How does the Italian Santa Claus find his way Christmas Eve if it's foggy? Not sure, but he doesn't necessarily have Rudolph to help! This is a fun little bit of Cultural Christmas trivia, but Rudolph the famously red-nosed reindeer is actually an American-created more recent character! Of course like a lot of North American cultural aspects of this nature, it has caught on elsewhere, but in case you were here for Christmas, you might have noted that Santa's reindeer were minus a particular one. Here's some fun facts about the American Shiny-nosed Christmas Eve Hero:
Santa already had the other reindeer to pull his sleigh, but a new reindeer came about in 1939 when the department store Montgomery Ward asked one of their copywriters, Robert L. May to create a Christmas story for a holiday booklet to giveaway.
It's thought that May used a bit of inspiration from his own childhood bully experiences to write this story of a misfit reindeer that all the other reindeer picked on.
May's boss initially thought it might be a bad idea to create a character with a red nose, which was associated with drunks, but changed her mind after seeing some sketches.
Two possible names for our red-nosed friend were "Rollo" (said to sound too cheerful) and "Reginald" (said to sound 'too British').
Rudolph got so popular that after World War 2 the need for trademarking the character arose, only that since May had created Rudolph as an employee, he had no rights or royalties to his creation until 1947.
The song you might know and love was written in 1949. Many turned down the opportunity to write this jungle, saying that they didn't want to mess with the already long-established Santa legend. In the end it was written by Gene Autry,
The story you might know about Rudolph is actually based on the song lyrics, as the original story of Rudolph written by May has some important differences. For one, in May's story Rudolph was not one of the reindeer in Santa's village, or the son of one of Santa's reindeer, but instead lived in a normal reindeer village with normal reindeer parents. Also, despite being teased about his nose by other reindeer kids, his family never treated it as something bad or to be ashamed of. So how did Santa find him? In May's version, Santa was delivering presents to Rudolph's house one foggy Christmas Eve and this is when he noticed his red glowing nose and asked him to help him guide the sleigh through the terrible fog.
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