Second Stay-at-Home Day of the Leatherman Christmas

On the second stay-at-home day of the Leatherman Christmas, we watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer… again.

We generally reserve movie watching for the weekends – the kids can pick either an episode (implying a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode On Demand or DVRd) or a movie.  When we started the Christmas season, Cal was big on Mickey’s Christmas, a trilogy of short stories with genuinely good messages to take away from them. For his birthday earlier in December, we had gotten him the classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” DVD.  Cal loved it but only watched it occasionally per the aforementioned weekend-only rule.  That was, until our 11 stay-at-home days kicked off.  It was a special time; so I lifted the movie-watching-on-the-weekends-only rule, and we watched Rudolph EVERY day, typically in the morning and sometimes more than once, always at Cal’s request.  Cal’s feet would barely have hit the floor at the base of the stairs in the morning when he’d be asking, “Can we watch Rudolph?”

Can WE watch Rudolph?  The “we” part of that question is amusing.  Me, what I did when it was on wouldn’t technically qualify as “watching” it, though I did catch all of the scenes multiple times.  I’d make coffee… tool around on the computer… get some more sleep… talk with Ella who, 10 minutes into Rudolph, would typically lose interest.  But Cal was always glued to the TV for the movie’s entirety.

A few days into our 11 stay-at-home days, Cal knew the movie so well that he’d announce that a scene he thought we’d be interested in was coming up.  “Ella, the Snow Monster’s coming!” was his favorite foreshadow.  Cal and I would have arguments over what the reindeer coach’s name was – “it’s Comet,” I’d say, and he’d tell me that it wasn’t Comet.  That was until I made sure that we synched up and paid complete attention together to the reindeer games scene and gave him a snotty “see, I told you it was Comet” when we both heard the reindeer say his name.  “My name is Comet. I’m your coach and I’m also your friend,” he announced (something like that, anyway).

Cal knows ALL of the songs from the movie.  ALL of them.  Sure, most kids can sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” word for word and many can hit most of the words in “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.”  But how many kids can sing the “Elf Song” (its official name, I do not know) – “We are Santa’s elves, we make <something something – Cal knows>, we make toys for good girls and boys, we are Santa’s elves” and it goes on from there. 

After watching Rudolph so many times during our 11 stay-at-home days, three thoughts still stick in my head: 1) I love that Cal genuinely enjoys such simple things – Rudolph is about as basic and low-tech as you can get these days – and am wondering how long that’ll last, 2) why didn’t Donner make the Christmas Eve flight through the snowstorm? And 3) “Ho ho ho, ho ho ho, we are Santa’s elves! HO HO!”