Rudolph: An American Parable
Christmas Films, #1
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The Holiday Season
In the home where I grew up, nobody really had their shit together. Everyone tried, sure, but the family didn’t really work as a family except for a few special, dependable times of the year.
The first was summer vacation. In my family, this was Road Trip season. All of us would pile into the van with our books and our music tapes, Dad would point the vehicle in a promising direction, and we’d head out on the roads to discover America. We got souvenirs at Stuckey’s, stopped at the National Parks, visited distant and half-remembered relatives, and did our best to be home before school started again. You can do this kind of thing when your family’s primary breadwinner is a teacher who also has a summer vacation.
While we were on the road, we were a team. We worked as a team, we slept as a team. We were on the lookout for interesting stuff, and we were by-God gonna find it. And we did.
But those trips, memorable as they were, never seemed real. They weren’t a part of everyday life, they were explicitly a departure from everyday life. When we got home, we knew, the same grudges, and fights, and financial hardships, and hatreds would be waiting for us.
The holidays were different. The holidays were about being home, and during the holidays, our often-broken family would just sort of…work.
I’ve spent many a long evening in the years since leaving home contemplating what it was that made the holidays special.
It wasn’t the feasts—sure, the food was always good, because in America you can eat well off the sales around Thanksgiving and Christmas even if you’re in such abject poverty that you don’t know whether you’ll have a roof over your head next month (which we often didn’t). If you’re willing to cook, you can make magic with turkey, breadcrumbs, cranberries, flour, butter, and old apples. And oh, boy, did all of us love to cook!
It wasn’t the church events, fun though they were. They were always a source of stress in a family where half of us (always a different group) were involved in one or another of the church pageants every year.
Instead, I’ve come to believe, it was the stories.
Festivities got their start at Thanksgiving. My family traces several lines back to the Mayflower, so reading the Mayflower diaries and the stories of the Pilgrims (both the real ones and the fictionalized and mythic accounts that arose later) were part of the scenery. We’d sing songs about the harvest and take turns at night reading to each other from one or another history book about the kinds of things our ancestors went through. In our no-alcohol fundamentalist world, us kids delighted in re-reading the parts of the story where the Puritans decided to make landfall at Plymouth rock because the were running out of beer and needed to brew some more.
One year, we planted our backyard suburban garden with rotten fish as fertilizer, just as the Wampanoag Indians taught our ancestors to do—and we populated our Thanksgiving table that year with pumpkin pies and corn-on-the-cob made from the late fruits of the harvest.
Thanksgiving was always my favorite time of the year…but it wasn’t because I liked Thanksgiving (even though I did).
It’s because, on the day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas season started.
The tree went up. We decorated it with ornaments we’d made every year of our lives, and then made this year’s ornaments to hang on it. Over the next few weeks, we’d each slowly and stealthily populate the under-tree area with presents, always labeled with riddles that had to be solved in order for the recipient to figure out whether the package was intended for them.
And, most importantly, television changed for four glorious weeks.
Every few nights, the siren song would issue from the TV:
“We interrupt our normal programming to bring you this special program…”
Peanuts. Garfield. The California Raisins. Even the normal run of sitcoms. Everyone who was anyone had Christmas specials going. Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse, Rich Little, Mr. Magoo, and everyone else had a version of A Christmas Carol. Even the adults had Christmas movies they could watch when the kids were tired and bored, movies like The Lemon Drop Kid, Holiday Inn, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
And, best of all, there were the Rankin Bass animated specials. The whole family loved these—the adults loved them because they’d grown up with them. We kids loved them because they were clever, well-written, and thrilling (often even a bit frightening).
Top of the stack?
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Christmas in America
As we exit one of the most contentious political seasons of my adult life (which is saying something), it seems good to me that we’re entering the holiday season. Of all the things American culture does very well, Christmas is one of the finest.
Our films bear witness to this. A special subset of these films are a cornerstone of our cultural mythos, and they serve as a fine reminder of the wonderful things that unite Americans and keep our culture fresh generation after generation.
Contrary to the “War on Christmas” garbage (which emanates from all sides of the culture war), Christmas in America has never been exactly a religious tradition, nor is it a tradition that belongs only to whites, or Christians, or to any particular political tribe.
It seems to me that we could use a reminder of this amazing tradition, so this will be the first of a series of articles this month on a collection of films that show Christmas as a nexus of American identity and values, transcending politics, tribes, subcultures, and religion.
And hey, if you all like the entries in this year’s series, I’ll do a sequel series next year, too.
Rudolph, the Christmas Angel
If you’ve heard the song, you know the story. Rudolph was a reindeer that had a glowing nose that marked him out as a freak. He was bullied, excluded, and put out to pasture—his deformity made him useless for the job he was literally born to do. Then, one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa realized that Rudolph’s deformity could save the Christmas toy run if Rudolph would only be kind enough to take the lead position in the sleigh team and light the way.
The song you know was, in turn, based on a 1939 short story by Robert L. May, which was commissioned by the Montgomery Ward department store chain as a marketing gimmick.
