Merry X-mas, Rudolph
That Time I Accidentally Drew an Explicit Reindeer Picture and Also Waged the War on Christmas
As Roy Schlegel has pointed out in the past, Medium is a platform for adults. We’re not children, guys. This ain’t no Sunday School.
I’ve been trying to provide a different kind of content, but I really feel like it’s time for me to drop this good-girl image and give my readers what they really want: scandal.
So this story starts with the office Christmas party at the job I used to work before the other job I used to work before I started being a SAHM/Freewill Offering Writer/Fallen Domestic Goddess.
Now don’t start, because it wasn’t that kind of an office Christmas party. Actually it was the kind of office Christmas party in which no alcohol was served and the employees were called upon to be the entertainment. I think that was the year we had a potluck dinner, too. It was lean times, guys.
A game called “Blind Pictionary” was a part of this employee-interaction entertainment. I suspect it was invented for the occasion. Blind Pictionary is actually not very much like Pictionary at all, except that it does involve drawing, guessing, and (as you will see) public humiliation. Two competitors are given a dry-erase board and marker, blind-folded, and told a secret object which they are then supposed to draw within 30 seconds, as the audience tries to guess what the secret object is. A judge (in this case, the owner of the company, my boss’s boss’s boss, and the signer of my paycheck) would determine whose picture best represented the assigned object. The winner would advance to the next round.
To my delight, I discovered that Blind Pictionary was my thing. I won round after round. “Christmas Present”. Too easy. “Gingerbread Man”. No problem. The trouble didn’t start until my opponent and I were assigned “Christmas Wreath”.
At this point, it was no longer enough to just draw something recognizable: in order to keep my edge over the competition, I had to keep making my masterpieces more and more elaborate. I drew the wreath, which was easy, but I decided to add a banner across it that was supposed to say “Merry Christmas”. It was pretty much going to look like this:
Blindfolded as I was though, I wasn’t sure that I could fit the entire phrase “Merry Christmas” onto the banner, so I made my first mistake of the evening: I shortened it to the widely (but not universally) accepted abbreviation, “Merry X-mas”.
Once again, I won. We were about to proceed to the next round when a voice rose from the back of the room.
“Can I say something?”
We all looked around. It was Frank*. Frank had started working there a couple of weeks earlier. Nobody really knew him very well. He usually lurked around in some back corner doing I’m not sure what. Anyway, Frank, interpreting our stunned silence as an invitation to continue, made his way up to the front of the room. He picked up the dry-erase marker and circled the “X” in “X-mas”, then he turned around and faced us.
“What have we taken out here, guys?”
We all looked at him blankly.
“Christ. We’ve crossed Christ out of Christmas.”
I am what non-religious people refer to as “very religious”. I am all about the true meaning of Christmas. I’m that person who is so concerned about the secularization of Christmas that the ceramic Santa cookie jar that we got as a wedding present has been christened “Uncle Boris”. I would be the last person to want to take Christ out of Christmas.
I could have pointed him to this article —
— but I don’t think anything could have convinced Frank that I wasn’t waging a full-on War on Christmas, so there didn’t seem to be much point in trying, so instead I just stood there. After a few delightful moments of excruciatingly awkward silence, Frank seemed to feel that he had made his point, and sat back down.
Now that I had been established as the Supreme Commander of the Armies of the War on Christmas, we moved on to the next and final round.
“Reindeer” was the word.
Drawing reindeer is hard even when you’re not blind-folded. Plus, I was up against Ellen*, who, like me, had made it through several rounds and was a pretty formidable foe. But I was more determined than ever to win and salvage my dignity after Frank’s rebuke of my heathen Christmas Wreath picture.
You know those times when the tighter you try to hang on to something — say, dignity — the more it slips between your fingers? This was one of those times.
The blind-folds went on. I got to work. The hardest thing about drawing blind-folded (and this will become important) is the point where you have to end a particular stroke, pick up your marker, and start a new one, hopefully in the right place. The best strategy is to try to avoid starting a new stroke as much as possible.
I was feeling pretty good about my reindeer. I finished up before the time limit was over. But Ellen was still drawing. The cheers from the audience told me she was doing well. I needed to do something to really clinch my victory. I decided I would add one more detail: one of those belts with jingle bells on them.
I raised my arm and drew the belt where I thought the reindeer’s stomach was. And I couldn’t understand why everyone was laughing so hard. At least, not until I took the blindfold off.
I missed, guys.
Let’s just say that my reindeer was, anatomically speaking, very detailed, and that I went down in the company’s history as the girl who drew dirty reindeer pictures at the office Christmas party.
Sometimes, no matter how innocent your intentions are, you come out looking like you want to take the true meaning away from Christmas and draw inappropriate pictures of reindeer. That’s what I learned that day.
But you want to know something? I still won.
*Name changed to protect the innocent-ish.
