Where the flying reindeer and the sleigh came from

A poem called "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared in a Troy, New York, newspaper called the Sentinel on 23 December 1823, and this poem first gives Santa Claus a sleigh, eight named reindeer, and a single night to visit every chimney. Nothing before it puts reindeer anywhere near Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. Once it was printed, reprinted, and read aloud in households for decades, the picture it drew became the one that stuck.

The eight names

The poem calls the reindeer out by name as they take flight, and the order it gives them is the order still used today:

• Dasher
• Dancer
• Prancer
• Vixen
• Comet
• Cupid
• Donder
• Blitzen

These eight are the whole list from the 1823 text. A ninth reindeer, the one usually remembered for a red nose, does not appear anywhere in this poem: he was added by a different writer in a commercial work from 1939, well over a century later, and this page treats him separately.

Who wrote it, and why nobody is certain

The poem was published without an author's name attached, which was not unusual for newspaper verse at the time. It was later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, a scholar of Hebrew and biblical literature, and he eventually claimed it himself and included it in a collection of his poems in 1844. That attribution has never been fully settled. A rival claim points to Henry Livingston Jr., a New York poet who died before Moore's authorship was made public, on the grounds of style, dialect, and family testimony from his descendants. No document has resolved the question either way, and reputable historians of the poem still describe the authorship as disputed.

What is not in dispute is the poem's effect. It set the reindeer, the sleigh, and the single-night journey in place long before any illustrator or advertiser touched the figure, and everything the site covers elsewhere on this page, the sleigh's early illustrations and the later commercial additions, builds outward from what this one poem put down in 1823. For the wider story of how Santa Claus reached this point, from Sinterklaas onward, Where Santa Claus Came From covers the ground before 1823.

Before there was a sleigh, there was a wagon. Washington Irving's satirical A History of New York, published under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, has St. Nicholas riding over the tops of trees in a wagon, bringing gifts down the chimney of the house he favours that year. There is no reindeer team in Irving's account and no sleigh, only a general sense of a gift-bringer travelling by air.

The 1823 poem fixes the picture

The sleigh as it is known now first appears in the poem usually called A Visit from St. Nicholas, printed in a New York newspaper in 1823. It describes a miniature sleigh pulled by eight named reindeer, small enough that the narrator first mistakes the sound on the roof for something else entirely. The poem gives the sleigh no colour, no shape and no maker. It is simply the vehicle, and the reindeer are what pull it. Everything that came after, the sleigh's shape, its load, the sky it flies through, was filled in later by illustrators working from that one sparse description.

Thomas Nast gives the sleigh a body

The visual sleigh most people now picture, laden with sacks and toys, runners cutting through cloud, came from the American illustrator Thomas Nast, whose drawings for Harper's Weekly ran from 1863 into the 1880s. Nast's Santa drawings, later gathered into a single collection, gave the poem's bare sleigh a physical form: heaped high, driven low over rooftops, arriving from a northern workshop that Nast's illustrations were also the first to picture in detail. Nast was not working from any written source beyond the 1823 poem and his own imagination, so the sleigh's familiar look is his invention as much as anyone's.

How the picture kept changing

The sleigh did not settle into one fixed image even after Nast. Later nineteenth-century illustrators, working for magazines, advertisements and Christmas cards, drew it larger, smaller, more ornate, more plain, according to the space and the mood of the piece. What stayed constant was the pairing the 1823 poem set down: a sleigh, and reindeer to pull it. Everything added to that pairing since, including any details that suggest a single settled design, is illustration building on a sparse original.

The eight reindeer named in the 1823 poem are as far as the public-domain tradition goes. Everything added after that point belongs to somebody: a named writer, a named company, working within living copyright.

Rudolph, 1939

The best-known addition is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, created in 1939 by Robert L. May, a copywriter working for the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago. May wrote Rudolph's story as a give-away colouring book for the store's Christmas trade. The song that made Rudolph famous came a decade later, written by Johnny Marks in 1949 and recorded by Gene Autry. Both the character and the song remain under copyright, held by their respective rights owners.

Why the line matters here

A reader who wants the traceable history needs to know which parts of the picture are open for anyone to retell and which belong to a company's back catalogue. Rudolph is a nineteenth-reindeer-and-fortieth-year addition to a story that was already over a century old by the time he arrived, and treating him as part of the original poem misplaces both his origin and his owner.

This site builds its stories from the public-domain material: the 1823 poem, the illustrators who followed it, and the tradition that grew from both. Where a later commercial figure enters the conversation, it is named as such, with its year and its source. The fuller account of how that older story took shape is on Where Santa Claus came from.

The 1823 poem that gave the world flying reindeer and a sleigh has been out of copyright for well over a century, which means the text and many of its earliest printings are freely available.

The poem itself

Project Gutenberg carries the full text of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" as part of its public-domain collection, set as plainly as it would have appeared in an early nineteenth-century newspaper or annual. The Internet Archive goes further and holds scanned copies of some of the actual period volumes the poem appeared in, so a reader can see the layout and typography of the original.

The illustrations that followed

The pictures that later fixed the look of the sleigh and its reindeer, including Thomas Nast's work for Harper's Weekly later in the nineteenth century, survive largely through library and archive collections that have digitised their print holdings. These are worth searching out directly if you want to see how the picture changed, print by print, over several decades.

Anyone wanting the broader story of how the modern Santa Claus figure took shape, of which the reindeer and sleigh are only one part, can follow it on Where Santa Claus Came From. A shortlist of other public-domain and well-sourced Christmas reading is gathered on Christmas Stories Worth Finding.