Rudolph the Red-Hot Reindeer

Sorry for the cat-pudding interlude. We're back to Christmas Ornaments now. And just in figgy time, too!

Oh, okay. This drunken-looking dude. Let's see now...

For a little bit when I was in high school, and almost all through college, I worked at McDonald's. I don't care what you think of that, it's true, and they were good to me. Even if the polyester uniforms did give me ass-zits like you would not believe. In high school I worked on weekends -- 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays -- and in college during every school vacation. They'd work around my schedule and put me on full-time rotation when I called, even if it was for just a week.

(Full disclosure: it wasn't only me who worked there. It was me and my sister and brother. And it's a little bit possible we were given special treatment. I, for example, never worked anywhere but behind the grill. This is expressly against the rules, but I never wanted to come out front and let people see me in my ass-zit-giving uniform, and they never made me. My brother, on the other hand, was supposed to have been flat-out fired once, when the regional manager saw him walk in to the store without his forehead-zit-giving baseball cap and took a hating to his hair. Regional Manager insisted that McDonald's employees don't sport mohawks, and demanded that he be canned on the spot. But Store Manager (who might have been a little smarter than Regional -- I'm just saying) put her tiny Italian body in the line of fire, and Brother kept his job. Which he hated. But that's beside the point. My sister, I don't think, ever did anything wrong. At McDonald's, that is.)

Anyway, we used to steal the toys. This was in the days before everything was a movie tie-in, and the toys were all generic things like plastic pumpkin-bucket Happy Meals, and reindeer Christmas decorations, and, um... I forget what else. But whatever they were, they were definitely meaningful enough that we had to have them. We didn't take 'em by the bucketload or anything, but we all made sure to pocket at least one of each. Everybody had complete collections of, um... whatever. Which we of course immediately threw away.

This dude was one of those. The only robbed thing I have left, and therefore one of the two that I remember. The other -- the plastic pumpkin-bucket -- is in the possession of my sister.

Aha! You see? I knew if I thought about it long enough I would remember something bad she'd done!