1# Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, had a very shiny nose…🎶

Here’s the surprising history behind your favorite Christmas Carols!
What if “The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, Frosty and the “One Horse Open Sleigh” had nothing to do with Christmas?
Singing Christmas songs goes hand in hand with baking Christmas treats, listening our favorite Christmas tales, watching our favorite Christmas movies, and not only.
Like everything around this period of the year, everything has a story.
From songs that have been saved from being erased forever to not really knowing for sure where a song came from, here is the history of a few Christmas Carols you know and sing still today!

Enjoy our Advent Calendar 2022!

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🎄🎅🏻 THERE ARE ONLY 24 DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS 🎅🏻🎄

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Everybody knows Rudolph was the last reindeer to join Santa’s crew, but few people know about the real story behind this beloved character.

Actually, Rudolph got his start in advertising.
In 1939, with the Great Depression starting to fade and World War II lurking, Christmas cheer was in short supply.
Thus Montgomery Ward department store HQ took it upon themselves to get children and families into the holiday spirit by creating a free book for kids.

It was Robert L. May, an ad man for the store, who came up with the idea of a reindeer as his main character, and it seems as he peered out at the thick fog that had drifted off Lake Michigan, he came up with the idea of a misfit reindeer ostracized because of his luminescent nose, who used his physical abnormality to guide Santa’s sleigh and save Christmas.
As a limerick writer, he loved alliteration, and he brainstormed different names that began with the letter “R” including Reginald and Rodney.
Luckily Rudolph was his final choice because singing about “Rollo the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, another of his tries, just wouldn’t be the same!

But Robert didn’t see himself as a winner.
He had always felt like a bit of an outcast, and, at 35, he felt he was far from reaching his potential, pounding out catalog copy instead of writing the Great American Novel as he had always dreamed he would.
Rudolph is the story of an underdog, red-nosed reindeer who was in the right place at the right time — just when Santa needed a reindeer with exceptional skills.

“Can’t you come up with anything better?” the boss asked, according to a May’s 1975 telling in a story published in the Gettysburg Times.

But Robert believed in his story, he got his buddy in the art department to draw up some sketches and, together, they convinced the boss.
Copies of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were shipped to Montgomery Ward stores across the country.
The book was a huge success, and Montgomery Ward’s printed and distributed more than 2 million copies that year at branches across the country.

Two years later, his brother-in-law Johnny Marks, a songwriter, put Rudolph’s story to music life.
Bing Crosby was given the first crack to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but none other than the singing cowboy, Gene Autry, recorded the song after Crosby turned it down.
That was a big mistake since the recording hit No. 1 on the U.S. charts the week of Christmas 1949, two million copies were sold and the song continues to be one of the best-selling of all time!

The song had an added introduction, paraphrasing the poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”, public domain by the time the song was written, stating the names of the eight reindeer:
“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen,
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?”

And now a little bit of numbers: the song was first introduced live on New York Radio (WOR) by crooner Harry Brannon in November 1949.
Finally Gene Autry recorded the song on June 27, 1949, which was later released as a children’s record by Columbia Records in September 1949.
His recording sold 1.75 million copies its first Christmas season and 1.5 million the following year. In 1969, it was awarded a gold disk by the RIAA for sales of 7 million, which was Columbia’s highest-selling record at the time, and It eventually sold a total of 12.5 million. Cover versions included, sales exceed 150 million copies, second only to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”.
In December 2018, Gene Autry’s original version entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 36, nearly 70 years after it first charted, and It climbed to No. 27 the week ending December 22, 2018.
It even peaked at No. 16 the week ending January 5, 2019!

And as for Rudolph, well, he, as they say, went down in history.