Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Consider the following Christmas lines (emphasis added):

 When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
 With a little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment he must be St. Nick.

I cannot be the only person who was ever struck by these lines in the famous poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, and their implication that the jolly old man of holiday legend and his magical conveyance could, at least for four lines, be aptly described by the word “miniature.” It’s not a characterization that is obvious from most familiar media depicting the character who would be Santa Claus, and from a child’s perspective St. Nick looms rather large indeed. Yet Clement Moore, the likely* author of the poem, tells us of a “little” old man and his “tiny” reindeer, operating a “miniature” sleigh. The smallness is conspicuous.

Christmas is among many other things a holiday of scale. Some aspects of it are grandiose: the sheer volume of commercial activity, travel, and cultural expression is such that, at least here in the U.S.A., the preliminary stages of celebration can be detected a full two months before the day itself. We sing about The Twelve Days of Christmas, in which an extended version of the holiday is adorned with excessive quantities of various revelers, musicians, and birds. In the contemporary mythology of Christmas Eve, Santa delivers presents to children all around the world in the course of one night, an Olympian feat which, even granting the ability to stretch a “night” into a full twenty four hours by taking advantage of the Earth’s curvature, necessitates the traversal of enormous distances at incredible speeds. These are maximalist traditions.

On the other hand, Christmas is also intimately associated with minimalism. The snow globe and the gingerbread house are among the most iconic holiday decorations, rendering everyday scenes of winter in scaled-down fashion. Christmas tree ornaments often contain or consist of miniature figures, turning the trees into scintillating microcosms of color and light. For the religious, Christmas is a celebration of Jesus Christ, specifically depicted in his smallest, baby-est form. As for most holiday observers, our warmest impressions of the holiday are made when we ourselves are small, looking up and around at a marvelously transformed world. In this way, Christmas is a season for the small.

Where does the stature of Santa Claus and his reindeer fit into this scheme? Possibly nowhere, if the words from St. Nicholas are merely an aberration; just a man and his team of deer, all more or less the size they’re supposed to be. But in this one instance, just what is the poet getting at?

As usual, when considering this question, my first instinct was to investigate the etymology of the relevant words. It could easily be the case that the meanings of the words have evolved since 1823, when St. Nicholas was first published. However, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the words “miniature,” “tiny,” and “little” have all meant more or less what they mean now since long before 1823. It does not appear that the poet meant anything other than “atypically small.”

“Miniature” comes from Latin by way of Italian, and the root word minium originally meant a kind of red paint. As this paint was used in illuminated manuscripts, it eventually came to be applied to the small drawings in those manuscripts, and by the 16th century (three centuries before this poem) it was a word in English that meant a very small picture. Sleighs being relatively large vehicles (in contrast to sleds) that typically have space for more than one person, a miniature sleigh would presumably be smaller than a full-sized man with a belly like a bowl full of jelly could pack himself and a large sack of toys into. A scaled-down sleigh seems to necessitate a scaled-down driver.

The reindeer pulling the sleigh are “tiny,” a word which is of obscure origin but which had meant “very diminutive” from at least the 16th century. The smallest variety of reindeer, the Svalbard reindeer, typically maxes out at around 200 pounds in males, while other reindeer can grow to twice the size. Such an animal could only be called tiny in comparison with its larger cousins, though a team of eight such creatures should be able to haul a full-sized sleigh.

The word “little” can be traced all the way back to proto-Indo-European, from the reconstructed root *leud, and it has always been a synonym for “small.” A “little old driver” does not necessarily convey anything unusual on its own, but following on the heels of these other words it seems to suggest that St. Nicholas, like his reindeer, is very little indeed.

Once he has descended the chimney and set to work filling the stockings, there are signs to indicate that St. Nick might not be of normal human dimensions. He is called a “jolly old elf,” which could indicate a small size, though it could also be a reference to his overall appearance; still, features like his mouth and even his jelly-like belly are still described as “little.” The poet’s St. Nick, though hearty and “chubby,” is evidently not very tall. Whether he is larger in this space than a “miniature sleigh” pulled by “tiny reindeer” can accommodate is unclear.

The fact that St. Nicholas is described in diminutive terms both when he is inside and outside the house leads me to discount the possibility that the sleigh and the reindeer are only “miniature” and “tiny” as a result of perspective, as they approach the house from a distance. Not only is this explanation significantly less fun, it runs counter to folkloric conventions, where things usually appear to be strange because they are, in fact, strange. Small things abound in folklore because it is that much easier to imagine they are hiding in some secret place, and that much easier to explain how they can do their work invisibly. As for Santa Claus in particular, what easier way is there to explain his method of descending chimneys than that he can at the very least become very, very small?

As it is a poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas does not concern itself with providing measurements and dimensions. We don’t know if a “tiny” reindeer is a half, a quarter, an eighth, or even a sixteenth the size of a fully grown caribou. It could be tinier still! We only know that it is tiny, and that word is meant to fire the imagination with possibilities. St. Nick and his entire retinue could very well be small enough to literally fit into the illustrations of a child’s Christmas book of the kind that generations of readers first encountered this poem in.

My interpretation is that St. Nicholas and his reindeer are of no definite size, because they magically transcend any physical scale. An inch of height is as much as a foot, just as one house is as much as a billion, and one night is sufficient time to visit them all. The year 1823 was early in the industrial age, when the world was learning that through ingenuity it could build, travel, and communicate at rates that would have seemed impossible a few generations before. The Santa Claus that grew from A Visit from St. Nicholas is a fantasy of this age, a response from traditional folklore to the possibilities of modernity.

It is not easy or intuitive to depict a man who can be multiple sizes simultaneously, or whatever size he needs to be at any particular moment, which is perhaps why more recent incarnations of Santa Claus have not stressed themselves over representing this aspect of the character. Nevertheless, the sleight-of-hand suggested by an ability to ignore the implications of scale is a fascinating and appealing kind of magic, and it is central to the appeal of the whole Christmas season, full as it is of contradictions and wishful thinking about what is and isn’t possible. It is an ideal time to contemplate and appreciate the relative nature of what is small and what is great, and marvel at what effortlessly embodies both qualities.

*Moore is traditionally credited with the poem, but it was originally published anonymously, and there is some controversy as to whether Moore’s claim is valid. I don’t necessarily think the arguments against Moore are persuasive, but they do exist.