This stop-motion masterpiece was made as a further marketing ploy, but what came out the other end wasn’t some chintzy piece of corporate propaganda. This fantastic film never ceased to enthrall the whole family. It had a strange magic about it that seemed—and still seems—positively timeless.
And, as I discovered many years later, there’s a surprising reason for this.
A children’s short story isn’t quite dense enough to support an hour-long film, so the minds behind the film had to take a few creative liberties. Instead of the simplistic story told by the song, the film starts with Rudolph’s birth in the North Pole village of Christmastown. The joyous occasion of his birth is shattered when Santa Clause and Rudolph’s father Donner express horror and shame at Rudolph’s glowing nose.
When Rudolph is old enough, he sets off for reindeer school wearing a debilitating prosthetic nose forced upon him by his shame-faced father, who desperately hopes that the other members of his community won’t find out that his son is a freak.
After a promising start to the school day, in which Rudolph makes friends with another young buck, our hero encounters a pretty doe fawn named Clarice. She takes a shine to him, kissing him on his blushing face, and in a frenzy of erotic joy Rudolph leaps into the air and starts flying without even a lesson. His enthusiasm is so boundless that he accidentally blows off his prosthetic nose.
His deformity gives his envious schoolmates the perfect opportunity to ridicule him. His cowardly teacher, determined to look cool in front of his charges, heaps ridicule and shame upon Rudolph, barring the young buck from school—and all of it happens in front of Clarice.
Rudolph, unable to bear the shame, does not run home. He runs into the wilderness.
There, he encounters Hermey, a toy-making elf who doesn’t like his job. His natural talents have led him to an interest in dentistry, and his inability to buckle under to the system lead to him being fired from his job, exiled into the frozen tundra and utterly shunned by his family and coworkers.
The two of them bond over their mutual status as misfits, and decide to set out into the wider world to make their fortune away from those who would try to force their square pegs into society’s round holes.
The sparse tundra, however, isn’t an hospitable place to go make one’s fortune, and they find themselves hunted by the Abominable Snow Monster, a yeti of such prodigious size and appetite that it crests mountains like King Kong mounting a model city, and swallows full grown reindeer in a single mouthful.
One morning, after spending a fitful night in terror of the Abominable, Rudolph and Hermey meet up with Yukon Cornelius, the Greatest Prospector in the North whose brain, addled by isolation, has confused peppermint with gold and silver, leading him to attempt to strike the mother lode by licking snow off his mining pick.
Nonetheless, he’s an affable fellow, and very good at outfoxing the Abominable, so they team up with him. Their adventures see them stranded on an ice floe and eventually running aground on a mysterious island filled with mal-formed and ill-conceived toys who’ve been rejected by Santa as unfit for human recreation.
The trio requests asylum from the king of The Island of Misfit Toys, but are denied. Toys have no real independent existence, he says, while living beings must figure out how to belong somewhere. Despite the fact that all three of our heroes are misfits, they nonetheless have an obligation to make their way in the world rather than hiding from it. He wishes them well, however, and begs that, should they ever find an opportunity to do so, they figure out a way to find homes for all the misfit toys on his island.
The three bed down and plot their next move, but Rudolph, believing that if he sticks with his friends he will put them in danger because the Abominable can track the group by watching for his glowing nose, waits until his friends are asleep, and slips away.
This Christmas season, spare a thought for your humble narrator. The proceeds from this column keeps the dogs and the cats fed, which allows me to write these articles instead of spending all my time trapping rodents and chasing the bears off. If you enjoy my writing, I’d be greatly obliged for your financial support—which is currently heavily discounted for the Christmas season!
Over the next year, Rudolph learns to survive in the wilderness, growing to adulthood as he fights for survival. He grows a handsome set of antlers and decides to return to Christmastown and face his problems.
Upon his return, he finds himself every bit as unwelcome among his peers as he was when he left. Dashing to his parents’ home, he finds them gone. Santa, finding Rudolph there, reveals that, despite the impossibility of the task his parents set out a few months back with Clarice to find Rudolph. Without Donner, Christmas will be canceled, and that’s to say nothing of the danger that Rudolph’s family and prospective girlfriend might be in.
Rudolph immediately sets out for the cave of the Abominable Snow Man, as it’s the worst possible place for his family to be (and, his luck being what it is, that’s where he expects to find them). He arrives just in time to save Clarice from becoming the Abominable’s lunch. However, Rudolph’s rescue attempt falters as the Abominable snaps off a stalactite and brains him.
As a storm-of-the-century blizzard unleashes its fury, Yukon Cornelius and Hermey, who’ve been searching for Rudolph, happen upon the cave and hatch a cunning rescue plan. They lure the Abominable out of the cave knock the monster out with a boulder, then Hermey pulls the Abominable’s teeth. However, upon waking up, the Abominable still blocks the way, so Yukon bum-rushes the monster and drives it over a cliff. Yukon has sacrificed himself to save his friends.
