Chapter Excerpt

SANTA AND
THOSE REINDEER

His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry.
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broadface and a little round belly
That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE,
"A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS"

Where do you think Santa Claus is right now? Sitting with a glass of sherry in front of the glowing embers in a cozy wooden house while Arctic snow falls softly on his sleigh outside? Or maybe feeding the reindeer? Perhaps he has his maps out and is making adjustments to his route across the North Pole for Christmas Eve?

Not the real Santa. For the sake of accuracy, Christmas cards should show Santa in sunglasses, clad in red and white swimming trunks, and sipping a cool Coke next to a swimming pool. For the sake of completeness, a reindeer with a sunburned nose, called Rosie, should be panting nearby.

There is now evidence to suggest that Santa's abode lies not on the polar ice cap, but among Mediterranean olive groves on Gemiler, a tiny island off Turkey. It is there, historians believe, that St. Nicholas, a direct ancestor of Santa Claus, may have died.

Gemiler is well-known to tourists and has recently been the subject of a number of archaeological studies, most recently by the University of Osaka, and by a group of scholars including David Price-Williams, an archaeologist who lectures at London University. Though it is only half a mile long, it has at least five churches decorated with frescoes and mosaics and all the hallmarks of a major religious site—a holy city dedicated to St. Nicholas.

Medieval Venetian sailing instructions refer to Gemiler as the Island of San Nicolo. On a church door near the anchorage is a painting of "Osios Nikolaus"—St. Nicholas himself. The island also has a huge Byzantine ecclesiastical complex, with a magnificent 300-meter barrel-vaulted processional way. At other Byzantine sites processional roadways are often associated with monastic complexes dedicated to the veneration of major saints, but few ever reached the grandeur of the one at Gemiler.

Who Was Santa?

Legend suggests that St. Nicholas was born around A.D. 245 in the town of Patara, an important Byzantine port in Turkey, only a couple of hours' sail from Gemiler. When Nicholas was a young man, his father died, leaving a great fortune. Nicholas began anonymously giving away the money to the needy, especially to children. Eventually he became Bishop of Myra (the modern-day coastal town of Demre), at the southernmost tip of the Bey Daglari Mountains. (The name "Myra" is derived from that of the resin myrrh.) There he supposedly performed several miracles, including saving sailors from drowning and resurrecting three boys who had been killed by an evil butcher. It is the best-known of his miracles, however, that helps to wrap St. Nicholas into the legend of Santa Claus.

This miracle concerned a noble and his three daughters, who had fallen on hard times. The daughters had little chance of marriage, as their father could not pay their dowries, so they faced a life of prostitution. One night St. Nicholas, hearing of the girls' plight, threw a sack of gold through a window of the nobleman's shabby castle. The sack contained enough gold to provide for one daughter's marriage. The next night he tossed another sack of gold through the window for the second daughter. But on the third night the window was closed. Ever resourceful, St. Nicholas dropped the third sack of gold down the chimney. Townsfolk heard the story and began hanging stockings by the fireplace at night to collect any gold that might come their way, presumably—hence the tradition of the Christmas stocking and Santa's affinity for fireplaces.

St. Nicholas probably died sometime in the mid-fourth century (One oft-quoted date is December 6, 343.) The earliest Byzantine portraits show him with a long white beard, and when the reformed church spread throughout Europe, he became linked with Christmas because his feast day is 6 December. His fame was widespread by the sixth century— a possible explanation for the huge settlement on Gemiler.

But just after 650, this place of veneration was disbanded The Islamic governor of Syria launched a fleet to challenge Byzantine sea power in the Mediterranean. He quickly destroyed the settlements on Cyprus, followed by those on Rhodes and Cos. Gemiler was abandoned. The site lay forgotten and forlorn—the lost sacred city of St. Nicolas. Today St. Nicholas remains one of the most popular Christian saints and is known as the patron of children, sailors, teachers, students, and merchants.

