“It’s Nose Day,” said Mike Rutkowski with Ramsay Signs, as he greeted the security guard at the White Stag building Wednesday morning.

Nose Day is a Portland tradition since 1959 — it’s the day the red nose is lit up on the White Stag/ Portland Oregon sign, which famously sits on the west side of the Burnside bridge.

The nose, at least in recent history, is always lit the day before Thanksgiving. It requires a manual flipping of a switch on the control panel located at the base of the sign, on the roof of the White Stag building.

Rutkowski graciously allowed The Oregonian/OregonLive to tag along, although everyone with Ramsay Signs assured us the process wouldn’t be interesting.

Wouldn’t be interesting?

This is the moment when the holiday season officially begins in Old Town.

This is a chance to get up close and personal with a world-famous symbol of Portland.

This is a proud part of the city’s history.

Ramsay Signs built the original sign atop a manufacturing building in Old Town in 1940. At the time, the Oregonian previously reported, “the animated 50-by-51 3/4-foot sign lit up with 1,100 feet of neon tubing and 500 incandescent lamps, featured a pouring sugar sack.” In five separate stages, it read, “White Satin Sugar, Oregon’s Own and Only.”

In 1957, the sugar came down, and the sign was rebranded for White Stag, a sportswear company, which used a white stag as its mascot. The holiday tradition of adding a red nose, a la Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to the sign began in 1959.

In 1997, the script was replaced by “Made in Oregon” to promote the Made in Oregon stores, but the stag remained.

In 2010, with the sign now a much beloved fixture in Old Town, the city of Portland took over ownership of the sign and the costs for its maintenance. The lettering was changed to “Portland Oregon,” but again, the deer remained.

The red nose isn’t a screw-in sort of light bulb. It’s actually a grid of neon tubing a bit bigger than a football. On Wednesday morning, Rutkowski briefly turned on the entire sign, flipped the switch labeled “red nose,” and made sure everything was in working order before leaving the rest up to the evening timer.

“I’ve already checked it twice,” he said.

Santa would be proud.

And that was it. The whole thing took about 15 minutes.

In the fall and winter, the sign is lit from 4 p.m. to 7 a.m., but it’s on an old-fashioned, not-exactly-precise analog timer.

So, if we’re being technical about a completely arbitrary pronouncement, we can state officially – the 2019 holiday season came to Old Town at exactly 4:18 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 27.

-- Samantha Swindler / @editorswindler / sswindler@oregonian.com