Who Knows What Meanness Lurks in the Hearts of Reindeer? The Shiny Nose!
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Winter 2022
Reprinted from the underground “Cryptid Encounters” newsletter.
After over eight decades of waiting, Rudolph—the reindeer of the shiny red nose—has finally received the formal apology he’s been due from his peers. And those casters who had previously mapped the legendary reindeer are now scrambling to re-map the cryptid in order to ensure their mapped versions possess Rudolph’s renewed, reinvigorated spirits.
“It’s been a hard row to hoe,” an anonymous source from the Claus Caribou Conservation Center north of Barneo Ice Camp in the North Pole says. “You gotta understand that Rudy has always felt that he was accepted because he was useful, not because he deserved kindness like everybody else. It’s been a wall between him and the other reindeer for a long, long time now.”
Rudolph’s story was revealed as fiction in 1939 by a caster named Robert May, who’d had the good fortune to map the previously unknown reindeer in Chicago on Christmas Eve, 1938. Until then, Rudolph was an enigmatic cryptid of a cryptid, assumed to be an extension or manifestation of Santa Claus, who has been one of the most influential cryptids in history.
“Robert May likely learned Rudolph’s story from his mapped version in the summer of 1939,” writes noted caster historian Abraham MacCamran in his field guide to cryptids, Nowhere to Hide. “Unlike many casters, May saw a financial benefit to exposing the existence of the reindeer, albeit in the guise of a free Christmas story distributed by the Montgomery Ward department store.”
Rudolph, most sources confirm, wasn’t adversely affected by the exposure until a decade later when May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, wrote a song about the reindeer’s exploits. The song, sung by the famous Gene Autrey, made Rudolph a household name—and underscored his sense of righteous indignation regarding the lack of any remorse on the part of his fellow reindeer.
“The whole world was singing about how Rudy was excluded from Antler Masters, Caribou Who, and all the other reindeer games,” the Claus Caribou Conservation Center says. “In his mind, it was public humiliation. And then, the rest of the story comes out about how Santa noticed his advantageous nose, and whoosh, everybody loves him like they were never mean to him in the first place. It hardened his little deer heart. And then, of course, the casters start coming around, looking to map him for their spellbooks.”
“In the years since first learning of Rudolph’s existence,” writes MacCamran in Nowhere to Hide, “an estimated 2.5 million casters have successfully mapped the reindeer on Santa’s yearly rounds. Unbeknownst to all of them at the time, Rudolph harbored a sense of bitterness regarding his previous treatment that proved, in fact, to be detrimental to casters’ abilities to fully control their mapped versions.
Many a caster, MacCamran says, “discovered when they tried to rely on their mapped Rudolph a second time that they’d failed to show him proper gratitude the first time—and after that, their Rudolphs rejected their requests for service over and over.”
Now, eighty-two years after Rudolph’s private shame was made public, all of the other reindeer have put their hoof marks on a formal declaration of apology that was delivered to their estranged kin through intermediaries at the Conservation Center.
“In part, it calls out individual acts that the other reindeer were specifically aware rubbed Rudolph the wrong way,” the anonymous source from the Center notes. “Like, one of the Essential Eight, as they call themselves, said he was sorry for saying Rudolph inspired the song ‘Blinded by the Light.’ Another one said he should never have called him ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Nightlight.’”
The apology, the source says, is two-hundred and forty pages in length, noting, “It’s been a long eighty years, so there was a lot to be sorry for. But at last, Rudolph feels vindicated.”
Now casters are lining Santa’s routes, all hoping for a chance to map the legend anew and replace the disgruntled version with one that feels more at peace with the world.
“Now that he’s got control of his resentment, I just hope everyone remembers to say ‘thank you’ after they map him,” the source says. “Otherwise, it might not be until the year 2100 before casters get another chance to map a reined-in deer again.”