There are many and varied explanations of how St. Nicholas evolved into the character we know. All that can be said with certainty is that Santa's roots lie in folk customs and beliefs from a sackful of sources. These include the British Father Christmas, the French Père Noël, the Dutch Sinterklaas, the Danish Jules-Missen, and even the Romanian Mos Craicun.

The Protestant church also influenced the evolution of this icon. When Martin Luther objected to the practice of gifts being given to children in the name of a Catholic saint, Nicholas was joined during the Reformation by a child, the Christkindlein. This would mutate back into the Father Christmas figure Kriss Kringle in English-speaking society.

Then the Christkindlein was joined by a dwarfish, darkfaced companion, often a frightening figure, known variously as Krampus, Pelzebock, Pelznickel (Nicholas in furs), Hans Muff, Bartel, or Gumphinkel. There were also female equivalents—Berchtel, Buzebergt, and Budelfrau. Most commonly the companion was called Knecht Ruprecht and carried a bundle of switches to mete out punishment to naughty children.

The Dutch are often credited with transforming the saint into the character we know today. Their custom of giving presents to children on the Day of St. Nicholas was brought to America by early Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (renamed New York when the British took over the colony). There Sinterklaas, the colloquial Dutch for St. Nicholas, evolved into Santa Claus.

Sinterklaas was traditionally depicted with a broadbrimmed hat and a pipe, and his long churchly robe was replaced with short breeches. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the various traditions started to mingle, so that in I809, for instance, the American writer Washington Irving wrote of a jolly, chubby fellow riding in a wagon over treetops.

There is another, quite different way to trace the evolution of the modern Santa. His development could be viewed in terms of how brains have been parasitized through the ages by entities that evolved to thrive in just such a niche. These are memes (loosely speaking, units of cultural transmission), a term coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins to show that ideas replicate rather like genes do. Examples include tunes, catchphrases, innovative concepts, clothes, fashions, and, of course, Santa Claus, Father Christmas, and the rest.

Genes are carried by organisms in which they produce effects (skin color, blood type, and so on) that make each of us individual. Memes are carried by meme vehicles—poems, books, sayings, and so on—bearing an idea that will distract us, burden our memories, and coerce children to be well behaved in the frantic run up to Christmas Day. Otherwise, as the memes warn, Santa will not deliver any presents. As one sociologist puts it, "Parents use the belief in Santa Claus to control children, to induce children to defer demands for gratification to Christmas, and to make it appear that Santa, not the parents, causes the deprivation of children."

Modern Santa and Meaning

It would be a mistake to describe today's Santa as a simple amalgam and evolutionary endpoint of his rich mixture of ancestors. For one thing, many versions still exist. In different regions of Germany St. Nick is known by various names including Klaasbuur, Burklaas, Rauklas, Bullerklaas, and Sunnercla. In eastern Germany, where the Santa figure remains more connected with his pagan past, he is called Ash Man, Shaggy Goat, or Rider. There is also the Weihnachtsmann, a Father Christmas-like figure who is depicted as tired and stooped from toiling through the dark winter night with his heavy burden of toys.

Another blow against the Santa-as-amalgam model has been struck by anthropologists. They have set to work on the most ubiquitous form of the modern Santa and declared him to be more than the sum of his European influences—indeed they see him as distinctly American. They highlight five key differences between the Santa of today and his ancestors: (I) Santa lacks the religious baggage of his predecessors; (2) he is, by the standards of Knecht Ruprecht, a bit boring; (3) he has turned into a softhearted liberal with no stomach for the punishment meted out by the likes of Sinterklaas and Knecht Ruprecht; (4) this mythical figure is more tangible than his predecessors, thanks to appearances in films, TV shows, and department stores (even in Japan); and (5) he spends much more than his central European forebears, preferring to give Nintendo video games rather than nuts, for example.

The distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has provided a wonderful pen portrait of this Christmas icon: "Father Christmas is dressed in scarlet: he is a king. His white beard, his furs and his boots, the sleigh in which he travels evoke winter. He is called 'Father' and he is an old man, thus he incarnates the benevolent form of the authority of the ancients."

Importantly, says Lévi-Strauss, children believe in him, paying homage to him with letters and prayers, while adults do not: "Father Christmas thus first of all expresses the difference in status between little children on the one hand, and adolescents and adults on the other. In this sense he is linked to a vast array of beliefs and practices which anthropologists have studied in many societies to try to understand rites of passage and initiation."

Sociologists have also been toiling away to reveal what we mean by Santa. Warren Hagstrom of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, couches his analysis in terms of either positivism or Clauseology. For the positivist (nineteenth century version), "belief in Santa Claus is defined as erroneous; and the problem of the positivist is to discover how such erroneous beliefs arise. The positivist, arguing that all beliefs arise by inference from experiences, finds the meaning of Santa in false inferences from actual experiences."

The naturism of the German-born British philologist Max Müller is a variety of positivism that finds the origins of figures like Santa in natural phenomena, says Hagstrom. Children, like primitive people, often personalize the forces of nature. "While small children may find it difficult to conceptualize the winter solstice, they find it easy to conceptualize Santa Claus. (Ask any child questions about the two phenomena.)"

The Clauseologist position, Hagstrom explains, is that Santa Claus exists but that his essential nature ("meaning") cannot be empirically ascertained. "The empirical phenomena associated with Santa are likely to be illusory and deceptive. It is instead necessary to rely on nonempirical methods of investigation, of which there are two types: inner experience and revealed sources. I cannot report here my inner experiences of Santa Claus, since it has been so long since I've had any genuine experiences of this type." This piece of whimsy, published in American Sociologist, goes on to say that one of the major problems facing Clauseologists is collecting authentic revealed sources.

Fortunately, Hagstrom accepts works like "A Visit from St. Nicholas" as part of the canon. This Christmas poem marks perhaps the most important single blueprint for modern Santa. It was written by Clement Clarke Moore, a professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York. A classical scholar and poet, Moore had translated Juvenal and other Roman poets into English verse and turned his hand to poetry in the romantic style. He was familiar with the folklore of the Dutch, German, and Scandinavian immigrants who had settled in the northern United States, including the Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas (which by then was widely observed on December 24 and 25) and the Teutonic and Norse notions of a jovial but somewhat impish figure who presided over the pagan midwinter festivities. In I822 he synthesized the lot into a figure who stars in his poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

That December Moore read the verses aloud to his children. A visitor to his home was so impressed that he had the poem published the following year in the Troy Sentnel in upstate New York. The poem gave us these oft-quoted lines: "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring—not even d mouse." In dozens of rhyming couplets, often derided today as doggerel, he described a plump, pipe-smoking Santa who traveled from the north in a sleigh drawn by tiny flying reindeer with "dainty hooves." This St. Nicholas also had a belly "that shook. . . like a bowl full of jelly" and a beard that was "white as the snow." That much sounds very familiar. However, he was "dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot," which is more reminiscent of Pelznickel than of a latter-day Santa.

Alas, St. Nicholas probably did not celebrate Christmas and probably never saw, or even knew about, reindeer. In Dutch legends Sinterklaas travels on a gray horse and wears bishop's robes. It is not clear when, if ever, Moore saw a sleigh drawn by reindeer, let alone the beasts in the wild, though he may have been acquainted with a Finnish legend concerning "Old Man Winter," who drives his reindeer down from the mountains, bringing snow with him.

Further evolution in the image of Santa occurred when he was depicted as a pear-shaped, jolly character with a flowing white beard in drawings by Thomas Nast in Harpers Weekly between I863 and I886. The break with his religious past was by then clear: Nast's Santa was reminiscent of his drawings of a drunken Bacchus and the corpulent plutocrat William "Boss" Tweed. Nast himself admitted that he was also inspired by the furs of the Astors when he designed Santa's fur-trimmed garb.

