With the various rounds of travel and vacation at end of December break we ran out of time to post the entries for the second round of Satan...

Today we are happy to present a guest post and map from our friends in LADEST at Siena University (Cristina Capineri, Michela Teobaldi, Clau...

We are happy to announce that Duane Griffin of Bucknell University is the winner of the Floating Sheep "Mapping Santa" contest. Hi...

This month marks the two year anniversary (more or less) of the Floating Sheep blog and we've made a tradition out of having some fun wi...

We've studied Santa Claus in English ( twice, even! ), French , Italian , Polish , German , Spanish , Dutch and a handful of other lan...

In this post we've decided to explore the less joyful side of Christmas. We conducted searches for three characters -- Zwarte Piet, Le P...

Searches for Santa's equivalent in Eastern Europe displays none of the Christmassy diversity of the western half of the continent. Świę...

As we've already covered in our series of posts up to this point, Christmas traditions are incredibly varied around the world . In fact,...

Now that we've covered variations on Santa Claus in English , French , Italian and Polish , it's time to turn our attention to Germ...

Gwiazdor and Święty Mikołaj were the two Polish terms for Santa Claus we searched and again it is very striking the extent to which they c...

Our comparison for terms in Italian are "Babbo Natale" and "La Befana", which we are the first to admit are not directly...

After something of an Anglo-centric start to our series of twelve posts (see Part II and Part III ), it's time to appease those Francop...

Now that we've explained the thinking behind this year's Search for Santa (in Part I) and mapped out references to two of the most ...

We've all heard about these old men wearing red outfits and sporting bushy white beards. But who are they really? Santa Claus or Father ...

Based on the names listed in our previous posting and the helpful reader comments (thanks!), we have completed our data gathering efforts f...

Building upon our discovery of Santa in Los Angeles last year we are embarking on a similar search this month. The goal this year is to co...

Sometimes analog is better than digital. This is especially true when being featured on the front page of the the Lexington Herald-Leader on...

With good tidings from all of us, the Floatingsheep team wishes you all a very happy holiday season, no matter your religious preference . W...

A question asked by children and adults for generations has been, "Where does Santa live?" While some may scoff that there is an ...