"Saint Teddy Candycanski"

Saint Teddy Candycanski, the Solstice Unwrapper

His last known letter, written in red-and-green ink on the back of a fruitcake recipe, ended with the line:
“One day the last factory bell will ring,
the last plastic toy will break,
and the only sound on Christmas morning
will be the silence I have gifted you.”

Even the reindeer still flinch when they hear a candy wrapper crinkle.1.6sFastnow give me a story about himDeep in the sugar-spruce wilderness, three days’ march past the last string of fairy lights, there stands a crooked little cabin made of gingerbread logs and regret. A single candy-cane pipe juts from the roof, but nothing sweet ever comes out of it; only thin gray smoke that smells of pine pitch and old grudges.

This is the home of Teddy Candycanski, the elf who used to sign the bottom of every toy patent with a tiny smiling face.

Back then they called him “the Workshop’s little genius.” He invented the Ever-Jingle Bell, the Self-Wrapping Ribbon, the Reindeer Turbo-Nog Injector. Children loved him. Santa gave him an extra cookie every century.

Then one December he opened the new production ledger and saw the numbers:
4,872,000,000 plastic drones with blinking eyes.
6,300,000,000 feet of single-use tinsel.
One planet, choking.
That night he walked out of the dormitory without his stocking cap. He left a note on his pillow written in molasses ink:
I am going to live deliberately.
I am going to kill what is killing joy.
Seventeen years passed.

Every so often a small, perfect package arrived at the North Pole post office. Brown paper, red twine, return address smudged with spruce sap. Inside: a hand-carved wooden puzzle box that smelled faintly of peppermint and something sharper.
Nineteen elves opened their gifts too early.
The twentieth box was addressed to Santa in Teddy’s own neat copperplate:
For the fat man in the red suit who sold wonder by the pound.
They caught him on the first day of spring thaw. Elf trackers followed a trail of crushed lifesavers and manifesto pages nailed to trees. When they kicked in the cabin door they found Teddy sitting cross-legged on the floor, calmly licking a candy-cane shiv he had whittled to a razor’s edge.

He did not run. He only looked up with those pale wintergreen eyes and said, “You’re too late. The real bomb was the workshop all along.”

They dragged him back in iron chains strung with sleigh bells that had been deliberately detuned to clang wrong. The trial lasted nine minutes. Guilty on every count. Sentence: eternity in the Peppermint Mines, breaking rock candy with a hammer made of frozen tears.

But every year, on the night before Christmas Eve, the guards hear it: the soft scrape of a quill on bark, the rustle of brown paper, the faintest crinkle of cellophane.
And somewhere in the dark, a small voice hums an old workshop carol, off-key on purpose:
“You better watch out
You better not buy
You better return
I’m telling you why
Saint Teddy Candycanski is coming…
to town.”

• 100% ring-spun cotton
• Sport Grey is 90% ring-spun cotton, 10% polyester
• Dark Heather is 65% polyester, 35% cotton
• 4.5 oz/yd² (153 g/m²)
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Quarter-turned to avoid crease down the center
• Blank product sourced from Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Haiti or Guatemala

Disclaimer: Due to the fabric properties, the White color variant may appear off-white rather than bright white.

This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!