Tue, Dec 16 2003

Holiday Animal Stories

It's nice if you can get home for Christmas. Someone brought the stolen star tortoises back to the Honolulu Zoo just in time to celebrate the holidays. I'm certainly glad no one decided to make turtle soup.

I've heard of people serving ham, turkey or roast beef in December, and I've seen tables laden with blintzes and St. Lucia buns and sugarplums, but I think it's going to be a hard sell to get the folks in Louisiana to include nutria as part of their holiday fare. If you don't know what a nutria is, think of an overgrown swamp rat in need of serious dental whitening.

If you see a 6-foot tall wolf holding a candle and singing up in Alaska, it doesn't mean someone slipped a little moonshine into your spiced cider. It's actually a human wearing a mask and protesting the local wolf-kill. Maybe they should just put reindeer masks on the wolves to fool the hunters.

And speaking of reindeer, who the thunder is Dunder? Would you believe we've been getting those reindeer names wrong all these years, at least according to this story? And if Blitzen was once Blixem or Bliksem, was Vixen really supposed to be called Vixem?

Ah, well. This is the time of year for mysteries and for miracles. Maybe some things are better left unexplained.

posted at: 10:48 | category: /Playing | link to this entry