Real Story of Rudolph

                Families can be strengthened by sharing holiday traditions, both spiritual and temporal.  They can share their traditions with friends and neighbors and strengthen their community.  By strengthening their families and communities, parents can strengthen their nations.

                Most of us have heard about Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer.  Most of us enjoy singing about him leading Santa’s sleigh to deliver Christmas presents on a foggy Christmas Eve.  Do you know how the story came to be?

                “Rudolph came to life in 1939 when the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward company asked one of their copywriters, 34-year-old Robert L. May, to come up with a Christmas story they could give away in booklet form to shoppers as a promotional gimmick.  The Montgomery Ward stores had been buying and distributing coloring books to customers at Christmastime every year, and May’s department head saw creating a giveaway booklet of their own as a way to save money.  Robert May, who had a penchant for writing children’s stories and limericks, was tapped to create the booklet.

                “May, drawing in part on the tale of The Ugly Duckling and his own background (he was often taunted as a child for being shy, small, and slight), settled on the idea of an underdog ostracized by the reindeer community because of his physical abnormality:  a glowing red nose.  Looking for an alliterative name, May considered and rejected Rollo (too cheerful and carefree a name for the story of a misfit) and Reginald (too British) before deciding on Rudolph.

                “He then proceeded to write Rudolph’s story in verse as a series of rhyming couplets, testing it out on his 4-year-old daughter, Barbara, as he went along.  Although Barbara was thrilled with Rudolph’s story, May’s boss was worried that a story featuring a red nose – an image associated with drinking and drunkards – was unsuitable for a Christmas tale.  May responded by taking Denver Gillen, a friend from Montgomery Ward’s art department, to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sketch some deer.  Gillen’s illustrations of a red-nosed reindeer overcame the hesitancy of May’s superiors, and the Rudolph story was approved.  Montgomery Ward distributed 2.4 million copies of the Rudolph booklet in 1939, and although wartime paper shortages curtailed printing for the next several years, a total of 6 million copies had been distributed by the end of 1946.

                “The post-war demand for licensing the Rudolph character was tremendous, but since May had created the story on a `work made for hire’ basis as an employee of Montgomery Ward, that company held the copyright to Rudolph, and May received no royalties for his creation.  Deeply in debt from the medical bills resulting from his wife’s terminal illness (she died about the time May created Rudolph), May persuaded Montgomery Ward’s corporate president, Sewell Avery, to turn the copyright over to him in January 1947, and with the rights to his creation in hand, May’s financial security was assured.  (Unlike Santa Claus and other familiar Christmas figures of the time, the Rudolph character was a protected trademark that required licensing and the payment of royalties for commercial use.)

                “`Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ was reprinted commercially beginning in 1947 and shown in theaters as a nine-minute cartoon the following year, but the Rudolph phenomenon really took off when May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, developed the lyrics and melody for a Rudolph song.  Marks’ musical version of `Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ (turned down by many in the music industry who didn’t want to meddle with the established Santa legend) was recorded by cowboy crooner Gene Autry in 1949, sold two million copies that year, and went on to become one of the best-selling songs of all time (second only to `White Christmas’).  A stop-action television special about Rudolph produced by Rankin/Bass and narrated by Burl Ives was first aired in 1964 and remains a popular perennial holiday favorite in the U.S.”

                For more information about the real story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer follow this link.