BATEMAN: Rooftop reindeer turned heads in ‘09,
Over the nearly 20 years I wrote a weekly column for The Union Democrat, the final pre-christmas entry was always tough. For a few years, I suggested gifts for public officials. But many were cheap shots that were not exactly in keeping with the season. I also regularly promoted the Ud-sponsored Christmas Sing, and once wrote about 11th-hour Christmas-tree shopping (the remaining pines and firs, no surprise here, were cheap and scraggly). For a few years I detailed offbeat gifts available at local businesses. A Jimtown store, for example, once offered a “fossilized walrus oosik” (hint: an oosik is not a tusk) for just $300. Some years later, particularly desperate, I interviewed Santa at Courthouse Square. While sitting in his lap. I’m pretty sure the Jolly Old Elf never forgave me.
Finding that deft mix of yuletide sentimentality and humor proved elusive. And adding in sex? Well, I figured that was impossible. Until a disgruntled caller rang me up exactly 11 years ago.
The column below, published in 2009, had it all. In fact my former newsroom colleague Margie Thompson — now The Democrat’s features editor and a veteran of decades at the paper — still swears that the piece is “the best thing you’ve ever written.”
That may be a stretch. But I’ll let you readers be the judges. Here is my Dec. 24, 2009 column:
MARK AND LIZ Barley, like a lot of their Jamestown neighbors, do it up right for the holidays.
Their Main Street yard and home are festooned with Santa, elves, icicles, Christmas trees and much more, all tied together by light strings which, if unraveled, might stretch clear to Sonora.
In fact Union Democrat photographer Amy Alonzo earlier this month shot the Barley place by night for a feature on the foothills’ best holiday displays.
But all those burning kilowatts aren’t what distinguish the home. Instead it’s two reindeer doing it up right — or wrong, depending on who you ask — on the roof.
“It’s a buck and a doe, and they’re coupling,” a highly offended caller told me earlier this week. “In plain view.”
What’s more, she insisted that The Union Democrat “do something about it.”
SO I HOPPED in my car and drove down to the Barleys’ place, right across the street from (Bah) Humbug Street, and knocked on the door.
“Coupling??” reacted Mark Barley when confronted. “They’re playing. Or frolicking.”
Which is certainly the raciest F-word you’ll see in this column.
“It’s just part of our good ol’ Redneck Christmas,” continued Mark, as I stepped back to take a closer look at his roof.
Up top were two illuminated, amorously juxtaposed Walmart issue reindeer. The buck’s animatronic head was gently moving from side to side. All of which gives new meaning to those “reindeer games” that Rudolph never gets to play.
“IT’S ALL IN good fun,” laughed Barley, a 28-yearold house husband who just might have too much time — and imagination — on his hands. “I get a lot of thumbs-up from the highway. But, yeah, I hear that a few people don’t like it.”
That would include my anonymous caller, who thinks Barley’s mind is “in the gutter” and that he should lug Donner and Vixen into his living room and out of the public eye.
“Hundreds of children drive by there every day on Highway 108,” she pointed out. “You’ll get little girls asking, ‘Mommy, what’s that??”
This is assuming that these little girls have the vision of a hawk looking for moles by night from 300 feet overhead. Consider this: UD photographer Alonzo, who has a fine eye for nuance and detail, took maybe two dozen shots of the Barley place and never saw the allegedly salacious rooftop cavortings.
“OH MY GOSH!” she exclaimed on inspecting colleague Maggie Beck’s subsequent close-up photo of Donner and Vixen back at the newsroom. “How did I miss that?”
Probably the same way 99 percent of drivers do — by losing the allegedly illicit illumination of two reputedly randy reindeer in a 5,000-bulb sea of Grated holiday hoopla.
Meanwhile, Maggie was warbling a chorus of her newly coined, largely unprintable, reindeer-themed love song, “O Unholy Night.”
But I digress: I had not kept my promise to “do something about” this affront to decency. So I called the county’s district attorney to see if he’d get those roof reindeer back in Santa’s harness in time for Christmas — and maybe boil the Barleys in court.
“I THINK WE’LL take a pass,” said DA Donald Segerstrom, who actually kept a straight face as I detailed the evidence.
His bottom line? Donner and Vixen likely don’t “appeal to prurient interests” or “depict sexual contact in a patently offensive way.” And — get this — they just might have “redeeming artistic or literary value.”
“In fact it could be art,” Segerstrom said of the display. “Maybe the intent was humor more than anything else.”
In the Court of Good Taste, of course, the verdict remains yours. You and no one else will decide whether to slow down and crane your neck as you drive by the Barleys’ house.
The easily offended, thus, are duly warned.
AS FOR THE rest of us, we now know that creatures may indeed be stirring on Christmas Eve. And that the “prancing and pawing of each little hoof” on our rooftops tonight could be proof that hauling Santa’s sleigh is not all work.
(Yes, I did attempt to contact Mark and Liz Barley before resurrecting this vintage piece of holiday cheer. But the couple has apparently moved to New Mexico and did not respond to my messages. And, no, I did not reach out to Land of Enchantment prosecutors and ask that they check out the Barley rooftop. After all, in this year of Covid, we need all the enchantment — and humor — we can get. Also, from the vantage point of 2020 and all its terrible news, it’s refreshing to look back on a time where someone could get truly upset over fake reindeer romping on a rooftop).