Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer did not emerge from the primordial snows of myth or some misty Scandinavian oral tradition. He came from a department store. Specifically: Montgomery Ward, Chicago, 1939. Which is to say, Rudolph is less of a folkloric tradition than a Depression-era marketing gambit.

That year, Montgomery Ward decided to stop outsourcing its Christmas coloring books and instead create its own proprietary giveaway. Enter Robert L. May, a copywriter tasked with producing a holiday story that could be distributed to the children of Monkey Wards’ customers. According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, May modeled the story loosely on ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, writing in rhyming verse and centering it on a misfit reindeer mocked for his physical difference until that difference became his differentiator in a competitive job market.

It’s tempting to retroactively read Rudolph as a parable of inclusion, tolerance, and the quiet dignity of the outsider (readings that aren’t wrong per se) but incomplete given the reindeer’s invention, which is bridled in brand marketing.

The first print run of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, more than two million copies distributed in a single season, guaranteed the free promotional booklet would become a classic (much like Coca Cola’s Santa Claus who was catapulted from a similar marketing manger).

Who Owns Rudolph?

“Because May was an employee of Montgomery Ward, the copyright in Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer was owned and registered by the company as a ‘work for hire,’” writes Kathryn Goldman of Creative Law Center. The story might have remained a charming retail footnote were it not for the unprecedented and charitable transfer of the original intellectual property from Montgomery Ward to May himself a decade later. This would never happen today. 

With the copyright in hand, May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, I adapted Rudolph into a song. The Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry, recorded it in 1949 after initially rejecting it, and the tune promptly exploded, selling over a million copies in its first year.

By the time Rankin and Bass immortalized Rudolph in stop-motion “Animagic” in 1964—adding Hermey the dentist elf, Yukon Cornelius, and the Island of Misfit Toys (a prescient metaphor for Gen X itself)—the character had fully escaped his commercial reins and entered the secular canon of American Christmas.

The Next Generation

“Olive, the Other Reindeer” is not a reindeer at all, but a dog, born from a mondegreen—a misheard lyric. Somewhere along the way, countless children heard “all of the other reindeer” as “Olive, the other reindeer,” and instead of correcting the record, canny culture vultures shrugged and said, hold my eggnog. That mishearing became a 1997 children’s book by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Seibold, then a 1999 animated TV special starring Drew Barrymore, produced by Matt Groening’s Curiosity Company.

This evolutionary spur of the Rudolph lore is interesting to me. Whereas Rudolph was created to sell sweaters and toasters, Olive emerged because kids are stupid. Both Rudolph and Olive endure because they’re powered by the same narrative engine—the consolation prize of being different in a system that rewards sameness.

What’s striking, in retrospect, is not that marketing departments can contrive enduring cultural touchstones, but that those touchstones can outgrow their makers and become culture itself. It might be on the nose to say, but as crass as his inception might’ve been, Rudolph persists because he is meaningful.

Montgomery Ward is long gone (the Montgomery Ward building in Petaluma received its demolition permit in December 1967, well before the chain’s 2001 closure) but Rudolph is with us, nose aglow, guiding Santa’s sleigh through the fog of the culture wars.

And even though medium is the marketing, his message remains merry.