The first, and most enduring, addition to the Santa Claus canon in the 20th century was the product of a Chicago department store. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” first appeared in 1939 in an promotional give-away for Chicago’s Montgomery Ward department store. His creator was advertising editor Robert Lewis May (1905-1976) who conceived of an illustrated booklet with a Christmas poem that families could read every year. The story was to be about a rejected reindeer with few friends (like May in his own childhood) to whom Santa Claus would turn for assistance. Denver Gillen did the artwork for the booklet based on sketches made visiting the city zoo and May wrote the poem about the reindeer named Rollo. Or perhaps Reginald. Both these names and others were rejected in favour of Rudolph, the choice of May’s four-year-old daughter. The company loved the project and gave away millions of the books throughout the 1940s.
In 1947 song writer Johnny Marks (the brother-in-law of May) penned the lyrics which summarized the Rudolph story:
You know Dasher and Dancer and
Prancer and Vixen
Comet and Cupid and
Donner and Blitzen
But do you recall…
The most famous reindeer of all?
Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And, if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows
All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say,
“Rudolph, with your nose so bright,
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee,
“Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer
You’ll go down in history!”
Marks couldn’t interest any music publishers in his work so he had to found his own St. Nicholas music company; nor could he find a singer willing to take a chance with a song about an advertising character. He was turned down by Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore and Perry Como before Gene Autry “the Singing Cowboy” recorded it in 1949, selling 2,000,000 copies in the first year alone and launching Rudolph to further success. The reindeer went on to appear in movie form, books with translations in dozens of languages and a host of marketing devices and toys.