Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Donder or Donner...Now I Know!

In my last post I wrote about several of my favorite things about Christmas. One of the questions in the tag was if I could list the names of Santa's reindeer. To be honest with you, I just copied and pasted them from Tina's blog so I wouldn't have to type them all out!

The other night I read The Night Before Christmas to the kids and in the book it calls him Donder not Donner. So it got me wondering, had I been saying it wrong all these years?


I decided to look it up! Apparently, there are some common misunderstandings about two of the reindeer, Donner and Blitzen. In Clement C Moore's classic, they were originally named Dunder and Blixem (Dutch for thunder and lightning.) In reprints of the poem they first became Donder and Blixen and then again Donder and Blitzen. When the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was written, they became Donner and Blitzen.






Crazy I know! I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going nuts! You probably all knew this already, but I thought it was some fun, useless, Christmas trivia! Next time someone questions their names, you'll know what to tell them!




6 comments:

Rachel said...

Good for you for looking it up. I was just going to let it be thinking some people did it one way and some did it another way. I sometimes don't remember that things like this can be verified.

Heather B said...

I love useless Christmas trivia, maybe as much as useless Disney Trivia. Actually, I will probably tell my kids at school about this, since I am going to tell them all about Dutch Christmas on Tuesday, before we go off for Holiday Break. Thanks Meg!

Tina said...

Hey, I like useless trivia. It makes me feel smarter...than a 5th grader anyway.
Merry Christmas you guys!
Oh, and I LOVE Kaitlyn's hair! She is so red in that family pic with all of you wearing brown. She may be the only grandchild with red hair, just like me!!!

Angela said...

It's not useless if you can blog about it and still be interesting.

The Meier Family said...

Very interesting. I probably won't remember all that if anyone was to ask me though. So I love your kitty post. We have a cat (Chloe). She loves to nap under our Christmas trees. I'm pretty sure she thinks we put them up just for her. She doesn't undecorate our tree anymore but she does bite the corners of the gifts so we have to put them elsewhere until just before Christmas.

Unknown said...

That is so cool! I had no idea! Useless trivia is so fun!