Saturday Night Lights

We drove through to a neighborhood we know on Saturday night to see decorated houses. It’s a good neighborhood for that. A lot of houses with a lot of lights, plus other electronic displays, but not too many inflatables.

There was one inflated oddity worth noting, however. I don’t think it was meant to be odd. It was a sleigh with an inflatable Santa and reindeer aboard. Leaving aside the question of why the reindeer was inside the sleigh at all, the truly strange thing was that the two were facing each other, almost grappling with each other, and the wind was blowing the setup hard enough to make the sleigh list pretty heavily.

Probably the wind had contorted the figures too. Still, I actually stopped the car to look closely at it, rather than just creep along. The more I looked, the more I thought the two were fighting hand-to-hoof, man-to-beast. My theory was that a jihadist reindeer was trying to highjack Santa’s sleigh to crash it into some hated symbol of the West -- its momentum would surely cause some serious damage, considering how fast Santa has to go to make his rounds.

This line of thought did not go over well with other members of my household, no better than when I suggested to Lilly a few days ago that there was an episode of the PBS cartoon Caillou concerning the boy’s uncle, who was in prison for passing bad checks.