Island of Misfit Toys

My husband called me from work yesterday evening to announce that he was scurrying to get home in time for the annual airing of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Mind you – we actually own the video – that special restored version with added footage not included in the original – which means that we can view this classic holiday story anytime we’d like. But we typically watch it when it re-airs each year on a major television network, usually in the middle of the week after Thanksgiving. It’s one of those paradoxes of technology: for us, owning a video means that there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that it gets watched only once before it spends the remainder of its life inside its container, collecting dust on a shelf. (Which is why we own just a few videos and DVDs. And this may also be an inevitable part of life in a childless household.)

But there’s this odd impetus to watch this particular show when it airs on national TV, when we know millions of others will be seeing it. It’s some kind of communal yearning – a desire to experience a beloved tale collectively. A need to be swept up with others – even unknown others -- in some current of mutuality. Perhaps, even, some subterranean tribal echo. But these days, rather than gathering in groups around a fire to listen to elder-told fables, we sit in front of movie and television screens, communally accepting an invitation to briefly set aside our own lives and, together, fall under the spell of Story.

I admit, however, that this story’s spell spins a little thinly at points.

Santa, for example, is a complete asshole. When he meets the infant Rudolph and sees his shiny nose, the first thing he can think of to say is “great blithering icebergs! He’d better grow out of that red nose if he expects to join my sleigh team some day.” (Because apparently a natural source of bright light on a high-flying sleigh in December darkness would just be ... terribly gauche). This is Kris Kringle, jolly ole St. Nick, giver of secret gifts? I think not. He’s grumpy, small-minded, and easily dissatisfied. Not someone I want as a judge of whether I’ve been naughty or nice. Not someone whose lap I’d want to sit on and whisper my Christmas wishes to. And Santa’s right-hand man, the bombastic elf-overseer, never has an encouraging word to say to the elf laborers, who, as far as I can tell, sing perfectly harmonized songs and make perfectly delightful toys. Well – except for those occasions where someone slips up and builds a train with square wheels or a watergun that squirts grape jelly. Did somebody overspike the eggnog, or were those misfit toys actually the products of elfin sabotage? Perhaps instigated by Hermie, who didn’t want to be a toymaker anyway? We’ll never know. But of this I am certain: we gotta get that Santa fired.

And, okay: What was that lion King Moonracer thinking when he suggested to the wandering Misfit gang (Rudolph, Hermie, and Yukon Cornelius) that they should return to Christmastown and tell Santa about all those unwanted misfit toys on that island? Moonracer seems to presume that big-hearted Santa will be eager to find a home for all those freaky toys. But this is the same Santa who rejected baby Rudolph because of his red nose. This is same Santa who does not know or care that poor Rudolph ran away after all of the other reindeer laughed, called him names, and kicked him out of their reindeer games (except for lovely Clarisse, who sees the splendid buck beyond the shiny nose). How can K.M. be so sure that a diplomatic plea from the Misfit gang will work with this feckless, thoughtless Santa?

And – one more thing -- why, oh why, does Yukon Cornelius have a professionally-groomed toy poodle and a pug on his dogsled team?  Only one dog, the St. Bernard, seems capable of dragging that big lug around. That’s the real reason why the sled keeps gliding when Cornelius yells (and re-yells) “Whoooaaa!” Simple inertia.

So, yes: Christmastown and its leaders are deeply flawed. But at heart, of course, Rudolph is a sweetly radical story. I was irresistibly drawn to it as a child. As a member of a multicolored family living in a deeply segregated city in the 1960s, I completely sympathized with the ostracized Rudolph and the dentally-aspiring Hermie. As an adopted biracial child, I recognized that I had also come from an Island of Misfit Toys. I was one of the unwanted sad beings rejected for who knows why, not fitting into any neat and tidy category, hard to place in a permanently loving home. I imagine that anyone who was shunned, despised, mocked, or bullied as a child for any reason feels warmly vindicated when it turns out that the very attribute that pegged one as a misfit is the necessary talent, the saving grace, the workable solution to a major quandary. Rudolph and his misfit allies represent any of us who were sneered at for being disabled, odd-looking, gay, unexpected, alien, a member of a minority religion, too quiet, too outspoken, hyperactive, freethinking, nonconformist, perplexed, bookish etc., etc., . . . so many red noses in this world. So many Charlie-in-the-Boxes and swimming birds and ostrich-riding cowboys. Probably enough to populate an entire Archipelago of Misfit Toys, when you think about it.

Which is a good thing, because it seems this world is having more than its expected share of blowout winter blizzards lately. We need boatloads of red-nosed reindeers and upstart elf dentists and tree-decorating monster snowmen working in concert to prep and guide Santa’s sleigh tonight, people! The message of Rudolph reaches beyond the mere celebration of individuality. It invites us to pool our various quirkinesses together in some fashion so that gifts and graces will fall from the sky and feed the world. So please: love your freakishness. Bless your streak of bad-assedness. Be patient with what you think of as your flaws. Cradle that part of you that has a ridiculous and seemingly unreachable dream. Be kind to your thunder thighs, because where there’s thunder, there’s lightning. There are gifts lurking inside your awkwardness and disconcerting distinctiveness. As Yukon might say, there’s gold in them thar hills.

A final thought: despite its holly-jolly secular folkstory appeal, I detect Judeo-Christian undertones in the Rudolph story. Like Moses and like Jesus, isn’t Rudolph an unexpected child, a spurned and rejected one, a suffering servant whose life turns out to be a path in the desert and a light in the darkness? Isn’t Rudolph the “stone the builders rejected” who “become(s) the cornerstone?” (Psalm 118: 22).

Perhaps I overplay these interweavings and resonances. But I can’t help it -- the misfit in me seems to have    . . . a nose for such things.