A (Data-Centric) Visit from St. Nicholas

My apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, but I was inspired to some Christmas (and data) inspired poetry this morning.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hope that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

And at that exact moment, in his shop way up north
The old man paced nervously, first back and then forth
He had spent so much effort in making his list;
Was it right? Was it accurate? Was there something he’d missed?

More than fifty straight weeks had he gathered the data,
His facts were on time, the dimensions came later;
He had sources to tell him the toys each child had,
But he’d had to determine who was good, and who bad;

So he digitally scanned every letter he’d gotten,
With OCR parsing the kind from the rotten;
And joined it with billions of rows he’d been keeping
On how children behaved while awake or while sleeping

With a cookie to fuel him, he pulled outliers out
In order to learn what each child was about,
He normalized measurements, threw out duplicate rows
To find out which kids would get gifts when they rose

The prepping complete, he turned his eyes to the model:
”Bad children,” said he, “I will simply not coddle!”
Having randomly split his list into two,
St Nicholas knew what he next had to do;

“I’ll train it! I’ll test it! I’ll tune ‘til it’s right!
I’ll test AUCs if it takes me all night!
I’ll segment this long list of the world’s girls and boys
Into two sets, one who gets coal and one who gets toys!”

But despite his best efforts, the list wouldn’t split,
They all came back as “good” and he wanted to quit;
Until lovely old Mrs Claus, with a click of her tongue,
Reminded him firmly, a rebuke, and it stung:

“Dear Nicholas, stop it, stop right now, and here!
You’re doing your best job of stealing my cheer;
Your approach isn’t flawed, it’s just fine, it’s quite right,
And it tells you that ALL kids are good on this night;”

And Santa, quite suddenly, threw down his list,
Took his wife in his arms and he gave her a kiss
”Get the reindeer,” he said as he turned to an elf,
Popped his pipe in his mouth as he readied himself;

“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
And he said with a laugh as the reindeer took flight:
”Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”