Dear Santa

It’s the most wonderful time of year for Christmas-themed procedural generation!

This NaNoGenMo project (from the same person who brought you One Hundred And Sixty-Five Days of Christmas) is the collective expression of humanity’s desires, in the form of a procedurally-generated letter to Santa.

The raw input used is from Twitter, which makes some of the entries particularly raw. There’s funny requests, offensive ones, and heartbreaking ones. Humanity’s collective id, as expressed to Santa Claus.

There’s five different official novels, collected at different times. The election night ones are, as you might expect, rather emotionally fraught. The Black Friday novel is a bit more materialistic, though not always:

I want people who have to dance.
I want your attention.🙃
I want ice cream to eat my feelings’ and ‘Someone get me drunk so I have no feelings’ …..
I want this to last us a lifetime, those are times we most ain’t in out right mind
I want to watch a decent game
I want something I go get it.
I want but honestly I’ll do better without
I want to date jack sparrow
I want to hear other voices than the ones in my head…! :'c

For something with such a light-hearted framing, it manages to drill down into the darkest nights of humanity. Nicholas is, I suppose, used to playing the role of saint-confessor. There’s heartbreak, suicidal thoughts, desires of violence and murder, abusive relationships, sexual assault, and all the darkest vices of the human heart.

Though human desires are not universally dark. There’s hopeful desires too. Desires for love, family, food, and good outcomes.

Some of my favorite bits are where the straight format gets broken because of the source content, a swerve that interjects unexpected questions:

Also, humanity seems to collectively have trouble deciding where their next piercing should be.

 https://github.com/hugovk/NaNoGenMo-2016/tree/master/03-dearsanta