Last year for Christmas, my mom gave us a set of Santa and reindeer plaques that she spent months of painstaking work embroidering. We saw them mid-project and commented how lovely they were…and received the shock of our lives when she gave them to us.
Over the past eleven months, we tried to figure out the best way to display them, and I thought we had it. I installed a shelf and ran lights…and this weekend when d-day came, it just didn’t look right. A whole year of anticipation down the drain…or so I thought. In a moment of just “hmmm, now what” my wife’s eyes danced around the room and focused on the perfect location.
Anyhow, the plaque of Vixen was overly pretty and my wife posed some question about his sexuality to which I replied “Vixen is a girl”.
She said that was silly because Vixen has antlers. Not knowing the answer, I said that maybe it was possible for female reindeer to have antlers. Then I remembered the Rudolph Christmas special and realized that Donner’s wife and Clarice didn’t have antlers.
But I didn’t stop there. I did a little digging and it turns out that all of Santa’s reindeer could be female because most male reindeer drop their antlers by late November or early December, while the females (the only female deer species to grow antlers) don’t lose their antlers until the spring.
According to snopes.com, while most males lose their antlers in late autumn…some, the castrated steers, keep them until spring. Apparently sledders use steers to pull sleds because the bulls used up all of their energy in the rut. So, it is possible that a) Vixen and Dancer and Prancer are girls b) the rest, even Rudolph with his nose so bright, are eunuchs.
…and you felt bad because they tried to hide his shining nose.
Merry Christmas, kids!