Funny as hell! (Warning: copyright law lesson)
I can see why there would still be a legal issue. Seeing as how, thanks to Disney pushing the change through Congress in the early 1990s, the schmucks, U.S. Copyright Law has copyrights expiring 70 years after the creator's death. I forgot who exactly wrote the Rudolph song, but it was written for (or the rights were bought by) Sears Roebuck & Co. in 1902, so that's probably the rightsholder, and they may still be getting royalties. Copyrights used to expire something like 25 years after the creator's death, and since Walt Disney himself died in 1968, every character he originally created were going to enter the public domain in 1993, and even though I disagree with how they did things, they probably thought that the company's valuation would plummet seeing as how the value of their original intellectual property was about to fall off a cliff straight to $0.