Pylimitics

It goes without saying that Santa rides around in a “sleigh.” That is, it goes without saying but it doesn’t go without music and pictures — the sleigh is a crucial part of any good Santa tableau. But “sleigh,” it turns out, is a word that only arose in the 1700s. Specifically, the 1721 December 25 Christmas edition of the Hartford Courant newspaper provides one of the earliest (and tersest) appearances of the word: “They went to church in a sley.”

Even as late as 1768, the word “sleigh” (which had by then acquired its modern spelling) was unusual enough that it needed inherent explanation: “The Amusements among the Ladies..is riding upon the snow in Sleighs, a kind of open coach upon a sledge, drawn by a pair of horses.” Note that the explanation mentions a “sledge” — and that’s a word that has some serious history. 

You can find sledges referred to so long ago that years had only three digits, and in both Old English and Anglo-Saxon, where…or no, wait, they were talking about big, heavy hammers. If we restrict things to the sorts of gadgets that slide over the snow, giving you a nice ride, even “sledge” only precedes “sleigh” by a measly ten decades . Here’s the earliest citation, from 1621: “We hired a sledge for eight stivers, and were drawne thither over the yce and snow.” 

We can be pretty sure that even before the 1600s there was snow, there were horses, and there were people who needed transportation. What they called the transportation was more often a “sled,” which Chaucer mentioned: “Þou..by my sledes shalt mowen retourne hool and sounde in to þi contre.” 

So any holiday-related visitation of children recorded outside the acrasy list (because they were “good”, and thus merited a “gift,” but not in the sense of poison) must have at one time been conducted by “sled” rather than your fancy-pants “sleigh,” by Santa himself. But wait, there’s one more thing to check:

“Santa” as in “Santa Claus” hasn’t been around all that long either! The earliest mention is from as recently as 1773 in a just-after-Christmas issue of the New York Gazette: “Last Monday the Anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called St. A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant-Hall.” The Gazette reporter inexplicably failed to investigate what that “A” stood for. But if you read that sentence out loud, it sure sounds like “Santa Claus” is just a version of “Saint Nicholas.” That’s just the sort of enunciation you might get from some kid with a heavy New York accent! Although it’s not clear whether New Yorkers had distinctive accents back in the late 1700s. 

Anyway, it’s looking more and more plausible that Charlie Brown’s friend Lucy was right, when she explained in the 1965 Christmas special: “Christmas, Charlie Brown? Everybody knows it’s controlled by a big eastern syndicate.”