Well, I must confess in this Christmas season to a certain prejudice that formed like a black pearl around a grain of sand when I was around 8 years old.
I hate Rudolph. There. It's out. Rudolph is a phony. An interloper. Who ever heard of a red light bulb for a nose? How stupid.
Back when Christmases were real, say when I was 6, there were only eight reindeer and I could recite them all more readily than I could the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord's Prayer. They were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Donder, Vixen, Blitzen, Cupid, and Comet. NO RUDOLPH.
Then one year -- maybe around 1950 -- the real Christmas crumbled. Everywhere on the radio was this song about Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. The illustrations showed a dumb creature with a red light-bulb nose. What idiocy! Worse, what faith-busting heresy that was. Sleighs and reindeer might be able to soar through the sky, that was real enough. But never were they led by a reindeer with a bright red nose.
And by the way, it didn't get foggy Christmas Eve, it got snowy. This Rudolph story was a phony from start to finish.
Well, maybe somewhere deep in people's love for skiing and snowboarding is that ancient Christmas myth of soaring magically through the sky, which, after all, is the essence of the sport. Learning how to do it surely and gracefully is another question.
Most of the kids where I grew up were on sleds long before skis. My own Flexible Flyer was a magnificent vehicle, crafted of red-painted steel and varnished oak with a red arrow through the crest, pointing straight ahead. How we groomed our sleds. Fine sandpaper in one pocket and an old candle in the other, we'd sand and wax our runners to keep them maximum slick. We gave them names.
Some kids sat on their sleds -- as did any adult with a baby -- to ride. But the preferred method was to get a running start to the crest of the hill, then belly-flop on the sled and careen down the hill with eyes a few inches off the snow, steering with the wooden handles that could bend the runners left and right.