When it comes to the kind of Santa that we see stalking shopping malls and TV today—the jolly, fat figure clad in red and white—a leading manufacturer of carbonated beverages claims the credit for that archetype. A year or two ago, Coca-Cola even had the cheek to celebrate Santa's sixty-fifth birthday.

Before I93I, the company says, Santa Claus appeared in many different guises, from a green elf to a somber St. Nicholas and even a gaunt figure dressed in animal skins. That year, so the publicity goes, Coca-Cola commissioned a young Swedish artist, Haddon Sundblom, to give the icon a makeover.

From I93I on, Sundblom created at least one Santa picture annually. His St. Nicholas wore an ample red coat trimmed in white and held in place with a thick leather belt, and he was depicted in various seasonal scenes. A hat, also trimmed in white, appeared in I934. Sundblom removed Santa's pipe, which can be seen in Nast's creation, and gave him a bottle of Coke.

Through a succession of poses—with children, reindeer, sacks of toys, or letters—he was never without his fizzy drink. With the billowing beard, expansive girth, and rosy cheeks, he would gaze intently at his bottle or grasp it heartily, ready for that "pause that refreshes."

Santa: The Hallucinogenic Connection

A rival suggestion for the origins of much of Santa's paraphernalia—his red and white color scheme, those flying reindeer, and so on—is much more fun, less commercial, more scientific, and somehow more appealing than Coca-Cola's version, because it is so politically incorrect.

Patrick Harding of Sheffield University in England argues that the trappings of the traditional Christmas experience owe a great deal to what is probably the most important mushroom in history: fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), the recreational and ritualistic drug of choice in parts of northern Europe before vodka was imported from the East. Each December this mycologist dresses up as Santa and drags a sleigh behind him to deliver seasonal lectures on the toadstool. The garb helps Harding drive home his point, for Santa's robes without doubt honor the red-and-white-dot color scheme of this potent mind-altering mushroom.

Commonly found in northern Europe, North America, and New Zealand, fly agaric is fairly poisonous, being a relative of the more lethal death cap (Amanita phalloides) and destroying angel (Amanita virosa). The hallucinogenic principles of fly agaric are due to the presence of the chemicals ibotenic acid and muscimol, according to the International Mycological Institute at Egham, Surrey, England. Ibotenic acid is present only in fresh mushrooms. On drying, it turns into muscimol, which is ten times more potent. In Lapp societies, the village holy man, or shaman, took his mushrooms dried—with good reason.

The shaman knew how to prepare the mushroom, removing the more potent toxins so that it was safe enough to eat. During a mushroom-induced trance, he would start to twitch and sweat. His soul was thought to leave the body as an animal and fly to the otherworld to communicate with the spirits The spirits would, the shaman hoped, help him to deal with pressing problems, such as an outbreak of sickness in the village. With luck, after his hallucinatory flight across the skies, he would return bearing the gifts of medical knowledge from the gods.

Santa's jolly "Ho, ho, ho" is the euphoric laugh of someone who has indulged in the mushroom. Harding adds that the big man's fondness for popping down chimneys is an echo of how the shaman would drop into a yurt, an ancient tentlike dwelling made of birch and reindeer hide. "The 'door' and the chimney of the yurt were the same, and the most significant person coming down the chimney would have been a shaman coming to heal a sick person."

Harding uses the shaman's urine to link reindeer to the myth. For one thing, reindeer were uncommonly fond of drinking human urine that contained muscimol. The hoi polloi from the village also were partial to mind-expanding yellow snow, because the potency of the muscimol was not greatly weakened—although it was probably safer—once it had passed through the shaman. "There is evidence of the drug passing through five or six people and still being effective," Harding says. "This is almost certainly the derivation of the phrase 'to get pissed,' which has nothing to do with alcohol. It predates inebriation by alcohol by several thousand years."

