The Real Red-Nosed Reindeer

A behind-the-scenes, insider's account of one foggy Christmas Eve, from The Reign of the Anti-Santas (Order Now!).

Read below, or listen to this chapter from the audiobook of The Reign of the Anti-Santas, as interpreted by David Foley Jr.

Everything started to fall apart when Santa made that deal with Rudolph. It’s a song now. It’s a joke. It’s a costume and a riddle. Because you need things like that to begin to wrap your brain around what actually happened and how things became so incomprehensibly fucked.

To understand the story, you have to understand Rudolph. I’ve spent a lot of time with reindeer—professionally, socially, even romantically, briefly. And I can tell you that the luxury paddocks of the first-string flying team are a nasty place to be. Imagine the locker room in a game where the losers are ground into deer burger.

As a reindeer, Rudolph was a perennial cusper. One month he’d be a member of the Main Eight, then a hoof injury or some lightning-fast kid from Lapland, and he was a top backup again. On and off, year in and year out, Rudolph was always about to take someone’s spot or he was standing in someone’s way. And when the song says those assholes “wouldn’t let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games,” I assure you that’s the nicest imaginable way of describing what they put him through. So I can guess how he might have felt that foggy Christmas Eve.

There’s a lot of stories about what happened. We all know the song, paid for by Rudolph. The estate won’t confirm it. But they’re quick enough to cash the royalty checks. Look it up. But like the song says, it was a foggy Christmas Eve, as you know. And Santa was seeing double, as you may not know. That night was foggy. My father said he warned everyone about the conditions. But no one else remembers that part.

Rudolph was a second-team reindeer that night, nearer to the end of his run at the pole than the beginning. And he’d never even made a Christmas run. In the Siberian outpost where he was from, he was hot shit—the best they’d seen in a generation—maybe ever—and living proof that a reindeer could make it out of that hopeless backwater with its shuttered peppermint mines, all the way to the big show at the top of the Earth. But on Santa’s training course, no one was too impressed, as you may have heard.

The thing is that Rudolph was more than just a high-flying sled-puller. You heard about his nose but not how he used it. Rudolph had a nose for the business, for what was actually going on and for who made it go. So when Santa called on Rudolph to light the way, at the last minute like that, Rudolph knew he had the old man by the place where it jingles.

Rudolph listed out his demands, which he’d recited to himself in many a lonely, bitter hour. The jolly old man scoffed, then laughed, then charmed, then pleaded, then agreed. Time was short, and the stakes were high, especially for Santa. Over the years, he’d made a lot of promises he could only hope would never be called in. Those promises had become mountainous problems or obligations. And he had to walk a highwire between the peaks with little besides a sterling reputation, threadbare goodwill and a fucking ho ho ho.

But Rudolph didn’t just harness up when Santa agreed. He had some sharp lawyers, the kind that work on Christmas, who faxed over something similar to a fiscal suicide note for Santa. The old man, against the advice of Mrs. Claus, who’d been a paralegal in a previous life, signed. And away they flew, bringing merriment far and wide, that year.

When they landed—only hours later to most of the world—Rudolph owned 10% of the holiday into perpetuity—gross, not net, mind you—along with a Senior Reindeer pension just as a sweetener.

Ninurtha told Santa to execute Rudolph there and then. And based on stories, the old man wasn’t squeamish about that kind of thing. But he had made a deal, and he stuck to it.

The deal with Rudolph was expensive. But the money was only part of it. The deal with Rudolph broke the feedback loop of Santa’s charisma. Overnight, anything could happen—so everyone went for the money and grabbed what they could.

The reindeer heard about Rudolph’s deal first. I know he rubbed their snouts in it. He bought a big red Cadillac Fleetwood as big as Santa’s sleigh, though the nearest Cadillac dealership was more than 2,000 miles away. He drove around town aimlessly, with exotic women, gloating. Soon, the reindeer threatened to walk off en masse. What they wanted, above all, they said, was dignity. This was a reckoning, they said. Being young and naive, I expected the deer slaughterhouse on the edge of the human suburbs to shut down that week. But the rhetoric never got off the ground. They settled for money, a lot of it.

As you might imagine, Santa the gift-giver was a terrible negotiator.

Soon, rent went up all around the Pole, which meant the elves needed raises, too. They found a union to join and negotiated a contract. Then came the lawyers. There were lawsuits from former elves no one had ever heard of, and class action suits from people claiming chimney damage and theft. Santa hired his own lawyers at no small cost.

The legislators weren’t far behind, threatening new laws. The federal agencies piled on for fear of missing out. The FAA, NORAD, and the Department of Commerce all started expensive investigations. Even the ATF had some kind of angle because of Santa’s pipe. So Santa hired lobbyists to whittle their broad threats into a series of well-placed but still expensive campaign-donation bribes.

The speed of it was stunning. It was a massive trap of a million unvoiced resentments sprung all at once. Maybe Santa lost his nerve. He’d always seemed untouchable. But being one-of-a-kind means having no place to hide. He was something no one else was. He had something no one else had. And he was wise enough to see the incredible peril in that. The herd could turn at any moment. So he didn’t put up a fight. He just wrote checks.

It would have been about a billion times cheaper just to let poor old Rudolph play those fucking reindeer games.

NOTE: This is an excerpt from The Reign of the Anti-Santas - a Christmas misadventure for grownups, which I hope you’ll buy here (ebook) or here (paperback).

ALSO: I won’t deluge you with many more excerpts. This is a non-fiction endeavor, mostly. Maybe one more excerpt, in a few months, when it’s relevant.