You may laugh but think about the similarities between Santa and documented cryptids.
Cryptids tend to be seen in places with difficult terrain where they cannot easily be tracked or seen. -Santa lives in an icy wasteland. Santa disappears and reappears. There are stories about bigfoot disappearing before people’s eyes and many cryptids are only spotted at certain times of the year when conditions are right. Santa flies through the air on a sled with flying reindeer. There are many flying cryptids from thunderbirds to mothman.
Then there are his little helpers –the elves. They could be a descendant or offshoot of the Hobbit skeletons that were found in recent years.
He leaves gifts. There are old stories of wildmen who left food for the starving on their doorsteps.
Santa is rather hairy according to many depictions with flowing beard and locks. Ditto are many cryptids.
He has a distinctive cry-Ho Ho Ho. So do many cryptids including a species of giant bat that is said to make a similar noise.
Santa only exists in folklore stories, so do many crytids until people start to hunt for them. Nearly all cryptids from the Loch Ness Monster to the Yeti are first discovered in old stories when one looks back at the time line.
So Is Santa Claus a cryptid? Probably not as there is no eye witness testimony to back up his appearances that I am aware of (that does not include your parent in a red dressing gown and Santa hat and fake beard leaving presents at the bottom of the bed) but next time someone scoffs at your belief in cryptids, remind them they believed in Father Christmas once so don’t knock belief in the unknown.
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4 comments:
I did mention on Karl Shuker's blog that while Father Christmas is not in himself Cryptozoological, in Europe he is frequently accompanied by a bona fide Cryptid, a Wildman figure known as The Krampus, who is there to punish (or at least threaten to punish) the naughty children.
Santa is also the only cryptid so far supposed to exploit quantum mechanical effects in his appearances (also the Owlman is another strong candidate for such trickery). Consider; Santa is verifiably able to visit millions in but a single night, yet is almost never seen in motion. He is unbelievably stealthy, appearing in houses protected by the best security systems money can buy, yet never being detected. Clearly something weird is going on.
That weirdness is the wonderful and most incredibly strange world of quantum mechanics. Once a year, interestingly never far from the Solstice, in the cold part of the year, a vast field of potential Santa comes into existence. This field is collapsed from potential to actual for mere instants wherever a suitably good individual exists, leaving a present, and frequently other things synch as glasses of sherry, mince pies and the like also disappear at the same time (probably to help combat mass inequalities which might otherwise prevent the effect working), similarly instantaneously.
Clearly more research is needed.
Actually some years ago the danish rarities committee received a description of Santa Claus from the staff on an ornithological field station at the extreme west coast of Denmark. Apparently they had seen said gentleman complete with sleigh and reindeer flying southwards along the coast.
The rarities committee rejected the sighting!
I find this fascinating especially since I had an odd Christmas experience with a cryptid. I thought it was Santa Claus' evil brother or something of that nature. I was a kid. But it was real and it's stayed with me for a long time now...
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