Such was the intensity of the drug-induced experience that it is hardly surprising that the Christmas legend includes flying reindeer. Witches soar for related reasons: a witch who wanted to "fly" to a sabbat, or orgiastic ceremony, would anoint a staff with specially prepared oils containing psychoactive matter, probably from toad skins, and then apply it to vaginal membranes.

References to flying can be found in more recent applications of the mushroom. St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) used fly agaric to soar to the heights of religious ecstasy, according to Daniele Piomelli of the Unité de Neurobiologie et Pharmacologie de I'Inserm in Paris. An account of the life of St. Catherine describes the use of ground agaric, so that God "infused such suavity and divine sweetness in her heart that both soul and body were so full as to make her unable to stand."

In Victorian times travelers returned with intriguing tales of the use of fly agaric by people in Siberia, Lapland, and other areas in the northern latitudes. One of the first was reported by the mycologist Mordecai Cooke, who mentioned the recycling of urine rich in muscimol in his A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi (I862). Harding points out that Cooke was a friend of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), the author of the fantastic children's story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (I865). Almost certainly, this is the source of the episode in Alice where she eats the mushroom, where one side makes her grow very tall and the other very small," Harding says. "This inability to judge size—macropsia— is one of the effects of fly agaric."

Long before I949, when that perennially popular Christmas hit "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was launched, the myth of the reindeer was already well established. English texts from the Renaissance mention the display of antlers during Christmas dances centuries before any belief in Father Christmas, much less the development of his legend.

Rudolph himself first appeared in an illustrated booklet written by Robert May in I939 for the Montgomery Ward department stores to hand out to children at Christmas, and was used as the theme for the popular song written by Johnny Marks a decade later. It was first performed by Gene Autry, the "Singing Cowboy."

One commonly held view is that Rudolph's nose was red due to a cold. Others claim that the song has saddled Rudolph with the red-nose slur—the implication being that while Santa consumes the milk and cookies left out for him, Rudolph helps himself to the strong stuff. The unexpected triumph of the drunken, inefficient Rudolph over his sober companions chimes with the relaxation of social conventions that has long taken place during winter festivals.

Recent research conducted in Norway, however, offers a more convincing explanation. Unfortunately for Rudolph, reindeer noses provide a welcoming environment for bugs. They have elaborately folded turbinal bones covered with blood-rich membranes, which warm the air as they breathe in and cool it as they breathe out, thereby reducing the loss of both heat and water. (Even when there are icicles and frost on Santa's beard, his faithful reindeer have dry muzzles) Odd Halvorsen of the University of Oslo suggested some years ago in the journal Parasitology Today that the "celebrated discoloration" of Rudolph's nose is probably due to a parasitic infection of his respiratory system. Even today, he is awed by the response that followed this revelation. "This paper brought me more fame than anything else I have published," he admits.

Despite living in such chilly conditions, reindeer not only share many of the same parasites that plague other ruminants, such as the warble fly, but also are preyed upon by around twenty different parasites that are specific to them. The pentastomid Linguatula arctica, one of a group of creatures called tongue worms, can be found in reindeer sinuses; larvae of the fly Cephenemyia trompe wriggle in the nasal cavity; and nematodes of the genus Dictoyvaulus squirm in the lungs, as do vast numbers of Elaphostrongylus rangiferi larvae. "We have not been able to quantify the combined effects of these parasites, but it is no wonder that poor Rudolph, burdened as he is by parasites, gets a red nose when he is forced to pull along an extra burden like Santa Claus," Halvorsen notes.

Rudolph notwithstanding, it remains something of a puzzle why reindeer are so embedded in modern Christmas culture. They were only one among many kinds of grazing and browsing mammals that once roamed the forests and plains of Europe, northern Asia, and North America. Indeed, ancient reindeer remains suggest that they ranged as far south as Spain and Italy.

