Reindeer Games

By Less Lee Moore

More fun than reindeer
should be allowed to have.

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 (a.k.a. “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.

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.

Down for the count.

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 (OK, 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.

Maw Maw and Cleo snatched up two more of these reindeer for the next year’s party and resulting games. The following year, they went on a madcap shopping trip around the city to find more reindeer but to no avail. I managed to find one at a toy store and thus, we ended up with five of them.

We’re not cult members!

These Reindeer Games became infamous, and for several years, young and old alike would gather ’round to eat, drink, be merry, and scream wildly at the reindeer going at it. However, the games were rough on the poor, punch-drunk little fellas.

After a few fights, we started to notice the sound of gears grinding. Then their legs wouldn’t work so well. Then, they just wouldn’t work at all. These members of the “old guard” were retired and took their rightful place on the sidelines of the fake snow tree skirt, nodding sagely at the antics of their younger, feistier counterparts (and commiserating with the Wise Man, no doubt).

In an effort to continually outdo ourselves, or perhaps just because we imbibed too much alcohol, the Reindeer Games evolved throughout the years. Sometimes group fights were staged during a particularly bloodthirsty Christmas. Sometimes members of the “old guard” would miraculously start working and would once again enter the ring. One year, a guest brought felt antler headgear for us all to wear as we frantically cheered on our favorite contestants. I’m quite sure that any innocent passersby would have thought we were in some sort of cult. And I’m not saying that we weren’t, but…

VICTORY!

Though we all remember things like The Dancing Flower from the eighties, the nineties seemed peculiarly suited to a mind-boggling array of dancing and singing seasonal decorations and toys. My dad and I decided that if the Talking Parrot and the Walking Reindeer were hits, the Talking Christmas Wreath, Talking Christmas Tree, Frog-who-played-Jingle-Bells, and other such oddities would make great presents for Maw Maw and surreal accompaniments to the Reindeer Games. She was in her glory and displayed every last one of those crazy things, each and every Christmas.

Eventually, Maw Maw’s physical age caught up with her chronological one. After a fall shattered her leg, she moved into a nursing home and then an assisted living facility. Even though she’d made an amazing recovery, she was too frail to host the annual Christmas party at her house anymore. It didn’t seem right to host the Reindeer Games anywhere else, so we stopped. In April 2006, Maw Maw passed away at the glorious age of 94.

We all miss Maw Maw—-her zest for life, her tolerance for craziness, and her amazing Christmas parties—-but we’ll always have memories of the Reindeer Games (and of course, the Talking Parrot) to keep us laughing for years to come.