Special Guest Blogger: Robert L May

Christmas is the biggest shopping holiday of the year so it's no surprise that companies spend every December bombarding us with ads full of cheerful, wholesome, uplifting messages to capitalize on all that goodwill and turn it into money but not everything in the Western World is based on some crass marketing campaign.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, however, was and that's how the story of a nasally deformed outcast reindeer came about.
My employer, department store chain Montgomery, would give away free colouring books to children around Christmas but they decided it would be cheaper to make their own book instead of buying them from publishers so i was asked to write a Christmas promotion story to be handed out, the only condition was that it had to be an animal story with a main character like Ferdinand the Bull'.
I came up with how a foggy Christmas Eve threatened to disrupt the Jolly Fat Mans sleigh trip but he used Rudolph's glowing, shiny red nose as a makeshift lamp to guide his sleigh therefore saving Christmas and becoming a hero.
The result was a bestselling children's book for which i was paid a nice round sum of zero dollars but i was given the rights to Rudolph a few years later as payment once the store thought they had exhausted all the reindeer stuff unaware that a Rudolph song, movie and a mountain of merchandise would soon be hovering into view as my little reindeer became a permanent addition to the Santa legend.
My brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, was a Christmas song specialist and wrote songs that you've no doubt heard every Christmas since you were born such as Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and A Holly Jolly Christmas and he adapted my poem to music and had it recorded by Gene Autry and as the song says, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he went down in history.