LITTLE ROCK — Dear Otus,
It has been our family tradition for 32 years to gather on Christmas Eve and read your annual “True Story of Rudolph” while we play our copy of “Jingle Cats” singing “Silent Night.” I do hope you plan to run the column again this year.
- Roman Aclef, Malvern
It’s a tragic tale of fleeting fame and the horrific consequences of unbridled hubris. It is the cruel, cruel cautionary tale of Rudolph the red-nosed ... caribou.
Rudolph came from the wrong side of the Prime Meridian and was not, technically, a reindeer. Yet he tried to “pass.”
Abandoned by his mother at a tender age, Rudolph wandered aimlessly northward until he stumbled upon Santa’s workshop, the sprawling 1,868-acre compound that surrounds theNorth Pole.
Rudolph was overjoyed. Hundreds of carefree elves labored in an idyllic setting of perpetual merriment and yuletide purpose.
Ah, but the elfin elan was only superficial. The elves believed themselveslittle more than indentured servants and, with no place to go since the brutal quashing of the Great Gnome Insurrection of 1428, they secretly cursed their jolly taskmaster and his termagant shrew of a wife.
Sometimes, when Santa wasn’t looking, they spit in his nog.
Frolicking nearby were the eight reindeer that pulled Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
The reindeer also harbored roiling resentment. Their sycophantic service one night a year left them with precious little job satisfaction and low self-esteem, especially since all the corpulent old twit ever said to them was, “Now! Now!” and “On! On!”
When Rudolph arrivedand tried to pass himself off as one of them, they viciously turned on him.
Alpha male Dasher was the first to ostracize the diminutive newcomer. Dancer, Dasher’s sniveling lackey, hectored Rudolph with taunts and gibes.
Most egregious was the surly torment that came from Prancer, Vixen, Comet and Cupid. The four malcontents would surround Rudolph and badger him about his red nose, an unfortunate congenital deformity that ungulate scholars suspect may have been the reason his mother abandoned him.
Donder, the dimwitted one, would prance about grunting Laplandish non sequiturs. Xenophobic Blitzen spent his days brooding and thinking dark, dark thoughts.
The essentials of Rudolph’s tragic tale are recorded in the well-known Christmas song:
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose, And if you ever saw it, You would even say it glowed.
“Glowed” is a euphemism. At its worst, REN (rhinitis epistaxis nostrildamus) can be painfully blinding to the afflicted and those in theimmediate vicinity.
All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names.
They wouldn’t let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games.
The hurled invectives only served to exacerbate Rudolph’s nasal condition until it eventually came to the attention of Santa Claus.
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say,
“Rudolph, with your noseso bright,
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
Rudolph was overjoyed to be chosen on the first occasion in hundreds of years when a passing El Nino warm front caused a dangerous advection fog and threatened to cancel Christmas. Sadly, it all went to his head and Rudolph had the impertinence to gloat in front of the others. It set him up for a tragic fall.
Then how the reindeerloved him
As they shouted out with glee,
“Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer,
You’ll go down in history.”
The reindeer were disingenuous. The next Christmas Eve dawned clear and bright and Rudolph was not needed. In fact, the addition of a ninth reindeer had spoiled the sleigh’s tenuous aerodynamics and made Santa late to parts of South America. He had been in a terrible mood all year and blamed Rudolph.
A pariah once more, Rudolph’s fragile psyche snapped and he wandered off to an ice floe where, legend has it, he was eaten by polar bears.
All except his nose, which even the usually thorough omnivores found disgusting.
Until next time, Kalaka admonishes you to accept yourself for who you are.
Disclaimer Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat’s award-winning column of humorous fabrication appears every Saturday. Email: mstorey@arkansasonline.com
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