Christmas shopping

Once again, the festive season is sneaking up on us, and for anyone who is a wee bit stuck for gift ideas, we’ve got lots of options on our webshop.

Adoption pack

For the reindeer fanatic in your life, how about adopting the Herd for them? As an adopter, you become one of our valued supporters and in return for your financial support, you will receive a certificate and photograph of the reindeer and additional information about reindeer along with two newsletters over the year. For UK adopters, we also send a few unique souvenirs. You can also visit the herd for free (one person admitted free per adoption). The adoption subscriptions are spent entirely on the upkeep of the reindeer including their food and welfare in the form of medicines and veterinary care. Click here to find out more.

All sorts of stationary – notepads, pens and pencils.

Toys and cuddly keyrings for all ages.

Handy eco cotton pouch, and locally made leather bookmarks.

Tea towels of different colours, reusable travel cups, locally made wooden coasters and branded thimbles.

A selection of books, telling the story of the herd.

All of these, and lots more, can be found on our webshop by clicking here. Happy shopping!

Adopting a reindeer? What’s that all about?

I imagine that there might be quite a few ‘newbies’ to the reindeer herd and to our social media pages just now, being as Christmas is the busiest time of year for our reindeer adoption scheme. Several hundred people will have had an A4 white envelope under their tree on Christmas morning last month, with a brand new, shiny reindeer adoption tucked inside. Hopefully some of those people have since tracked us down online to see what on earth they’ve just become part of… I thought I’d write a little bit of an introduction to us, and primarily to the adoption scheme, to shed some light on what we’re all about. So if you’re ‘new’, then welcome!

Reindeer roaming freely on the Cairngorms

We have the only reindeer herd in the UK whose reindeer are in their natural habitat, and who spend at least some of each year living out on the mountains in complete freedom, with no fences to be seen. Reindeer are native to the UK but died out here thousands of years ago, and our herd was re-introduced from northern Sweden in 1952. We’ve been running guided walks out to see and feed them on the hill ever since.

Reindeer in our hill enclosure, where we take the Hill Trips to (for most of the year at least)

Visitors mingling with reindeer on a Hill Trip in a different location

Guided walks form a large part of our income, directly supporting the management of the herd, but we have several other ways of earning money too – one of the main ones being the Support Scheme, the income from which is all ploughed back into the upkeep of the herd. This was started in 1990, and I see from our database records that we still have two adoptions that were originally set up in 1990 which are still going today, in their 30th years! We have about 1200 adopters in total just now, having had over 9000 adoptions in total over the years.

Highly technical filing system…

I think the biggest appeal of our adoption scheme, in comparison to those available for other animals, is that we still hand-write the majority of our correspondence to our adopters. No printed packs pulled off shelves and ready to go for us… Maybe it makes it a bit less ‘professional’ but I feel it’s so much more personal, and there can be very few animal adopters in the UK who receive a personal letter direct from the people who look after ‘their’ adoptee (complete with spelling mistakes and the likes!). A generic typed letter must be so much more the standard nowadays. Perhaps we’re just old-fashioned here at Reindeer House.

A range of certificates of former designs…

Now we’ve settled on a good certificate design, so we rotate the colours through the years. All very organised!

Photos of every single reindeer in the herd have to be taken, cropped, printed and filed ready for the right one to be glued to each certificate.

In the run up to Christmas, all hell breaks loose here in the office. Adoptions, both renewals and new ones, start pouring in and reindeer herding becomes a delicate balance of outdoor work, dealing with visitors, and frantically making up adoption packs. I liken them to a tide, at times threatening to overwhelm us and at times receding as we battle them under control. In November and December the tide never recedes for too long though, before returning with fury. There was a memorable Friday this Christmas just past when we started the day with 30 adoptions waiting to be made up, several of us then working at them pretty much all day, and finished the day with 45, as they came in faster than we completed them! Panic stations.

A typical, frantic, day in the office at Christmas time. This is Andi’s ‘panic’ face!

Along with the yearly adoption pack come the two newsletters, printed in June and October and posted out to everyone. By snail mail – we’ve not really got on board with the idea of emailing digital copies yet. Lots of our adopters are in the “mature” category too, many of whom don’t use email regularly. And to be honest, sometimes the old fashioned ways are much more straightforward – give me printed material over PDFs anyday. Don’t even get me started on whether direct debit is an option for renewing adoptions or not… (Our computers, and my brain, would melt.)

We highlight a different reindeer each newsletter, a female in June and a male in November.

A busy day for the post office when the newsletters are all ready to go!

Along with the pack and the newsletters, adopters also get one free admission each time they visit. For some this is never, for some, multiple times a year. We also always do our best to ensure adopters get to meet their adoptee when they visit too if they give us advance warning of their visit, although this is not always possible depending on the time of year. Nothing beats the delight of hand-feeding your ‘own’ reindeer!

Hand-feeding on the Hill Trip. Photo by Carole Curtis

Many adopters have become very familiar faces to us now, and with the rise of social media, friendships have formed between adopters. On the subject of social media and the internet in general, gone are the days when adopters saw one sole photo of their reindeer per year. Now we do our best to be relatively active online, posting photos regularly and (no surprise here) blogs. A social media course told us a few years back that, as a business, we should be blogging regularly, so we started doing so every Friday, and have not missed a week yet. All hail the ability to ‘schedule’ blogs far in advance, meaning there’s not a last minute panic!

And sometimes, it all just goes wrong. Spot the mistake… Face palm moment.

So thank you, each and every one of all you adopters! You help fund every aspect of the herd and the company (including paying our wages 😉 ) and enable it to be so successful, and your generous support is NEVER forgotten. And if this has whetted your appetite and reindeer adoption sounds like the thing for you, more details can be found on our website.

Here’s to the next 30 years of reindeer adoptions!

Hen

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