Editor's note: Laura Galloway is a communications entrepreneur
and journalist studying Sami culture. Finnmark, Norway (CNN) --
Millions of people know Clement Clarke Moore's poem "The Night
Before Christmas," written in New York in 1822 and believed to
describe Santa's mode of transportation, a reindeer-driven
sleigh, for the first time. But Santa's reindeer have a story
and a history all of their own, one tied to the oldest
indigenous culture in Northern Europe and accelerated by an
American entrepreneur whose principal intention was not
delighting children around the world, but creating an appetite
for what he hoped would become a mealtime staple as ubiquitous
as beef. For thousands of years here in the snowy Arctic of
northern Norway, reindeer have been a symbol and a way of life
for the Sami, Northern Europe's oldest surviving indigenous
people, spanning parts of Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Kola
Peninsula of Russia, in an area that is known as Sapmi. (They
are also called Laplanders.) About 10 percent