Special Guest Blogger: Head Elf Shinny Upatree

Most businesses start small and Santa’s magical workshop is no exception, at the start there were only just six elves designing and making toys and dealing with the millions of requests children send Santa every year. Hundreds of years later us original six elves are still employed with Santa at the North Pole and i was the first and even co-founded the Magic Workshop with Santa.
I have been around so long that i have forgotten how old i am but i do remember that the North Pole Village was just one igloo when i got here and that had a fir tree inside it which grew and grew so i made it my home but had to cut a hole in the top and it took up so much room it blocked the door so I had to climb up it to get in and out, hence the name.
I met a jolly fat guy who had an idea of how to honour children at Christmas and it sounded fun so i contacted some other elves i knew in far-away lands who may have the qualities we needed to get the project off the ground and first to come was Bushy Evergreen who could make anything out of wood, he used to build ships so he knew what he was doing with a hammer and a chisel and he not only built most of the village, but also came up with the concept of Santa's sleigh but it was when Wunorse Openslae turned up with his magical gift for working with animals who made it so it could fly, he really did have animals in his blood, reindeer's especially, and not just in his blood, also on his shoes, on his trousers, on his coat, he trod it everywhere.
With the organisation becoming larger, next came a pretty little Elf called Mary, or Sugarplum Mary as she was quickly nicknamed due to her love of serving everything with Sugarplums. She helped Mrs Claus in the kitchen to keep us all fed with snacks, mostly toast and sugarplum sandwiches but her joke about making our sandwiches from shortbread became old very quickly.   
Now we needed some sort of administration so we hired Alabaster Snowball who is the nerdy geek behind the 'Naughty and Nice List' and Buzzlewitz who is the elf responsible for collecting the children’s Christmas lists and delivering them to Santa.
With the lineup complete we set about making Christmas and have been doing it for longer than i want to think of and we have seen a few changes, mostly the toys on the lists but a lack of chimneys on rooftops and the problems of passing over international boundaries into certain countries but to be honest, there are some countries that i wouldn't pass water over.