Reindeer Rant Redux – and a reindeer rampage!

My bloggy peeps, I have a reindeer-palooza of fun for you today! You might have read the reindeer rant a time or two (or coughninecough) before, but now we have reindeer trivia! And photoshop! And webcams! And even reindeer on a rampage! Oh my.

But first, the rant. Because especially at Christmas, traditions matter. Also? Because Donder.

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

You did know that Santa’s reindeer is actually Donder and not Donner, right?

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.

(Oh yes I did take that photo with this blog post in mind. Of COURSE I did!)

And now, as promised: reindeer trivia! Courtesy of mental_floss, amaze your colleagues at the office Christmas party with these clever facts about reindeer! Did you know:

• Reindeer and caribou are more or less the same – but not quite!
• Baby reindeer can run within 90 minutes of being born.
• Clement Clark Moore’s poem (see above) was the first ever reference to Santa having reindeer to pull his sleigh.
• Santa’s reindeer are most likely the R.t. platyrhynchus subspecies from the Svalbard islands off of Norway, the only reindeer that could really be considered tiny, weighing about half as much as the average reindeer species and at least a foot shorter in length.

Click through to the mental_floss article for more fun reindeer facts!

But this — THIS is my favourite find of this holiday season: the ReindeerCam! I discovered this through Twitter late last week, and have been clicking through rather regularly. It’s a live feed of Santa’s reindeer-in-training enclosure at Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Wildlife Park (“Halfway to the North Pole”!)

I find watching the reindeer strangely compelling. Santa comes out to feed the reindeer daily through Christmas at 9 am and 3:30 pm AST (that’s 8 am and 2:30 pm EST) and waves to the camera. It’s adorable!

I noticed yesterday that Santa’s sleigh had disappeared (I’m not kidding, I’m clicking through at least a couple of times each day!) and I laughed out loud when I saw what had happened. Mad reindeer on a rampage had toppled Santa’s sleigh – and of course it was all caught on camera. Naughty Donder!!

So there you go – it’s a multimedia reindeer-palooza! But don’t forget the key message here, folks – it’s Donder, not Donner. Tell your friends!