Tunesday : Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

(Marks, J) As Performed by Gene Autry

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, 
Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen, 
But do you recall 
The most famous reindeer of all? 
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer 
Had a very shiny nose, 
And if you ever saw it, 
You would even say it glows. 
All of the other reindeer 
Used to laugh and call him names; 
They never let poor Rudolph 
Join in any reindeer games. 
Then one foggy Christmas Eve, 
Santa came to say: 
"Rudolph, with your nose so bright, 
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?" 
Then how the reindeer loved him, 
As they shouted out with glee, 
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 
You'll go down in history

Christmas is still a week and a half away, but I'm feeling the spirit, so here's to Rudolph. I chose this carol in particular because I asked Kennedy the other day if I had ever told her that when we were kids we did the whole "Like a lightbulb" after "Had a very shiny nose", but that I had never heard anyone call out "In his underpants" after "Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say..." until she came home with it from school when she was just little (probably Kindergarten). She was surprised -- no, I had never told her that before -- and her Dad was nodding in agreement: that wasn't something they said either where he was from. And that got me to thinking about anything else I hadn't told her about Christmas when I was a kid. And then Lolo came over talking about her Etsy yarn store, and I asked if she knew about the year my Mom was selling crafts, and it all went something like this:

So, Lolo was talking about how her hand-dyed yarns are selling like gangbusters, and I was asking if she was hoping to grow her business, and she said not really -- with a full-time job, if she was dyeing and selling any more yarn than she is right now, it would become a burden, not a fun money-making hobby that she loves. She mentioned that when she had a display at a craft fair in the summer, a woman asked her if she would be interested in selling through her craft store, and when Lolo looked into it, it wasn't a very good deal: apparently this woman will stock hand-dyed material in exchange for keeping half the selling price, but since Lolo is at production capacity and keeping something like 90% of her selling price through Etsy, this wouldn't make sense for her at all. It was then I brought up my mother's story, and although Ma had told it to Lolo this past summer, we went over it for Kennedy.

When I was somewhere between 10 and, let's say, 12 (definitely the late '70s), my mother approached a woman with a handmade crafts store to see if she would be interested in carrying her sock monkeys, a sample of which she had brought along with her. Now, my mother made very fine sock monkeys, and the woman was interested, and she put in an order for so many. Ma made up the order, they sold very quickly, and the woman ordered a whack more. My mother was urged to make ever greater quantities as Christmas approached, the woman asked if Ma could make anything else, and as the weeks went by, she started making dusters out of Phentex yarn (I can't find an image, but she'd make something like a giant pompom snowman out of this special kind of white yarn, bind it to make a head, body, and skirt, and then cut just the loops of skirt part to make a duster out of the doll-like thing, embroider on a face, tie an apron around the waist, stick a dowel through the whole thing and it looked pretty cute), and then she started making these marionette ostriches with crazy-coloured fun fur heads and bodies, heavy plywood circles for clomping feet, and braided yard to hold it all together. We'd come home from school and Ma would have all her materials in assembly-line piles on the rec room floor, and we'd know she would have spent her entire day cutting and sewing and creating, and aside from a brief break she'd take to feed us and our dad our dinner, we knew she'd be at it long after we went to bed. I may be remembering this wrong, but I think my mother got a dollar per unit she made, and when she wasn't actually making anything, she'd be at the flea market or the discount stores trying to get the cheapest materials. Before Etsy and the internet, I think she was happy to have found any way to sell what she was making -- as if this woman with the store was doing her a huge favour by stocking her wares -- and although I might regret the demise of the small town craft stores, I can look at Lolo today and appreciate that selling direct is a much better deal for those who are still creating handmade objects.

That Christmas, Ma was able to buy Dad a welding kit that he still uses today, and I know that she had a huge sense of accomplishment from earning the money for it all by herself (for all I know she may have bought all the Christmas presents that year; that sounds like something my father would have done to her; teach her a lesson about the price of independence). I do remember Ma keeping at the crafts after Christmas for a while, but not for too long: maybe Dad forced her to get back to her real life, maybe Ma finally had it with the bad deal she got from the craft store owner, or maybe the market simply collapsed. No matter how it ended, I'll never forget the image of my mother, surrounded by the piles of her near-finished pieces -- monkey tails and ostrich heads side-by-side the grandmotherly duster bodies -- and beneath her stress and panic, there was always a grin; she was doing it for Christmas; for all of us.