Flight of the Reindeer

by Robert Sullivan

  He picks up a piece of paper from his cluttered desk. “Here, I’ll quote from one. This one was found somewhere in Palestine, and my translation is pretty rough, but it reads as follows: ‘And in a strange situation, it appears the poorest of the poor were visited Tuesday last, and were given bread and wine. Of the same night, several children of our settlement were visited as well, and given trinkets.’ It goes on, but not much longer. It wasn’t news, really, it was just a curiosity—this gift-giving. Why wasn’t it a bigger deal? Well, you see, it was a time of great turmoil in the civilized world, and obviously there were more pressing things to talk about than these unconfirmed stories about children and peasants being given tokens by some wandering stranger.”

  Church pauses. “And also,” he says, being playful, as though offering a riddle. “Think about it—there’s another reason why it wasn’t big news. No one could have known that it was global.”

  Church continues with a smile, enjoying the moment: “You see, a kid in Rome wakes up on December 25th and finds a gift, and the same thing happens in Athens on the same day. But who could’ve put two and two together? It was local news, minor neighborhood gossip. There was no quick communication between settlements, between towns, between regions. It is only with hundreds of years of hindsight, and ten thousand excavations, that we can see what was going on. We add this report here to that one from over there, and soon we see the truth—on the same night, in places all over the world, charity was being offered. Why? We don’t know. We’ve never known. But we do know one thing. We can tell from the local histories that it happened once and only once each year. Year after year after year. It was an annual signal to us—an anniversary, a reminder.

  “Of what? Well, to be charitable, maybe. To think about the least fortunate. To be generous. To live each day as if you would deserve such a reward as this. I can’t say for sure, though I wish I could.”

  “Saint Nicholas was an exemplar y human being. Santa Claus is an exemplary elf. What’s the problem?”

  – FORREST CHURCH, minister, theologian, historian

  BACK IN THOSE EARLY YEARS of Santa Claus’s visits, not only was the elf’s reindeer not called the Peary but the elf wasn’t called Santa Claus. “He answers to that now,” says Will Steger, the famous adventurer from Ely, who actually asked Claus about this. “All the kids of the world call him Santa, so it’s fine with him. But his elves know him as something else. It has many syllables, and it really sings—La-la-flayah- something. I tried to pronounce it, and simply could not do it. That was strange. I just couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth.”

  When the name-change occurred is hard to pinpoint, but it had to have happened in the 4th century A.D. or later. “Yes, absolutely, he worked for at least three hundred years under his real name, whatever it is,” says Church, who is equal parts scholar and Unitarian minister. “You could say ‘Santa Claus’ is his Christian name, because he got it when people started confusing him with a famous and very popular Christian saint—a man, not an elf. The confusion was natural because the North Pole elf and the very human man, Saint Nicholas, were both famous, principally, for their charity and gift-giving. The confusion started sometime in the Middle Ages, and slowly the two figures grew into one—at least in the mind of the world’s children.”

  WHO WAS THIS SAINT Nicholas? He was a man born late in the 3rd century in Patara, which used to be a city in what is now Turkey. He was a devout and serious child, and as a boy he made a pilgrimage to Palestine, seeking knowledge. He entered a monastery and became a priest when he was only nineteen years old. He was known as a loving minister. There is a tempera painting on wood panel (facing page) done many years after his death by Carlo Crivelli that shows a stern Saint Nicholas. But look closely at the forehead, at the eyes: There is kindness there, for those who are good.

  Nicholas became Bishop of Myra in Lycia on the coast of what was then Asia Minor. There is a legend that he was imprisoned during Diocletian’s persecution, then released under Constantine the Great—but much about this man is uncertain. He may never have been imprisoned, may never have needed release.

  A serious Nicholas is depicted in this painting, executed by Crivelli in 1472 and now on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

  There is one tale, however, that makes its way to our time having been told over and over again. It takes on the air of truth because so many believe it. It is this:

  Nicholas came to know a poor man with a large family. The man had three daughters, each of them personable, intelligent and altogether companionable. But no man would marry any of the daughters because the father could not provide a dowry. The father grew saddened, the daughters despondent. Then, one December night, Nicholas passed by the family’s house. He threw three bags of money through an open window. (Who does that sound like?) Each of the girls now had a dowry, each of them married, and the legend of Saint Nicholas as a secret gift-giver was born.

  But not only as a gift-giver.

  As “One who helps the poor.”

  As “One who understands.”

  As one who sees bright futures for the young, inspiring them to always be at their best.

  After his death, Nicholas was credited with having performed many miracles. He was beatified, and came to be considered the patron saint of sailors, travelers, bakers, scholars, merchants, of all of Russia—but most importantly, of children. He became famous throughout the world, and by the Middle Ages traditions were springing up that were associated with him. His feast day was celebrated on December 6th. In many European countries this became a day of celebration and gift-giving.

  IT’S EASY TO SEE how the confusion started, what with the saint having an annual day in his honor—during which gifts were exchanged—and the elf making his surreptitious visits in the same season. From the year 1000 until approximately 1500, the images blurred further, with the saint getting more and more credit for the elf’s work, with the elf taking on the saint’s name in country after country, with the saint taking on elfin characteristics in certain cultures, with the elf starting to look more and more like a man.

