Satan Claus

The setting is America in the early- to mid- 1800s.

It is not, however, America as we know it. Thomas Jefferson became the first President of the United States. He designated all the land west of the Mississippi as an Indian refuge, with the result that America is now crowed into massive cities on the East Coast, the most notable of which is New York.

The South never adopted slavery, because the cotton gin was never invented. Instead, the de facto slavery of cheap labor in the cities exploits Negro and Irish alike. This only serves to increase racial tensions, as the two groups compete for the same jobs.

Religion is different too. Catholic and Protestant Christianity never became the dominant religion of Europe. Instead Gnosticism thrived, alongside with Celtic and Roman Paganism It is the conflict between these two religions that produced the gangs of Satan Claus, where rich English Gnostics, living in esoteric refinement, exploit cheap Pagan labor, culled from the squalid slums of half-a-dozen metropoli.

Here the Pagan Irish defiantly celebrate the harvest-feast of their deity, in olden times called Samhain, now simply called... Satan Claus.