Rudolph
By Robert Mariner, East Sierra Branch
Hello, my name is Rudolph. You’ve probably heard of me, I’m the one with the antlers and the red nose.
Yeah, that Rudolph.
Anyway, please let me introduce myself. First, they’ve got it all wrong in that song. None of my stable mates – sorry, that’s “all of the other reindeer” – used to laugh at me or call me names. That’s just Robert L. May’s taking poetic license when he wrote the story. I don’t agree with it, but hey, he had a profit motive. And then May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, put the story to song, and wanted Gene Autry to sing it. Gene didn’t originally want to do that job, but his wife convinced him to, and that song went on to become the second biggest-selling Christmas song of all time.
At any rate, here’s the real story. I’ve always been susceptible to an irritable, runny nose condition in really cold weather. At some point I also developed a skin condition on my nose. It’s not terribly common, but sometimes you find it in dogs. Generally it makes our black nose skin lose its color and turn pale. Sometimes the result is splotchy, other times it’s pretty uniform, but the skin just loses some to all of its pigmentation. I had it bad, so my entire nose went almost completely white. Well, actually a pale pinkish, considering the blood in the capillaries in the skin.
Now, that’s not altogether a bad thing. Dark skin radiates heat faster than pale skin, that’s one of the reasons why people whose ancestors lived in the higher latitudes for thousands of generations tended to develop really light-colored skin. That’s called a “survival enhancement mutation.” It seems to work. Keep in mind that during the winter it gets cold up here at the North Pole, even if you aren’t flying.
Anyway, not long after the start of the 20th century, people began building airplanes, and the Big Guy understood that to avoid collisions, pilots needed to see whether there might be other aircraft about. Well, one thing led to another, and one day he noticed that my nose was far redder than usual – remember, it gets red and runny in really cold weather. So, seeing as how he’s a magician anyway, he thought it would be useful if my nose glowed a really bright red when we’re flying our delivery route on Christmas Eve. Early version of an anti-collision beacon, as every pilot knows that if you see a bright red light sailing through the nighttime sky, you want to avoid it.
So there you have it. I’m just a fairly ordinary miniature reindeer – caribou, to you folks in North America – even if my nose does have a skin condition. And once a year we get to dress up in a fancy rig and officially pull the Big Guy’s sleigh. It’s seasonal work, but it pays the bills.
And yes, I guess I have gone down in history.
Read more by and about Robert Mariner at
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/RobertM256
and on his website http://therefugeconfederation.com/.