Reindeer Games

Posted in Toys and Collectibles, Holidays |

By Less Lee Moore

Fear not: this is no paean to the 2000 movie with Charlize Theron and Ben Affleck woefully miscast as two-timing criminal lovers. This is a tribute to a storied family tradition, one involving bizarre rituals and the relentless search for functioning batteries.

First I should tell you about my grandmother Alice (aka “Maw Maw”) and her love of holiday decorations. For as long as I can remember, Christmas decorations were a Big Deal. Her enthusiasm also applied to Halloween, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, and, well you get the picture. She would trot out boxes of well-loved decorations every year: the Nativity scene featuring the Wise Man with the broken and glued on arm; the plastic Snowman with the carpet sweeper (for some reason this was a favorite of mine); and many others whose initial manufacturing likely predated the Johnson Administration.

At some point, she acquired a talking parrot toy, one that had two modes: record and play. Speaking into a tiny microphone chip embedded within the parrot’s plastic “perch,” you could record a snippet of speech. By flipping the switch to “play,” you could repeat the recording while the parrot flapped his wings and waggled his beak.

More fun than reindeer
should be allowed to have.

For some reason, Maw Maw found this to be a perfectly appropriate Christmas conversation piece. We all went along with it, and juvenile antics such as making the parrot swear became commonplace.

A few years later, Maw Maw and her cousin Cleo found some mechanical reindeer toys on sale at a local department store. They purchased several of them (a real bargain at $9. 99 each!) in anticipation of Maw Maw’s annual Christmas party. One year, my brother, my dad, and I were all a bit tipsy (okay, so we were drunk) and we decided it would be funny to make the reindeer “fight.” This entailed placing them on an ironing board facing each other, flipping the ON switch, and taking bets to see which one would get knocked off the table first.

It was a huge hit and these walking, nodding, music-playing reindeer with blinking red noses then became a magical doorway into the modern era for a woman who was born before the First World War and who wore double-knit polyester separates well into her nineties.

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