The Conclusion
Once I confirmed I could access the super secret research department share with Santa's Secret for a Wonderful Holiday Season, I had to simply get the file from smbclient with: get SantaSecretToAWonderfulHolidaySeason.pdf. This only put it on the registration server, so I could SCP it down. That is, if I could get SCP to actually work. Not much of a problem, I didn't fiddle with it all that much and there were tons of other ways to exfil data. The way I chose to do it was:
base64 -w0 ./SantaSecretToAWonderfulHolidaySeason.pdf
Then copied the output into my clipboard. On my local shell, I ran:
echo -n <pasted output> | base64 -d > SantaSecretToAWonderfulHolidaySeason.pdf
Then opened it normally. The contents?
According to the document, the first secret ingredient is Kindness!