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Christmas is a time of mysteries. Many mysteries. How in this time of goodwill, the members of even the mildest family are only a cracker's snap away from murdering each other with carving knives and small battery-operated toys. Or, how in a country full of shops which in turn are full of 'things,' it's still impossible to find anything that ones sister, mother or nephew might actually want and be grateful for.

And, the greatest mystery of all. What happened to Santa Claus's horses?

Father Christmas, in as much as there is any continuity or logic in our Christmas traditions, should be parading around on a magnificent white steed, or being pulled in his sleigh by a team of flying carriage-horses. Instead he gets a straggle of drugged-up reindeer. So, just where did the Christmas horses go? And where did the reindeer idea come from?

For a start, what connection does Santa actually have to horses? Well, the figure of Father Christmas, is in the main, based on Saint Nicholas, a 4th century bishop from Myra in Asia Minor, whose holy robes and beard live on in the costume of today's plump 'ho-ho-ho-er.' Apart from being feted for his habit of giving anonymous gifts to the needy, Saint Nicholas was best known for the white horse he rode. Being a bishop one imagines that he wasn't short of a talent or two, and so one might suppose that his mount was, perhaps, an Anatolian blood horse, or a Turkman stallion from Persia, or one of the Greek war horses from the plains near Thessalonika.

Saint Nicholas became patron saint of Russia, travellers, pawnbrokers and, in many countries, of Christmas itself. When Dutch settlers arrived in the New World to colonise the American east coast, and founded the town that was to become New York, they bought with them their tradition of a present-giving Saint Nicholas whose day was celebrated on the 6th of December. In their story he rode a horse, and, in the modern Netherlands, even today, bit-actor Saint Nicholases still arrive in towns and at shopping malls on a horse or in a horse-drawn carriage to hand out sweets to children.

Washington Irving's A History of New York, published in 1809, updated the Dutch tradition, but not by much. The first edition still had Saint Nicholas riding into town on a horse. But things were moving fast in the Santa Claus world and only three years later Irving revised the story to portray 'Saint Nick' soaring through the sky in a horse-drawn wagon.

In 1821 William Gilley's poem, 'Santeclaus,' lost the horses, seemingly forever and, instead, placed his fur-coated saint in a flying sleigh pulled by a single reindeer. Scandinavian settlers in the Americas had added their bit of myth to the mix.

Once Santa's horses had been written out of the story, things got very silly indeed. Shortly after Gilley's ode, another poem, The Night Before Christmas, increased the reindeer to eight - Blitzen, Comet, Cupid Dancer, Dasher, Donner, Prancer and...the most unlikely of names...Vixen. The red-nosed one, Rudolph, was added via a 1939 song. Whilst the enduring image of Father Christmas, as a portly, white-bearded chap in a red, fur trimmed tunic, was forever fixed in 1931 by the illustrations used by Coca Cola for advertising.

But how did the horses come to be replaced by reindeer? For that you need to go, not forwards, but back in time, to prehistory and Pagan beliefs. For early European and Eurasian tribal peoples - the Scythians, the Dacians, and our own Celtic forebears, amongst them - the horse was a sacred animal. Revered for their speed and power, horses were seen as animals of the Gods, and sacrificing them in elaborate rituals and then eating their flesh, was one of the defining acts of the 'horse-powered-peoples. Naturally this appalling Pagan custom was one of the first to be attacked and vanquished by the coming of Christianity. Eating horses became very wrong. Taboo. Un-Christian. The mark of a barbarian. As it remains today.

But the Christians had less luck in eradicating the Pagan winter solstice celebrations of mid-December when, of course, sacrificing and eating horses formed an important part of the festivities. Too strong a tradition to be purged from the year's calendar, the ritual of feasting and a general pig-out in the darkest part of the year had to be absorbed into Christianity, even if substitutes were found for pony stew.

Meanwhile, up in the north of Europe and Asia Christianity was something of a late comer, and the reindeer hunting and herding tribes of Siberia and Lapland continued relatively undisturbed, almost to our own times, in the Pagan beliefs they had followed for millennia. Which is how the 'flying' reindeer got into our modern celebrations.

Lappish Sami and Siberian tribes discovered that reindeer would do pretty much anything for pieces of dried Amanita muscaria - the poisonous-in-quantity but hallucinogenic-in-smaller-amounts Fly Agaric toadstool. It was found that wild herds would follow a trail of dried fungi, giving the reindeer-people control over the animals' movements.

At the same time the narcotic effects of the amanita were used to give a sensation of flying to northern shaman who ate them to induce visions and to visit 'other worlds.'. But, eaten untreated, the mushrooms also made the shaman horribly and violently sick. Then somebody discovered, (how? exactly how, I shudder to think), that if the Fly Agaric were fed to a reindeer and then the animal's urine collected and drunk, one got all the benefits of soaring free of one's body without any of the appalling hangover. Reindeer and flying became connected in the folk mind, to be recycled in a sanitised format as part of the Father Christmas story.

Just to confuse things, there is another theory linking reindeer with flying, and one whose roots I have witnessed on the Norwegian tundra. Camped out on a remote fell, in the middle of a hot summer's night, the sun still above the horizon, I heard a castanet-clacking and irregular thudding in the distance. Into sight came a small group of reindeer, pursued by a thick cloud of mosquitoes. The animals were leaping and jumping high into the air, taking great bounds to escape the insects. They dived over bushes, twisted, sprang sideways, their split hooves clattering together as they left the ground before crashing back to earth, and launching into another huge skipping prance. It wouldn't have taken much imagination, or vodka for that matter, to see them as flying.

