Torrent Nightmare Before Christmas Here

Part One: The Seedier Side of the Holidays Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, was bored. Another Halloween had come and gone, a symphony of screams he’d conducted a thousand times before. The shrieking kids, the rubber spiders, the perfectly calibrated terror—it had all become a hollow, joyless ritual.

Santa raised a single, mitten-clad hand. It wasn’t a hand. It was a key . He typed into the air:

So he wrote a letter. Not an email. Not a torrent. A real letter, on bat-skin parchment, addressed to the North Pole.

It read: Dear Santa, I’m sorry I tried to pirate your joy. Next year, may I please just have a lump of coal? I think I’d like to warm my hands on something real.