Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

By Barbara Shook Hazen
Adapted from the story by Robert L. May
Illustrated by Richard Scarry

My daughter picked this one out at the thrift store.  She insisted on it. She loves Rudolf.

Whatever.  Palatable Christmas fare.  It's pretty long winded, though.  At least it isn't a transcript of that weird Christmas special.  Don't get me wrong; the Christmas special is totally adorable.  But the script is crazy.  Santa and the reindeer are horrible people, and Rudolf should have just hightailed it and never gone back.

 This part is a bit weird, just because it has unnecessary details that don't make much sense.  I bet you Santa only brought the reindeer into the toy factory to break the elf union.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this stuff.  We're pretty anti-Santa for a number of reasons, which I guess could make us seem like a couple of Scrouges.  It can be really crummy for kids to be fed a bunch of lies about Santa and then finally find out the truth.  I feel, especially now that my daughter is old enough to play pretend, that it makes sense to pretend Santa rather than feed it to her as some kind of weird almost-religion.