11 December 17

Following up on a theme from last week, here's another Santa-and-reindeer games tie! This one features reindeer football, which was the inspiration for naming my own fantasy football team the North Pole Reindeer. The idea that Santa's reindeer spent Christmas Eve day playing and cavorting is traced to a 1939 story by Robert L. May, an advertising writer for Montgomery Ward. After World War II, the store gave the rights to the story to May, whose brother-in-law composed the tune about Rudolph that became a huge hit for Gene Autry (in 1949) and set the stage for the famous stop-animation film (in 1964).