Good morning. Now, I reckon you’re expecting some sugar-plum nonsense about flying reindeer and jolly old elves. Well, you’ve come to the wrong source, for I intend to tell you the plain truth of the matter, as it was told to me by the principal himself, and if it ruffles your feathers, you can take it up with the North Pole.

My name is Rudolph, and I am a reindeer. Not a magical one, mind you, but one with a considerable nasal inconvenience. This protuberance of mine, which has been the subject of more verse than a bad politician’s speech, is not the cheerful, self-lighting beacon the story-singers would have you believe. No, sir. It is a plain, old-fashioned deformity, and it made me the laughingstock of the entire herd. The others, fine, strapping lads like Dasher and Dancer, they’d snort and say, “Why, Rudolph, you could guide a ship through a fog bank with that thing,” and then fall about laughing while I tried to bury my snout in a snowbank.

So, when that portly old gentleman, Santa Claus—a name which, I am told, carries weight among your kind—showed up on Christmas Eve in a state of considerable agitation, my first instinct was to hide. The fog was thick as Aunt Willie Mae’s gravy, and the whole enterprise was grounded. I watched from the lee of an ice-ridge as he consulted with the foreman, a grim-faced old buck named Donner. They were in a pickle, and the whole works was in jeopardy.

Then the old fellow’s eye fell upon me. I saw it clear as day—a flicker of pure, unvarnished desperation. He marched over, the little men in his employ scattering like ducks, and he peered at my nose as a doctor might peer at a troubling growth.

“Great jumping caterpillars!” he exclaimed, which is an expression I later learned he picked up from a traveling salesman in Cincinnati. “That’s not a nose, that’s a hazard light! Son, how would you like to be front-page news?”

Now, I am a reindeer of simple needs, and being front-page news was not among them. But the prospect of the entire night’s haul being cancelled, and the subsequent gloating from the other bucks, was a fate worse than notoriety. So, I agreed.

Let me tell you something about leading that sleigh. It ain’t the poetry-in-motion you imagine. For one, the din is infernal. Behind me were eight reindeer who had not, until that very evening, considered me fit to clean their hooves, all suddenly required to follow my lead. The chatter was incessant.

“A little to the left, Glow-stick!” from Comet.

“Mind the weather-vane, you luminous idiot!” from Cupid.

And Blitzen, ever the pessimist, muttering, “We’re all going to die following a radioactive nose!”

And Santa himself? A fine navigator, but a nervous passenger. The whole flight, he kept up a running commentary on my luminosity. “A little brighter, my boy! Capital! Now, don’t flare up, we don’t want to wake the children! Steady as she goes, you magnificent, pulsing proboscis!”

It was, without question, the most mortifying and triumphant night of my life. We delivered the goods; I’ll not deny it. We plunged through that woolly darkness like a hot coal through snow, and my nose did, in fact, perform the service for which it was so cruelly engineered.

And the next day? Christmas Day? There was a celebration, of course. A great deal of back-slapping and speeches. They gave me a shiny medal that clinked dreadfully against my feed bucket. The same reindeer who once mocked me now praised my “unique gift.” It was enough to make a fellow cynical.

So here I am, the hero of the hour, standing in the stable while the others sleep off the spiked eggnog. There’s a moral in here somewhere, I suppose. I reckon it’s this: The world has a curious way of making use of a man’s—or a reindeer’s—worst embarrassments. It will first mock you for ’em, then, if it finds a use for ’em, it will celebrate you for the very same thing. There ain’t no sense in it. It’s just the way of things.

But I’ll tell you what does have sense. The quiet of the barn after the fuss has died down. The simple satisfaction of a job done, however strangely it was accomplished. And the knowledge that, for one foggy night, a feller’s greatest liability turned out to be the one thing the whole operation needed. It don’t make the past any less sore, but it makes the hay in the present taste a little sweeter.

That’s the real Christmas gift, if you ask me. That, and the fact that nobody, for one whole day, dared to call me names. And that, my friend, is a story worth telling, even if it ain’t exactly the one they sing about.

*****

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