ANNUAL SANTA INTERVIEW: Getting his bear-ings in the Kootenays
By Castlegar Source
Iconic holiday figure Santa Claus, aka St. Nick, aka Pere Noel, was thinking about folks in our region even more than usual this year, The Sourcediscovered in an annual interview with Claus yesterday.
“I hear you’ve been having some bear problems in that neck of the woods,” he said. “We’ve been facing a similar problem here, but with polar bears, instead.”
Of course, he said, the shaggy creatures don’t eat garbage, like they do in Castlegar, or stage home invasions like the bruins in Rossland – but they create problems of their own.
“This being a magical place, we can talk to the bears …and we’d have words with any bear who acted like that,” he said, adding he was deeply impressed with the newsstory, earlier this year, of a Castlegar cop who chased away an invading bear in the middle of the night, just by giving it a stern talking-to.
“It’s hard enough to have words with such a fierce animal when they can understand you and you’ve been friends forever …it must’ve taken some kind of moxy to lecture one that’s maybe wondering whether you’d make a great entree.
“But I’m distracting myself – we were talking about the polar bears,” said St. Nick. “It’s like this – global warming is melting the ice caps around the edges – so the bears keep heading farther and farther north to find intact ice and temperatures cold enough for them to be comfortable.
“Of course, you can’t get much farther north than the North Pole, now can you …so guess where they end up?”
While not afraid of the bears – in fact, Claus says he counts them among his best buddies – the North Pole CEO finds the bears can be a burden, just the same.
“You know we would never, ever turn a friend away from the North Pole … but do you have any idea how much those critters eat?” he explained. “And we have to have our groceries flown in. There’s no Safeway or Ferraro’s here.
“We want to be hospitable, but … I sure wish people would turn around that global warming thing so bears can head back out and eat salmon fresh from the ocean, instead of out of our refrigerator.”
Claus went on to say the polar bears, too, feel a connection to the West Kootenay.
“ It all started one night when I heard such a clatter, I sprang up from the bed to see what was the matter … and it was the bears. I’ve never seen them act like that …rolling around on the ice, clutching their stomachs, tears freezing in their fur, they were all laughing so hard. Not very dignified, I must say.
“At first, I thought they’d all gotten into the rum pudding …rolling around, hollering stuff like ‘they call THAT cold?’ and ‘they took off their fur coats BEFORE getting in the water – who DOES that?’
“Turns out, a sweet six-year-old boy named Bud sent them a videotape of the Polar Bear Swim in Nelson, and it really tickled them.”
“At any rate, they asked me to pass along their regards.”
He also said Rudolph et al. are keenly anticipating the stop in Grand Forks, where the prodigious city deer population makes them all feel right at home.
Claus said he’s sad the Kootenay swing will be shortened this year, with so many area politicians having removed themselves from the ‘nice’ list, but he’s getting excited about the milk and brownies one can only get in Kootenay homes during the holidays.
“I don’t know what it is about the brownies out there … must be a special recipe you all have or a secret ingredient …but I really get to craving those little suckers when Christmastime rolls around,” he said.
The conversation was then cut short by an disagreement between the head reindeer and one of the elves.
“I guess Rudolph has his nose out of joint over some thing or another – not a pretty sight,” he said. “Gotta go.
“Tell all of your readers we’re thinking of them, and wishing them the Merriest of Christmasses … Ho, ho, ho!”
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