We recently reported on the cost-of-reindeer-feed crisis that is jeopardizing Santa’s Christmas’s eve gift drop. Now, the big man has been implicated in a multiple cat abandonment which has occurred in Bramfield, near Halesworth.
One cat and eight kittens were found dumped in the middle of a field this week by Marjorie Spool, a local farmer’s wife who was out picking dumplings for Christmas. We asked Maj to tell us what happened.
The cat abandonment story
“Well, Bert, that’s my husband, the farmer, he likes a dumpling with his Christmas lunch. Everyone knows that dumplings are supposed to go with cow but he likes his with Turkey. Whatever. So, I goes up into three-acre field to the small patch of dumplings that I sowed in November to gather ‘em in. It was a nice crop. I was on my way back when when I saw two tracks in the snow. Strange looking they were and not from any of our machines, so I took a closer look. They were about six feet apart and there seemed to be what looked like glitter in and around the tracks. Very strange, I thought.”
Maj told us how she followed the tracks for about thirty yards until she heard the faint miaowing of… well… cats.
“Right at the end of the tracks was this litter of cats. Well, one cat and eight kittens. All black, apart from the glitter on ‘em. I started scratchin’ my head as I couldn’t fathom what was going on.
I looked at the tracks, then at the cats, then back at the tracks, then back at the cats again – well, one cat, and eight kittens. I was scratching and thinking. Then it dawned on me. I’d read about Santa and the problems he was having with his reindeer feed in the SUFFOLK GAZETTE.
I knew that he had cut some sort of deal with Ryanair because the article was so informative and well-written. But then I thought, hang on, those Ryanair bastards are so unreliable, perhaps the deal with Santa fell through? Then it all made sense. Santa must have decided to use cats – well, one cat, and eight kittens – as replacements for his starving reindeer. The tracks were from his sleigh which had crash landed in our field. Obviously.”
The names just won’t stick
We asked the farmer’s wife what happened next. “How much did you say I’m getting for this? £100? Okay. So I picked up that cats – well one cat, and eight kittens, and I puts ‘em in the cat cages that I happened to be carrying with me, and takes ‘em back down to the house. When I put ‘em on the kitchen table, I noticed that each of the cats – well, one cat, and eight kittens – had little tags around their necks with their names on. I read them out loud to myself… ‘Blitzen, Prancer, Dancer, Rudolph, Cupid’ errr? I can’t remember the rest. But that confirmed my suspicions. I was all excited and thought, I’d better call the SUFFOLK GAZETTE because they’ll probably pay for a story like this, so that’s what I done.”
To be certain, we asked Majory if she was saying that in her opinion, Santa had used the cats – well one cat, and eight kittens – as a trial run for the Christmas drop – presumably because cat food is cheaper than reindeer feed – but crash-landed because of the cats’ (one cat, eight kittens) inability to fly, and then just left them there in the field, and then somehow recovered his sleigh back to the North Pole, maybe with the assistance of Ryanair or some other passing flying animals? “Yes” came her reply.
We wish to clarify that no money changed hands between the Suffolk Gazette and the farmer’s wife except for the £100 we paid to buy the dumplings from her.
