Two Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, The Little Drummer Boy (1968) and Nestor theLong-Eared Christmas Donkey (1977), were favorites of mine as a child. While re-watching them again last Christmas season, several anachronisms stood out. With thebenefit of childhood ignorance back in the 70s, I enjoyed these shows unperturbed byinaccuracies of historical detail. But now as a 50-something adult possessing a basicknowledge of history, these inexactitudes irritate me perhaps more than they should -after all, Rankin/Bass productions exist not for the purpose of teaching history, but asquasi-religious fantasy entertainment for children.

The overarching anachronism of The Little Drummer Boy, which takes place during thenativity of Jesus, is that the Roman province of Judaea is populated by modern ethnicstereotypes. Here the stop-motion puppet characters are dressed in attire moreappropriate to than to Jews from the time of Herod theGreat. One example is the greedy, hook-nosed Ben Haramed, the leader of a caravanof traveling performers, who kidnaps an orphaned drummer boy named Aaron andforces him to join his troupe. Ben Haramed wears a lavishly embroidered vestresembling a yelek, and his sidekick Ali of Arabia sports a hat called a fez. Never mindthat both the yelek and the fez originated in Ottoman Turkey around the 17th centuryA.D.

A numismatic connection occurs in The Little Drummer Boy when Ben Haramed burstsTevya-like into song and dance, a kind of for shifty desertnomads. During the song, Ben Haramed reaches into his bag of shiny gold coins andflings one of them high into the air. However, the coin's perfectly round and regularshape evinces no attempt by the animators to suggest the high relief and irregularcontours typical of an ancient coin. On first impression this prop appears to be a modernmilled coin; but upon closer inspection of a still frame its true nature is revealed. Despitelow resolution and backlighting, the shape of an eagle can be seen on the coin'ssurface. The design of the eagle is rendered in the post-World War II modernist stylesymbolic of the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly known as West Germany.Around the eagle a legend is discernible: STOLLWERCK SCHOKOLADE MUNZE,which translates as These same chocolate coins are shownmore clearly in a later scene, in which Ben Haramed sells Aaron's camel companion forthe price of a bag of gold. These coins are shown from various angles as Ben fondlesthem greedily. In one frame the literal is visible, stamped with thenumber ten.

Ben Haramed's then, is really a child's confectionary treat wrapped in gold-colored foil and made by the Cologne-based chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck.Founded in 1839 by Franz Stollwerck, the company has a storied history, and the brandcontinues to produce chocolate today. During the 1960s, chocolate coins exported byStollwerck would have been cheap and readily available in Japan where theRankin/Bass animations were filmed. It seems logical, then, that the animators decidedto use these shiny gold-colored as convenient and cost-effective stand-ins forthe real thing. Given that the film was made for children, the use of chocolate coins isappropriate - perhaps these would have been the only money available for somechildren of the target age range to play with. Probably several each adifferent size, were sold together as a set. The animators likely selected the because it fit comfortably in the puppets' hands.

It seems safe to surmise that the animators, working during the era of low-resolutionprogressive-scan TVs with relatively small screens, did not anticipate that viewers wouldever be able to discern much detail on the coin's surface. Only still frames on an HDmonitor and research on Google have enabled me to positively identify these coins asthe product of Stollwerck chocolates, which to the best of my knowledge is the first timethis fact has been discovered outside of the animation studio itself. The Stollwerckcompany has been mute on the subject since I reached out to them via email severalmonths ago.

Several of the set pieces and puppets used in The Little Drummer Boy were apparentlyreused in Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey, which premiered 11 years later.But commonalities between the two films go beyond shared production assets. Forexample, in both tales the main protagonist journeys across the desert, following theStar of Bethlehem to the nativity of Jesus. Each witnesses the divine infant lying in themanger. Within their individual stories, both Aaron the drummer boy and Nestor thedonkey are destined to assist the Holy Family: Nestor transports the pregnant Mary toBethlehem on his back, and Aaron plays a calming, rhythmic tune on his drum for theinfant Jesus as Mary and Joseph look on. Another commonality: in both films, coinschange hands when an animal is sold.

However, unlike The Little Drummer Boy's chocolate coins, in Nestor, real coins areused. In a scene in which Nestor's owner Olaf is forced to sell him to the Romans alongwith several other animals, Olaf and a soldier discuss their price in silver. During thetransaction, Olaf is shown holding a stack of coins while the soldier hands himanother. On the face of the coin held by the soldier, the shape of Monticello, ThomasJefferson's home, is easy to discern, making it obvious that these are U.S. Jeffersonnickels and not actually silver. As in The Little Drummer Boy, there is no attempt here toimitate the look of a genuine ancient coin. Jefferson nickels were chosen as stand-insfor the denarius, the standard silver denomination in the Roman empire during the reignof Augustus. Probably for similar reasons that chocolate coins were used in The LittleDrummer Boy, nickels were cheap, readily available, and of the appropriate size to fitthe puppets' hands.

Beyond this I believe that the animators must have chosen the Jefferson nickel,specifically out of all modern coins of comparable size, because its relative chunkiness,smooth edge, and mellow color reminiscent of toned silver help it to appear sufficiently Indeed, the Jefferson nickel lacks some of the telltale features of manymodern coins they might have considered instead, such as the Roosevelt dime with itsreeded and copper-colored edge. Perhaps of equal importance in determining the useof the Jefferson nickel as a prop in Nestor is that the reverse bears a frontal image ofMonticello. It was Jefferson himself who designed Monticello in a neoclassical styleinspired by the architectural forms of ancient Greece and Rome.

The most prominent of these forms on the building's façade are visible on the nickel.These include a portico with steps leading up to it and two rectangular wings extendingon either side. Over the portico is a triangular pediment supported by columns, andabove this pediment rises a dome. The central part of Monticello's structure is modeledafter the Pantheon in Rome, a building which dates to the reign of Emperor Hadrianaround A.D. 126, more than a century after the nativity. Nonetheless, the animatorsmust have certainly felt that the image of Monticello lent an authentic but sufficientlygeneric look to the coins. They therefore hid the more recognizable portrait ofJefferson by deliberately orienting the coins in the puppets' hands so that the reversesshowing Monticello faced upward toward the camera.

Many anachronisms in The Little Drummer Boy and Nestor the Long-Eared ChristmasDonkey are based on modern ethnic stereotypes. But the use of modern coins as propsin these films, whether made from nickel or chocolate, appears to have been a purelypractical matter for the animators. For myself as a twenty-first century 50-somethingadult, a member of Rankin/Bass's original target audience now grown up, thesenumismatic are seasonal gifts that await discovery and inviteidentification.