Eh. Reindeer or Reindoe. Who cares?
Where are the wings?
When I was young, I thought that all reindeer had antlers all the time. I don’t believe I ever saw a picture of a reindeer without them. So I assumed that some of Santa’s reindeer were male and some were female.
I didn’t particularly assign the names in the poem to genders. I just assumed that they lined up two-by-two - - like the animals walking onto the ark.
They are magic reindeer that fly and are pretty smart.
But Vixen is clearly a female name. Of the original canonical 8,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
I would have to say none of the names are clearly male. Dancer & Prancer sound female.
North Pole penguins all come from Hoboken.
This is one of those issues that I don’t really Caribou about.
Penguins is practically chickens.
Pedantic answer
They became extinct in about 1840.
The Great Auk was the OG penguin.
I thought they came from Chicago.
Burpo’s reference comes from the 1950 Bugs Bunny cartoon, 8 Ball Bunny, in which Bugs agrees to help a lost penguin get home. After many travails to get the penguin to the South Pole, Bugs discovers that the penguin, who performs in an ice show, was born in Hoboken.
Oh! I’m dyyyyy-in’ again!
We used to visit my son in Redmond, WA every Christmas for about 15 years and their local amateur theater group (called Studio East) put on a show every year called " 'Twas". It was locally written and changed a bit every year. They had a reindeer chorus line and, except for Rudolph, were all women wearing antlers. Our 4 grandchildren there all went through it at their various ages. Before that I had no particular thoughts about the reindeer sexes. For all I know they are still putting on this show.
I am another who never considered the gender of the reindeer. I just never thought about it one way or another. Until now.
It does dawn on me now that the common depictions of reindeer don’t look much like reindeer, they look like whitetail deer, the deer Americans are most familiar with. Reindeer have a real different vibe. They are grayish, have big almost bovine heads carried low, and huge flat feet for walking on snow. I’m sure someone could make a cute caricature of reindeer but I don’t recall seeing it.
Sven from Frozen comes to mind.
good one. I did not see it.
Have you seen The Santa Clause?
Honestly since they all have antlers in the movie I thought they were male. Was it deliberate? Probably. Or at the very least unconscious bias.
But they also show technology that can change the size of both animate and inanimate objects. So perhaps Santa just embiggens the tiny reindeer for the intimidation factor, since we also see several Christmas-hostile entities in play.
Yes, but Santa himself is a “right jolly old elf” and seems to be assumed to be smaller than we usually see him depicted. He just fits in chimneys. He’s in a miniature sleigh because he’s miniature.
It’s all over the poem, to the point even his own daughter who illustrated his poem later depicts him quite small:
Mm, I guess I avoid Christmas movies and children’s movies which means there might be a host of semi-accurate reindeer out there which are unknown to me.
TCM has a program called Christmas Past, a collection of Christmas-themed short films from the early 20th Century. I recorded it Sunday night, and just watched it this morning.
One of them is a 1925 film Santa Claus, directed by Frank E. Kleinschmidt, which has a lot of footage filmed in Alaska, with a guy in a Santa Costume tending to caribou herds and driving a caribou-drawn sleigh.