On Shakespeare, On Austen, On Wordsworth and Carroll! Author Reindeer for Santa’s Sleigh

Here at Quirk, we believe writers can do anything: star in movies, be superheroes…and pull sleighs. Why not? So, in the spirit of the holiday season, we thought it was time to divvy up Santa’s team of reindeer according to their famous author personalities…

Dasher is known as the leader of the pack. With that in mind, how could we pick anyone but Shakespeare? He’s arguably the first great writer in modern English, after all.

Dancer is Dasher’s co-leader, so we knew we had to pick an author who could hold her own. We figured that a woman who can write a great character like Jo March has got to be pretty strong herself, so this spot goes to Louisa May Alcott.

Prancer is the proud and powerful one who’s always preening himself. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” begins, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”; with lines like those, he clearly gets the nod.

Vixen is Prancer’s counterpart—he too is a dandy, just like Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s famous quips like “I can resist everything except temptation” only further prove that they’re a match made in heaven.

This one might be a bit more of a stretch, but work with me here. Comet is meant to bring happiness and laughter to children, and Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does just that.

Cupid, on the other hand, was an easy decision to make. What better author to choose for the reindeer who brings love to the world than Jane Austen, whose romantic heroes still make women everywhere swoon?

For Donner and Blitzen, whose names mean “thunder” and “lightning,” we had to pick two authors who were inseparable both in life and in style of work. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge completely fit the bill. It also helps that their poetry often conjures up images of the meanings behind their reindeer names.

Finally, for Rudolph, we had to go with Emily Dickinson. Just like how Rudolph was shunned at first but then everyone loved him, Dickinson shut herself away from the world while she was alive, but is now one of the world’s most widely-read poets—the parallels were just too uncanny to make any other choice.

So there you have it—reindeer as authors, aka everything you didn’t know you wished for. To paraphrase another famous holiday tale, “Merry Quirkmas to all, and to all a good night!”