Now that Christmas is over, I can voice my concern.  I wasn’t sure what happened to Rudolph.

We love watching Santa’s reindeer wander through on a regular basis.  We’ve named our herd, of course — Dancer, Prancer, Comet, Cupid…, you get the picture.  But when it comes to the most famous reindeer of all — well, we found an unsettling sight the week before Christmas.

We can sometimes hear antlers scraping on the trees somewhere in the distance on the deer trails.  We decided to set out for a “hike” in our overgrown, nearly impassable couple of acres to see if we could find any antlers.  We got caught in briars, crawled under thick brush and got slapped in the face with branches.  I had all but given up in despair, “when what to my wondering eyes did appear,” but a big rack laying on the ground — attached to a skull.  It had been there for a while, thankfully there were no remnants of fur or meat or blood or guts — just dried bones.

This isn’t the first time we’ve discovered skeletons on this property, but this was definitely the biggest skeleton.  We brought the rack and skull back to the house, filled a huge bucket with water and bleach, and set it to soak.  When it came out all squeaky clean a day later, we could tell the skeleton looked a little worse for wear.  Something had gnawed at it’s antlers, and … it’s nose!   Poor Rudolph!

But, maybe it wasn’t Rudolph because Santa had no trouble finding our house this year.  Whoever he was, he’s guarding our woodpile now.