Actually, it's an ancient Sumerian fertility myth
December 21, 2019 7:55 AM Subscribe
Is Dominick the Donkey based on any actual Italian or Italian-American tradition, or was the whole Christmas donkey thing made up out of whole cloth for the song?
Lou Monte's wikipedia page suggests he made a career out of novelty songs for an Italian-American audience, so my instinct is "made up". My dad's Italian-American relatives in Chicago have no donkeys at Christmas besides the one Mary rides on (and the presumed others in the stable and whatnot), but Monte was from New Jersey, so it's possible the culture was different.
posted by hoyland at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by hoyland at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Babbo Natale (loosely, "Dad/Daddy Christmas") is the Italian name for Santa Claus and he's completely borrowed from other cultures, down to using a sleigh and reindeer. La Befana is the one who traditionally brings gifts on the Feast of the Epiphany (Jan. 6), and she rides a broom, because her legend is that she's a poor older lately who encountered the three magi and regretted letting them leave without her to follow the star of Bethlehem so now she travels around bringing gifts to all the good children while she looks for Baby Jesus. (She rides a broom because she'd told the wise men she was too busy cleaning her house to go with them.)
Lou Monte's songs were definitely more for the Italian-American assimilated market - they use a lot of Neopolitan and Calabrian dialect and a lot of Italglish, which would have made them more appealing to folks like my grandmother and her sisters, who were old enough when they immigrated to keep a lot of their dialect but were so assimilated to their more urban lives in the US that they could joke about the quaint mountain villages they'd grown up in.
Okay, that got long. tl;dr, Dominic is an Italian-American creation. Thank you for coming to my TED talk on novelty songs and the Italian diaspora. Hee-haw, hee-haw!
posted by camyram at 10:53 AM on December 21, 2019 [14 favorites]
Lou Monte's songs were definitely more for the Italian-American assimilated market - they use a lot of Neopolitan and Calabrian dialect and a lot of Italglish, which would have made them more appealing to folks like my grandmother and her sisters, who were old enough when they immigrated to keep a lot of their dialect but were so assimilated to their more urban lives in the US that they could joke about the quaint mountain villages they'd grown up in.
Okay, that got long. tl;dr, Dominic is an Italian-American creation. Thank you for coming to my TED talk on novelty songs and the Italian diaspora. Hee-haw, hee-haw!
posted by camyram at 10:53 AM on December 21, 2019 [14 favorites]
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posted by brujita at 9:19 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]