There are other theories as well. The book, Flight of the Reindeer by Robert Sullivan, is a 'serious study’ of reindeer in the Kuujjuaq region of northern Quebec in Canada. Having heard stories of reindeer that could fly, and seen early drawings of a man being towed through the sky by an airborne caribou (the North American name for reindeer) Sullivan set off to study Peary caribou in the wild He came to the conclusion that the animals' light weight, airfoil shaped hooves and, in some cases, a rack of wind vortex creating horns that could act like a sail, did indeed give the reindeer the power of flight. Even counting in the hours i've wasted on reading 'Chariots of the Gods' and 'Atlantis is in Glastonbury' style guff, and in puzzling out the self-assembly instructions for flat-pack furniture, I have rarely read such nonsense. But it’s entertaining nonsense.

I'm never one to turn down the chance to travel, however silly the pretext. So, in late November, I headed for a spot high above the Finnish Arctic Circle to try a spot of reindeer driving. And possibly reindeer flying. Well, actually, that's not totally true. I was really going to Levi for a few days of skiing, snowmobiling, sauna and husky sledding. But once there I found myself lunching with a bunch of Sami reindeer farmers, in a century-old log-built house deep in the snow covered woods. Their reindeer, in brightly-coloured felt and leather breast-collar harness were tied to trees outside. All except one animal who had, in true Pagan fashion, been sacrificed for the delicious 'Old Man's Soup' we spooned from our bowls.

Well fed, we sat back. "Now we go with the reindeer," our hosts announced. Being offered a reindeer to drive seemed like a good chance to try out its potential for flight. Outside I looked over the different animals' conformation looking for vortex creating horns, aerodynamic hooves and a general disposition towards leaping and jumping. None looked like an obvious contender for getting far off the ground.

I handed my passenger, Senja, into one of the small, boat-like sleighs with its lining of loose reindeer skins. Then I climbed in beside her. A single rein ran back from the animal, whose plump buttocks, from our recumbent position in the low-built sled, towered over us. A Sami explained the secrets of reindeer piloting, but unfortunately in Finnish. I got something about flicking the rein on one side of the animal or the other to make it turn. But missed the bit about braking or accelerating. Perhaps because there was little to say on either subject.

"You know about animals...you drive," Senja suggested. Then voiced an underlying fear: "How do we stop the thing if it takes off?" I didn't mention that in the interests of scientific enquiry, 'taking off' was exactly what I hoped we'd do. We set off down a snow muffled track between pine trees and into the forest. Taking off was looking distinctly unlikely. The reindeer ambled along, it's wide-splayed hoofs making a very soft 'thruupp' with each footfall, being the kind of noise you'd get if you pushed your hand slowly into a feather pillow. The sleigh's runners crisped through the snow. Apart from that all was silence.

Silence that was, until Senja, no longer feeling threatened by any likelihood of our reindeer building up life threatening speed, asked if I could make it go faster. I tried a global repertoire of 'animal hustling' noises. Tongue clickings, 'hey-ups,' the 'mishyaaar' command used by Berber camel drivers, deep growls, whistles. The reindeer plodded on. It was only the Moroccan mule drivers' 'aaaargghzi' that worked. I aaaargghzi-ed energetically, and our animal broke into a cow-like trot, accelerating the sleigh to, perhaps, eight miles per hour. We were still very, very far from reaching 'lift off' speed.

Reindeer travel I realised was not about speed, but about a comfortable and reliable way of crossing huge distances of snow covered tundra and northern forest. So, once I'd given up on flying, I sat back to appreciate the beauty of the Arctic winter. Senja sang Finnish folk songs beside me, as we ambled and trotted along the track that ran like a canal through the deeper snowdrifts to either side.

When we got back to the reindeer farm, I asked Senja to ask the Sami how I was meant to have made my reindeer go faster, other than by shouting at it in Arabic. We were just starting to climb out of the sleigh as the herder reached forward to demonstrate. He grasped the animal's stubby little scut of a tail in his fist and gave it a sharp twist. The reindeer leapt forward in a gravity defying bound. Senja and I were thrown back into the sleigh by the acceleration, and the Sami hauled on the rein to bring the snorting, glaring animal back to a halt. From that one brief jump it's difficult to judge whether the animal would have been capable of sustained flight. I rather feared not. And more I realised that, even if reindeers could fly, all the Christmas cards showing Santa sitting back in his sleigh jiggling the reins had got reindeer driving all wrong. He'd need to be leaning forward working those reindeer tails like crazy to keep from a forced landing.

That evening, over a plate of reindeer steak, I mused on the loss of horses to the Father Christmas story. I could see serious scientific arguments for bringing them back to replace the reindeer. A mathematician with far too much time on his hands worked out the speed that a team of reindeer would have to fly at to deliver presents to the world's children in one night. Based on a reindeer's top speed of 15 miles per hour, and it's ability to pull a payload of no more than 400 pounds, Dasher, Prancer and the rest would have to move, he calculated, at 650 miles per second or 3,000 times the speed of sound. A good horse on the other hand can reach 40 mph and pull two or three times the load a reindeer can shift. They could do the job in a quarter of the time. If only for efficiency's sake, Santa should be given his horses back.

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