”
The bearded doll in the middle alien’s hand began to shake. The head on the doll rattled and popped off. There was something inside. Smit watched with growing horror as a red tentacle worked its way out of the doll’s neck, followed by a green one. Several more tentacles emerged as something that looked like a small octopus squeezed its way out of the doll. The middle alien continued trying to hand it to Smit.
“Merry Christmas.” The aliens repeated.
“No… stay away from me with that thing.” Smit cried, falling from his bed as he tried to get up and flee.
Smit had no time to react before the left and right aliens rushed him, pinning him to the ground. The middle alien grew closer, the green-and-red tentacled creature still in its hand. The small creature jumped from the alien’s grip and onto Smit’s face. Smit tried to scream, but the amorphous alien helping to hold him down covered his mouth with an appendage like a giant sponge. The octopus thing pushed a tentacle into Smit’s nose, and then began squeezing the rest of itself inside his nasal cavity. Smit couldn’t breathe, his mouth was still blocked and his nose was now becoming increasingly filled with something that couldn’t possibly fit inside. Still, somehow, the small creature fully worked its way up Smit’s nose and into his head. From there, it burrowed its way up to his brain and nested itself firmly within his skull, filling Smit with Christmas cheer and an intense desire to control the will of others.
“Merry Christmas.” Smit said.
The three aliens backed off, Smit was one of them now and he knew what he had to do. The aliens beamed down a dozen wrapped boxes from their ship, each of which contained another Yule parasite like the one in Smit’s head. These would go to the staff of Smit’s mansion, so they could begin their work. It would take a year for the birthing vats brought on the ships to produce enough to control the whole planet. It was too late for this Christmas, but on the next one they would make their move.
Rob couldn’t believe it. The previous year, he had been told that there was no Christmas on Ebenezer-6, but something had changed. Not only was the whole planet in full holiday mode, but the boss himself had sent everyone presents. Now, Rob was decorating his house for a Christmas party, albeit one with a small guest list as he still hadn’t made many friends on the planet. He haphazardly hung tinsel and lights all around his living room, singing the old Christmas classics as he worked. It was still a few hours until Rob’s friends arrived, so he decided to sit down and catch his breath. Rob looked under his tree at the pile of packages. For a second, he thought he saw one of the presents shake. Figuring it was just his imagination; he got back up and continued preparing for his party.
He was certain this would be the best Christmas ever.