Dear Santa:

I hope you enjoy your protein shake for your long journey.

I would like to know what it’s like to be Santa Claus.

1. Is it fun to fly?
2. Do you like being in charge of your elves?
3. Do you like delivering presents to children?
4. What’s your favourite hobby?
5. What do you do over the weekend?
6. Do you ever think of moving to a sunny place?
7. Do you go on vacation?
8. What’s your birthday?
9. Do you deliver presents to pets?
10. Do you have a pet?

Love,

Talullah from LA

Dear Talullah:

You should know that Santa is very grateful to you for leaving him a protein shake. You are a very sweet girl. Unfortunately, Santa is very lactose intolerant and suffers acute gastric distress whenever he has a protein shake, so he had to give it to Dasher, his lead reindeer, who is a bit of a hippy and really very experimental in his tastes. Last year Dasher tried Ayahuasca– saw serpents and had diarrhea for two days.

Santa isn’t sure how that “blessed” him with “spiritual advancement,” but whatever.

Santa will now try to answer all your questions!

1. It is NOT fun to fly. It is VERY dangerous, especially with all the drones terrorizing the skies! Santa is only able to do it if he gets gassed up and takes his medication: 3mg of Ativan and a magic gummy.
2. Santa is not in charge of the elves! Santa and the elves work as a team, functioning as a single unit without any hierarchy! Also, the elves are very well compensated for the work they do and the netting that surround Santa’s toy factory are NOT suicide nets like those at all the Apple factories in China! Also, any rumours you heard about elf slavery or elf sex slavery are not true! That’s fake news!
3. Santa has had worse jobs. Working at a poultry farm, for instance.
4. For hobbies Santa really enjoys Cosplay, voyeurism and experimenting with surveillance equipment.
5. On the weekends Santa usually just chills and watches Netflix with the wife. Highly recommends Mindhunter.
6. It is amazing to Santa how ill-informed people are! Little girls like you, Talullah, just live in little electronic silos, never learning anything you don’t already believe! Let Santa assure you, there is plenty of sun in the North Pole!
7. We have been to Mar-a-Lago a number of times. Just the best. Saw Melania changing into her bikini once. Not bad at all.
8. Santa will only tell you that he is a Leo with Pisces ascendent.
9. No. Santa would throw-up if he ever even saw a chicken again.
10. Several elves and a turtle.

According to various reports, he is currently wandering around the remote BC island of Alert Bay, howling at the moon as if he’d just had his massive, mythical heart broken.

The news stations that deliver such stories do so with a smirk, as if it was on par with a Dachshund Super Bowl, a little bit of fun to indulge in at the end of a tough new cycle. Santa Claus stories packaged for children.

And yes, of course, unhinged obsessives touched with a kind of religious fervour and pranksters, make up the undying core of Bigfoot promoters. The sober mainstream asserts that Bigfoot does not exist because there is no proof or evidence that he does, and to believe anything else is to indulge in fantasy.

However, I would argue that this is a position of arrogance. We are inconceivably small in this universe. It’s impossible for us to process how small this pale blue dot is in the vast darkness of infinity.

There is more that is unknown than known in this world and beyond, and more that is invisible than visible. Our tools for perceiving the universe (sight, sound, smell) are pitiful. As humans, everything we know and sense, is created and processed by the mystical chemistry of our brain. It is literally true that the universe exists inside of our head, and it is worth keeping in mind that a different universe exists inside the brain of a spider. As a species, we apply our technology to expand our tools of perception so that we might better understand some of the things that lie beyond our natural ability. In short, we see very, very little.

Imagine you were a lobster living on the bottom of the oceans floors.

If you could be imbued with a consciousness like a human, there is simply no way that you could conceive of living on the same world as a creature like a human being. Physically, you could hardly be more dissimilar.

Your skeletal structure exists on the outside not the inside, you shuffle along in the bottomless dark of the cold seas. Humans, bipedal giants. You cannot imagine a world beyond water. You cannot imagine air, this transitional plain, or that there is a world yet beyond that, a terrestrial land where humans live in palaces, farming and managing your species and then devouring them as a delicacy. Such a thing would seem ludicrous and completely beyond your imagination, but we know that it is true. Perhaps, in the great expanse of time, distance and dimension, a similar analogy can be made, only with us as existing as the lobster and something else as humans.

In searching for Bigfoot we seek his proof on our terms, not his.

He must exist as we understand things to exist, not as he may exist. He must be visible to our eyes. But what if like radiation, or the wind, he’s not visible to to us? What if he’s not quite of this world we live in, just as we, are not quite of the world the lobster lives in?
The older I get, the weirder the universe becomes, and the more ridiculous it seems that we profess anything with certainty. The people who believe in Bigfoot are no more flawed in their methodology than those who claim his existence an impossibility, and so I am content to imagine his howls at night, a reminder of the limitless mystery both inside of us, and beyond.

It was covered with black hair all over her body. She ran across the county road, squatted down and when I got close to it, she made eye contact with me, jumped up and began to run beside the truck!

I know what I saw and I never believed the reports until it happened to my daughter and me that rainy night.

I was tree planting in British Columbia back around 2000. My partner and I were dropped off at a site that hadn’t been seeded for 10 years, and as such there were no evidence of human activity there at all. I remember remarking to Andrew that the truck tires leading in to the sight, now 10 years old, looked like artifacts on the moon. It was a little bit spooky, I guess, but it was nothing we really thought about.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of planting we came across some giant footprints in the middle of this nowhere. Bigfoot, right? I never believed in this sort of thing, but here was this massive, inconceivable footprint, and we followed it from step to step, each stride being about four feet. The footprints were fresh, too, I mean, it hadn’t been there more than a day or two, and as we followed the trail we came to a part where there were dozens of these prints all over the place, and then they all vanished into the forest. I never for a second believed in something like Bigfoot, and I can’t really say that I do now, but I honestly don’t know what it was we saw. I mean, if it was a hoax, why would they do it out there, in the middle of the interior of BC where nobody would see it, and if it wasn’t a hoax, what was it?

When I was 35 years old I was visiting my twin brother who at the time was living in Mad River. We were deer hunting high in the Trinity/Shasta Park in a thick-forested area. We split up and after 20 minutes all my hair stood on end because I began to feel there was something behind me in the ferns and forest. And then after 5 minutes a huge rock (30 pounds) was thrown into the creek bed near to me, and frightened I decided to head back to the truck. I waited in the truck for 40 minutes before my brother showed up. He had no idea what I was talking about, so I know he didn’t throw that rock. I’ve been hunting deer for 35 years all over America and this was the creepiest thing that has ever happened to me.  Personally, I think it was the Bigfoot who threw the rock at my head, and just so you know I’m not nuts, I have an MS and PHD in Organic Chemistry from Arizona State University.