Lit
Christmas
Rudolph adjusts the phone mount strapped to his antler, angling it until his face fills the frame. The red glow of his nose casts everything in a warm filter that his followers absolutely love. Behind him, the Northern Lights ripple across the sky like a screensaver designed by God.
“What’s up, everyone, it’s your boy Rudy, and we are LIVE on Christmas Eve,” he says, keeping his voice low. Santa’s still doing final checks on the sleigh, muttering about payload distribution and checking his tablet for route optimization. “We’ve got forty-seven thousand watching right now. Let’s get that to a hundred K before we hit North America. Smash that heart button.”
The chat explodes with emojis. Hearts, Christmas trees, tiny reindeer faces.
Donner trots past behind him, and Rudolph swings the camera. “Yo, Donner! Say hi to the stream.”
Donner doesn’t even look up. “Some of us are professionals, Rudolph.”
“He’s just nervous,” Rudolph whispers conspiratorially to the camera. “Performance anxiety. It’s his first time in the lead formation. I’ve been doing this for years.”
This isn’t entirely true. Last year was Rudolph’s first Christmas Eve run. The year before that, nobody would even let him join their reindeer games. He’d spent most of December alone, filming himself doing trick flights over frozen lakes, building a following one sad video at a time. The comments had been brutal back then. “What’s wrong with your nose?” “Freak.” “Reported for using a filter.”
He doesn’t think about that anymore. Or he tries not to.
They’re somewhere over Greenland when Prancer nudges into frame, grinning. “Oh my gosh, are we live right now? Hi everyone!” She waves a hoof at the camera. “Rudy, you have to show them the view. The STARS, you guys. I literally can’t.”
“Prancer’s our hype girl,” Rudolph narrates. “She handles social for the workshop during the off-season.”
“It’s mostly TikTok dances and behind-the-scenes stuff,” Prancer says. “The elves are surprisingly good at transitions.”
Santa’s voice booms from the front of the sleigh. “Landing in sixty seconds! Phones away!”
“You heard the man,” Rudolph says. “Going dark for chimney descent. Back in five.”
He mutes the stream but keeps it running. The numbers in the corner of his screen keep climbing. Eighty-three thousand now. He’s never broken six figures before.
The landing is smooth. Santa disappears down a chimney with a bag that shouldn’t fit but does, and Rudolph waits in the cold silence, watching his breath fog in the air. Comet sidles up beside him.
“You really think anyone cares about this?” Comet asks. Not mean, exactly. Just tired.
“I don’t know,” Rudolph admits. “Maybe not. But I spent a lot of years with nobody caring about anything I did, and now people watch. That means something, doesn’t it?”
Comet considers this. “Maybe,” he says finally. “Just don’t trip on the next takeoff. That would definitely go viral, but not the good kind.”
They’re over Tokyo when it happens. Someone clips a thirty-second segment of Rudolph banking hard through a cloud formation, his nose cutting through the mist like a beacon, the city lights sprawling beneath him like a circuit board made of gold. The clip gets picked up by a meme account with eight million followers. Then a news outlet. Then three more.
By the time they reach Rio de Janeiro, Rudolph’s stream has two hundred thousand viewers. By Mexico City, half a million. Blitzen keeps flying over to check the numbers, shaking his head in disbelief. Even Donner cracks a smile.
“Dude,” Vixen says, “you’re going to be verified by morning.”
Rudolph doesn’t know what to say. His nose has never felt brighter.
They land back at the North Pole just as dawn breaks across the ice. Rudolph’s phone buzzes relentlessly with notifications. Brand deals, interview requests, a DM from a reindeer he’d had a crush on back in flight school who’d never spoken to him once.
The other reindeer crowd around him, laughing, shouting, clapping him on the back.
“Rudolph, my guy!”
“That was legendary!”
“You’re gonna go down in history, bro!”
Rudolph looks at them, these same reindeer who once wouldn’t let him play.
“Thanks, guys” he says says happily to them. “Merry Christmas.”