  On one level, it seems odd that the elf was confused with a man at least twice his size.

  As for the name, it came by way of Holland. Of all the places where Saint Nicholas was popular, he was most beloved in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands. The Dutch for “Saint Nicholas” is Sinterklass, and when this term made its way to the English-speaking world, “Santa Claus” was born. Because of various pictures of the human saint that were available, the winter visitor from the North Pole acquired a physical image that would not be corrected until the 1800s. For centuries, most people thought “Claus” was a tall man who wore bishop’s robes and rode a white horse. Children throughout Europe would leave carrots and hay for the horse on the special eve, and must have wondered why only the carrots—a vegetable that Peary caribou adore—were gone the next morn.

  Not all countries called the mysterious visitor Santa Claus or even Saint Nicholas. In Germany he was Knecht Ruprecht, or Servant Rupert. In Italy he—or, rather, she—was Le Befana, a kindly old witch. In England he was Father Christmas, and on this point—if few others—France agreed with England, calling him Pêre Noel.

  Why all the variation? Because no one was sure. No one could pin him down precisely. Those who came closest were those who were geographically and spiritually nearest to him: the Scandinavians. Swedish children, it was said, received gifts from the elf Jultomten, and Danes and Norwegians were visited by an elf they called Julenissen. “We know they found evidence of Santa’s elves—that map, for instance—since they lived way up there near the Pole,” says Young of the Institute of Arctic Studies. “I’ve always figured that’s why their version of Santa Claus is closest to the real thing.” It was in the early 1800s that Americans started to know the real thing better. The writer Washington Irving played a large part in this. He spent much of the first decade of the century researching traditions concerning the C
hristmas holiday and its famous present-bearer. In 1809 Irving published the fruits of his labor. To give an idea of the portrait he painted, there is this, concerning a visit by the elf to New York state: “And lo, the good Saint Nicholas came riding over the tops of the trees, in that selfsame wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children, and he descended hard by where the heroes of Communipaw had made their late repast. And he lit his pipe by the fire, and sat himself down and smoked; and as he smoked the smoke from his pipe ascended into the air and spread like a cloud overhead. . . . And when Saint Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hat-band, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished Van Kortlandt a very significant look, then mounting his wagon he returned over the treetops and disappeared.” And later: “Thus, having quietly settled themselves down, and provided for their own comfort, they bethought themselves of testifying their gratitude to the great and good Saint Nicholas. . . . At this early period was instituted that pious ceremony, still religiously observed in all our ancient families of the right breed, of hanging up a stocking in the chimney on Saint Nicholas eve; which stocking is always found in the morning miraculously filled; for the good Saint Nicholas has ever been a great giver of gifts, particularly to children.”

  In the 19th century, Nast’s illustrations (top) and the word portraits of Irving (seated) gave us an accurate picture of the elf.

  With these words America’s first great man of letters was codifying a vision of the December visitor: the most accurate description of Claus yet presented anywhere in the world. Substitute “sleigh” for “wagon”—and what historian might not suffer a trivial mistake like that?—and it becomes evident that Irving’s was a remarkable achievement.

  “Irving was a brilliant man,” says Regina Barreca, professor of English at the University of Connecticut and an expert on British and American literature. “Careful, thoughtful, thorough. He was just as great a biographer as he was a writer of fiction. When he turned to biography, he didn’t choose to write about just anyone. He liked to deal with the true giants—the biggest of the big. He gave us masterful portraits of George Washington, of Shakespeare and, of course, of Santa Claus.”

  What was Irving’s source material? “I presume Irving found copies of the Greenland journals, and there were also several Scandinavian histories concerning elves published right about that time,” says Dartmouth’s Cronenwett. “We have some of them on our shelves, though we certainly didn’t have them back then. Irving would have been able to acquire them because he was one of the first American authors to travel extensively in England and Europe. He spent an awful lot of time in London doing research, and these books, which would not have made their way to the U.S. until much later, would have been available there.”

  “Without the good, honest reporting of Irving, Moore and others, it would be much harder to believe in Santa.”

  – REGINA BARRECA, literature professor and Santa Claus scholar

  IRVING’ S VERSION of Santa Claus was confirmed and elaborated on throughout the remainder of the 19th century. There were many reported sightings, of which the 1847 group sighting in Durango, Colorado, is perhaps the most famous. From The Durango Nugget, December 26, 1847: “Mike and Janice Larkin were hosting their annual ‘Dark Night Dance’ at their cabin on the mountain Friday night when a noise was heard and all the guests made for the porch. ‘Sounded like dynamite, ’ Larkin said. ‘But who would be blasting at that time of night? So we went to see and, I swear, a flash of light just zoomed up over the far hills, it looked like a star flying by, but closer. It was weird, son, real weird.’ Larkin’s guests confirmed this account.”

