Forget what you know about Santa’s reindeer

By NANCY CLARK - December 18, 2006

Maybe you’ve heard the urban legend about the guy who travels to the big city and hooks up with a lady in the hotel bar. They slip back to his room, clearly not to read the room service menu, and the maid discovers him the next morning. Wrapped in bloodied towels in the bathtub the crude stitches in his side shore up where his kidney has been removed.

Mileage plus a little transplant.

The viral thing about an urban legend is that there’s always a plausible hook to the horror. The world is full of bad guys, we rationalize. And a long waiting list at the dialysis center for kidneys, we do the math. It’s just enough to stop us short of sniffing indifferently at the person who cautions us about the dangers inherent in travel.

Now comes the legend to throw over Santa and the reindeer.

Where it started, I don’t know. But it’s a revisionist question worth exploring. Both the male and female reindeer in the species have antlers. Most males lose theirs before winter and the females in spring. Since the dawn of St. Nick, his reindeer have had their antlers intact. That said, Santa’s reindeer, including Rudolph, may have been girls all along.

The gender switch works with the chorus line of hoofers with monikers like Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. I’ll even go with Dasher, Comet and Cupid as parallel to women with christened names like Morgan, Jordan and Gerry. Donner could be a Donna from Massachusetts with a thick accent. And I’m having visions of a hard-core Blitzen at 2 a.m. in LoDo. But Rudolph too? It’s the polar opposite of a boy named Sue.

This posse of nine with their 28 gams flying through the night sky is a bit Braniff. But recalling that they’ve always been described as “tiny reindeer” clearly smaller than their outsized brothers, it’s making more and more sense to me. In reindeer size charts, I can accept they are Hollywood’s size 0.

But why would these sleek and youthfully energized beauties with their headdresses on spend the entire night with a white-bearded old guy wearing red (bad fashion decision) who comes with a belly that jiggles like a bowlful of jelly? Unless, that is, he’s got a fat wallet tucked inside that belt of his? It’s like a flashback to Elway’s on a summer Wednesday night.

For argument’s sake, more females than males profess to love shopping. No doubt these dears have probably been called on more than once by the elves to fetch a last minute gift from the mall with ease. And then there’s the fact that while Santa’s throwing himself down the chimney, the reindeer wait politely, the only evidence they’re even on the roof is the prancing and pawing of each little hoof. Like stilettos, not loafers. And really, eight guy-types made to wait on a roof would be tossing snowballs and sliding on their bellies like projectiles off the eaves.

XX vs. XY? The rethinking is a lot like re-gifting. If you can’t use the theory, pass it on.

And have a Mary Christmas.