They had been established for around a million years by the time humans came on the scene. People hunted reindeer, along with bison, mammoths, wild horses, and many smaller mammals. Reindeer meat is delicious, the fur is light and warm, and the antlers and bones are handy for making tools and ornaments. No wonder the beasts are featured in cave art and rock carvings, such as one found in Sagelva, Norway, that dates back to 2000 B.C.

But reindeer are badly misrepresented during Christmas festivities, according to Caroline Pond of the Open University in England. Pond is a biologist who has studied reindeer with other biologists from the University of Tromso, Norway. Take the depictions of the beasts typically found on cards, for example. True, reindeer are the only deer species for which both sexes have antlers—bone, often branched, that is covered with a thin layer of skin, or "velvet," rich in blood vessels. But the males actually lose their crowning glory around the time that the holiday is celebrated. The reason has to do with sex.

Antlers of mature male reindeer are usually larger than those of females, with the most impressive found in caribou and Norwegian reindeer. They probably evolved as a secondary characteristic of males under sexual selection: they depend on the sex hormone testosterone; are larger, more elaborate and heavier in older males; and are at their biggest during the breeding season, when they are essential for ritual combat and fighting. Afterward, the males are "rutted out" (even Rudolph), exhausted by the loss of body weight and fat reserves. It comes as no surprise that studies have found that male reindeer suffer greater mortality than females.

Changes in the concentration of sex hormones promote bone reabsorption at the base of the antlers in adult males. Eventually the antlers fall off, and there is a delay of up to four months before new ones grow in the spring. Perhaps the inaccurate depictions of Rudolph sporting his antlers wish to deny this seamy side of reindeer life.

The reindeer Lapps, or Sami, an ethnic group living in northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, acknowledge this link between virility and antlers by selling powdered reindeer "horn" to the Japanese with the claim that it increases potency. The Sami are unusually virile, but the reason, according to a study by Ilpo Huhtaniemi of Finland's Turku University, is not due to this horny folk medicine but to a genetic mutation.

The mutation is found in 4o percent of Sami men (compared with 25 percent of other men in Finland and 20 percent of Swedes) and apparently maintains a high level of testosterone in older men. It seems that the farther south you go, the lower the incidence of the mutation. "The frequency of the mutation is I5 percent in men from southern Europe, I0 percent in Asian men, and 5 percent in American Indian men," Huhtaniemi says.

The very fact that Christmas card artists show Rudolph with his antlers in place may underscore another unfortunate fact, one drawn to my attention by Odd Halvorsen: the Sami mostly use castrated male reindeer to pull or carry loads. Without their equipment, males have an abnormal antler cycle, so they keep their headgear longer than functional males To keep his antlers for the sake of the Christmas card, Rudolph would have had to be castrated. "This introduces another sad aspect to the story," Halvorsen says.

The more we know about reindeer, the worse the problems faced by card illustrators become. While the males are squandering their energy on sex and violence, the females are piling on fat, Caroline Pond notes. By the time Christmas arrives, the only adult reindeer with antlers and enough energy to drag around a sleigh full of presents are females. That is why Marks's song should have been about Rosie the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Reindeer are well adapted to living in a snowy landscape, though one that is more barren than the kind found on Christmas cards. In winter they dig through snow to feed on the plants underneath. Fine, powdery snow is easy enough for them to handle, but if the snow is too deep or too hard, feeding becomes difficult. Snow that melts and refreezes to form a crust of ice can be so firm that the reindeer cannot dig through it to reach the food underneath.

Other reindeer behavior is also misleadingly depicted on Christmas cards. The animals' fur is an efficient insulator; outer hairs are long and hollow, supporting a fine, dense undercoat. Together they trap a layer of warm air. Insulation is so effective that snow does not melt on the backs or heads of reindeer. Rudolph, Dasher, Prancer, and the rest of the crew are so well adapted to the cold that they would probably find loafing around chimneys and firesides with Santa too warm to be comfortable.

© 1998 by Roger Highfield