It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool. May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. He went for a chair and then found it a sink! The room he came down in was blacker than ink The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,Īnd hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.Īnd Santa was right (as he usually is) The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills. Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills, His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…) Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. (That schnozz is not without controversy. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.Īfter giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog. He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.Ĭopywriter Robert L. To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
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