more commonly known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. Rudolph was introduced more than a century later, in Robert L. May’s 1939 children’s storybook Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

There was his nose, to begin with. In the first version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” it glowed “like the eyes of a cat,” and Rudolph’s friends nicknamed him Ruddy because of it.