From our earliest childhoods, we all know Santa Claus has some truly remarkable powers – even if we don’t call them by that name at the time. We’ve all spent time pondering how he does all that he does:
- Sees us when we’re sleeping and awake (read: always)
- Knows if we’ve been bad or good (without any need of some Elf on a Shelf’s help, I might add)
- Manages to fit down (and later up) chimneys with ease (and finds alternative ingresses if you have none)
- Delivers toys to all the children of the world in a single night (a mind-boggling and impossible task even when you account for timezones)
- Has a stomach with a limitless capacity (who else is eating a world’s worth of children’s milk and cookies?)
Well, in 1991’s Holiday Special, Marvel gave us all the explanation we never expected.
Cerebro Detects The Most Powerful Mutant Ever![santa claus detected by cerebro]()
As the story goes: Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Banshee, and Wolverine are decorating a tree when Cerebro interrupts the festivities. It has just detected “the most powerful mutant ever registered!”
The team arrive on the scene and run into the current Brotherhood of Evil Mutants consisting of Toad, Blob, Pyro, Mastermind, Unus the Untouchable, and Fantasia. A fight ensues when all of a sudden it appears as if the Brotherhood has just….vanished.
Initially the X-Men suspect the disappearance to be nothing more than another of Mastermind’s tricks, but Wolverine announces that his senses say they really are gone. He’s partially right.
Santa makes his presence known at this point. He’s turned the Brotherhood into a bunch of action figures, then in short order teleports the X-Men away while simultaneously wiping their minds of any and all memories of the events of that last hour.
Santa’s True Power
According to the Marvel Wikia page, Santa’s powers include:
- Longevity (Immortality?)
- Matter and molecular manipulation (the shrinking of the Brotherhood as well as their transformation from organic beings to inanimate objects)
- Gravity manipulation (up and down chimneys with ease)
- Teleportation
- Weather manipulation (After the X-Men are teleported away by Santa, its snowing. Storm, our resident mutant weather manipulator and therefore a reasonable facsimile for a meteorological expert, comments that it wasn’t supposed to snow that day.)
And that doesn’t really even touch on his seeming omniscience/omnipresence (although teleportation touches on that latter a little bit).
(Editor’s Note: The Marvel Wikia page linked above also includes a lot of really cool Santa lore as well as a fairly extensive list of his aliases from all around the world!)
Santa Claus: An Omega Level Mutant
There is ongoing debate about whether Santa is the
strongest mutant ever recorded, or if he was just the strongest recorded to date back in the 1991 issue. Regardless, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas is in pretty good and insanely strong company alongside the likes of other Omega Level mutants like Jean Grey, Iceman, Franklin Richards, Hope Summers, and more.
And his powerset gives us all the more reason to be good boys and girls all year round…’Lest we incur his wrath and find ourselves shrunk to 1:10 scale.
“You’d better watch out” indeed…
Tabletop Takeaways: Tips for Dungeon Masters with a Narrative Spin