After mourning the loss, the deer and the elf return to Christmastown and tell their story. The tale of their valor impresses the locals, and both Hermey’s elf boss and Santa express regret at the way they behaved towards the misfits. Santa further pledges to find homes for all the misfit toys.
Then, unexpectedly, Yukon Cornelius shows up with the Abominable in tow (apparently the monster bounced, saving Yukon from a splattery death). The monster, having been tamed, gets a job decorating tall Christmas trees.
Unfortunately, as the storm intensifies, Santa decides it’s too dangerous to fly and announces that Christmas will have to be canceled…until he sees Rudolph’s nose glowing. He realizes that it could act as a search-light to cut through the gloom and allow for safe navigation.
And thus, Rudolph with his nose so bright, comes to guide the sleigh that night. The misfit homecoming saves the town, and the value that the town brings to the rest of the world, and redeems the outcast misfit toys in the bargain.
An American Christmas Carol
In Rudolph, we see a microcosm of the American experience, mirrored at multiple levels.
The United States, having been populated more-or-less entirely by people who faced incredible hardships to escape their native lands in search of something better, is, itself, a sort of Island of Misfit Toys. But, like any such colony, it did not remain a mere home for refugees. Our progenitors who crossed the sea were not idle—they built upon this continent thousands of Christmastowns to raise their children, and make their way. As time went by, new waves of misfits struck out West to make their fortunes and build a world that they could more comfortably live in.
But, eventually, American misfits ran out of “West.” With nowhere left for the misfits to go, the country had to find another way to come to terms with the restless spirit that lay beneath its deepest foundations.
Even the children of misfits, it seems, are mostly normies. Those who aren’t (normies, that is) always have trouble finding ways to fit in. Thus, in the United States, the anarchic frontier ethos and the domesticated Yankee ethos had to find some way to share a country.
Where they did, and when they did, they managed the compromise by creating a world that looked a lot like Rudolph’s world. The mainstream, obsessed with conformity, punished the misfits heavily, and the onus fell upon the misfits to find a way to bring value to their community (or to establish their own). The mainstream, however, tacitly understood that it could not persist without the refreshing powers of the hare-brained loonies that they were so happy to crush. Therefore, when a misfit returned from the frontier with tales of wild adventures, with strange ideas, or with unusual strength of character, they were welcomed back into the fold so long as they could provide value to the community whose tranquility the misfit’s presence disrupted.
The normies, of course, also had to earn their place, but (much as it pains me to say it) there is a default value in conformity. Someone who “plays by the rules” is someone who has a place in any given social order.
In the last decade or so, it’s become popular among the young-and-pretentious to “problematize” Rudolph along these lines:
“The lesson of Rudolph is that if you’re only worth anything if you bring economic value to your community.”
This statement is a deepity—it is true in a shallow sense, while in a deep sense it is false, yet it pretends to be revealing a deep truth.
The truth about human sociality is that no one, anywhere, has ever had pride-of-place if they didn’t bring value to their community. Every civilization ever recorded (with the exception of those flush with plenty in their twilight years) has pretty brutal mechanisms for getting rid of dead weight. Those who do not work do not eat, except and unless another person takes pity on them.
In most cultures, some forms of pity are, likewise, obligatory. In these cultures, those classes to one which is expected to show mercy (the poor, the widows, the orphans, the untouchables) are also usually expected to stay outside.1 They receive mercy because they have no legitimate place, and they can’t get one (which is why charity towards them is obligatory).
But there is something special about the American way:
The American mainstream has a further default obligation: to accept the misfits back into the fold, so long as they provide value. This means that, in America, one can fall from grace, live in the gutter, and then ascend again. It means that one born into the lowest of circumstances is not obligated to stay there. The willingness of the misfit and the outcast to stand upright, to build his own character and fight for esteem, is enough to get him a ticket to normie-land, where he can stay as long as he cares to provide value.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a gospel tale of for the American misfit, explaining in beautiful, simple metaphor (accessible even to children) that we misfits can nonetheless can make a place for ourselves in a world that seems to care nothing for us. And if we fulfill our obligation to make something of ourselves, there is a reciprocal onus on the good-fits to forgive our eccentricities and ask our forgiveness in turn.
Throughout history, the festival of the Solstice has been one of hope and rebirth. It’s a time where an alien being (such as a god) might materialize in a strange world—as mis-fit a situation as can exist—and find a place of honor in this strange world by bringing value to it.
Rudolph reminds us, and teaches us anew, that the ill-born, ill-bred, and ill-treated yet may find within themselves the stuff to be heroes. In so doing, it resonates with great tales from Western history, be they tales about crazy explorers (like Marco Polo and Columbus), rogue frontiersmen (like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid), or gods-made-flesh and lain in mangers.
And thus, in this strange little claymation TV special, do we find the true meaning of American Christmas:
There is honor in heroism, even here among the broken creatures on this Island of Misfit Toys.
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By this I mean “beyond the bounds of polite society” rather than strictly and literally “outdoors,” though the two situations often overlap.
Brilliant. I had forgotten about the raisins.
Now do Year Without Santa Claus!