  There were the visual interpretations of Thomas Nast in several issues of Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1890. There was Clement Clark Moore’s famous 19th century poem “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas” that enlarged and embellished the Irving Santa. It is interesting and a bit sad to note that this poem, which begins with the famous line “Twas the night before Christmas,” may not have been written by Moore at all, but by a man named Henry Livingston. Moore was credited because, as a renowned scholar, he was believed more capable of insight into Claus’s character than was Livingston, a land surveyor by trade.

  There were even those strange photographs of unidentified flying objects. Many remain unexplained. Some people think they’re spaceships, others insist they are merely photographic illusions. Undeniably, a few of these photos are taunting in the extreme. Look hard at Bill Johnson’s famous image taken in far northern New Hampshire, in a tiny village with the cold and lonely name of Stark (population, 350). Yes, sure, it could have been a speck on Johnson’s lens as he turned his camera toward the moon late one night in December. Or it could have been a reindeer, flying. Imagine it: He is traveling slowly—slowly enough to forge a distinct image on film, instead of just a blur—as he heads back to the North Pole following a workout. The Stark Image beguiles and bedevils us.

  There were these things and others to lead us closer to an understanding of Santa Claus—who he was and what he did.

  But, still. . .

  No one had yet met him.

  No one had gone north to the Pole.

  No one had seen the village.

  No one knew the secrets behind the miracle.

  Johnson remembers: “The covered bridge at Stark never looked lovelier than it did on that night. The air was frigid and I was absolutely alone. Then, suddenly, in front of the moon—There it was!”

  PART TWO

  The North Pole Today

  On the Roof of the World

  NOT A CONTINENT, not a country. It is solid but it is liquid. Nothing grows there and almost no one goes there. It is never in precisely the same place that it was only a moment ago. It is always in flux, shifting and floating. All ice, not a bit of earth beneath it, it is the roof of the world. It is the North Pole.

  I’VE STUDIED THE NORTH POLE, and I can tell you—it’s a very mysterious, almost eerie place,” says Dartmouth’s Oran Young, who is also vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee. “There’s often fog, and there are these mountains of ice all around. There’s absolutely no way Santa Claus and the entire village could be so seldom seen if they were anywhere else on the globe. Every other location is fixed in space and time. Plus, the way the ice floats—swirling and sailing like it does—well, the huge ice ridge that you saw in the west yesterday can be in the north tomorrow, and it can be east the day after that. You start to think your compass is going crazy. It makes Santa’s village nearly impossible to locate. It’s the only town in the entire world that does not lie at a specific latitude and longitude. It moves.”

  “Of course we wondered whether we might see him. But you can’t count on much that far north. ”

  – WILL STEGER, adventurer and the only man to have visited the village

  THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN the tiny village have literally stumbled upon it. They have been tourists, glimpsing it through a cloud bank as their airplane flew over the Pole. Or they have been explorers, seeing something as they gained the summit of a sheltering ridge of ice. Will Steger is one of the latter, although to say he saw merely “something” is a gross understatemnt. In 1986 Steger went north with his dog team and, near the very top of the planet, realized that he was among the blessed few. “I was driving my team up this ice ridge,” he remembers, as he sits by the shore of a lake in back of his rustic cabin in far northern Minnesota. He gazes at the water, and his eyes glisten. “The sled crested, and at that moment the fog blew away. There it was, below us. The whole village. The reindeer. The small sleds being pulled all over the place by deer and elves. The moment I saw it, I was sure it wasn’t true. I figured I was getting delirious, that the cold and fatigue were finishing me off. I mean, that’s an ice world up there. Nothing can live there, right? But I rubbed my eyes, and the village did not vanish. I wondered if I had died, and was maybe in some kind of Arctic heaven.”

  “Some kind of heaven”—Ste
ger was more right than he realized. He was in an otherworldly kingdom, a place of magic, miracles, nonmortal things. He was in a place humankind had been trying to reach forever.

  Some history: The North Pole has always been considered a grail; man has always wanted—needed—to understand the place and those who live there. The ancients believed that there existed a happy region, Boreas, that lay north of the north wind, a place where the sun always shone and the Hyperboreans led a peaceful and productive existence. The Greek Pythias went in search of this happiness in 325 B.C., proceeding northward along Europe’s western coast. He made it to Norway, which he called Thule, but he probably didn’t reach the Arctic Circle. In the 9th century a group of Irish monks also quested northward, eventually settling in Iceland; people were getting closer. There were many, many thrusts north throughout the years, most of these by English,

  Scandinavian and eventually American explorers. But before this century, each effort was stymied by the horrible weather and the various dangers of the polar cap. The ice up there is never smooth; it is thrust up into terrifying ridges with knife-edge peaks. How could anyone travel in such a land?

  But the pull of True North was great, and eventually a contest of sorts developed: Who would reach it first? The Englishman David Buchan tried to find the Pole in 1818 and came nowhere near. Nine years later his countryman William Edward Parry also went north via Spitzbergen, and also came back south in disappointment. In 1871 Charles Hall’s third try came to tragedy: He died, and on their attempted return to England half of his crew became stranded on the ice during a storm. They drifted on the frigid sea for six months before being rescued by a whaling boat.