We had a nice, healthy thunderstorm roll through the Twin Cities this evening. As I sat on the floor of my new condo (no furniture) listening to rain bounce off the skylight (very cool), my mind drifted to thoughts of German (for no reason). 'Donner' and 'Blitzen', as you may well know, are German for 'thunder' and 'lightning', respectively. Now I'm sure Santa had their speed, power, and skyward association in mind when he named two flying reindeer after thunder and lightning, but were these truly the best name choices? I mean honestly, how many thunderstorms do they have at the North Pole, or in Europe at Christmastime, for that matter? There are other cold-weather phenomenon he could have chosen that would've been much more appropriate. Blizzard, for example. Or Wind Chill. Heck, he could've used a nice Inuit word for "freakish jingling flying horse pulling a fat man"; it's not like he'd have to travel all that far to ask them for ideas.
Or maybe I'm giving Santa a bad rep. Maybe his reindeer do have lovely, culturally and meteorologically relevent names. Maybe Clement C. Moore, in the grand tradition of dead white guys everywhere, couldn't pronounce Inuit and therefore made up his own names that were perpetuated in "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Just as "Ojibwe" became "Chippewa" and "Ho Chunk" became "Winnebago" (don't ask), the Inuit word for "freakish jingling flying horse pulling a fat man" was transliterated in the poem as "Donner and Blitzen." I'm no linguist, but it sounds good to me. Scholars specializing in 19th-century Christmas poetry now believe that Moore probably didn't write the poem anyway, so I say it's open season on the shoddy Inuit transliteration!
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