Undead Christmas Deer

The holidays are a time when tradition reigns supreme.  Growing up, my Christmas experience was no exception to this rule -- though in my family, it was as much for reasons of frugality as for love of tradition.  My grandparents lived through the Great Depression, and those conservative fiscal habits were deeply ingrained in us at an early age (meaning I come by my thrift-store shopping honestly!).

Because we tended to reuse and recycle rather than buying new things, much of our holiday decor hailed from previous decades.  One house rule was that we didn't buy new gift wrap until we finished off what we already had, including the stockpile we'd inherited when my grandfather died.  This meant that we were still wrapping gifts in paper from the 1960s -- hot pink and lime green and very mod -- until I was in college.  (Around the year 2000 my mother rebelled and started buying gift bags, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some 1960s gift wrap in the attic.)  We also have an aluminum Christmas tree (the kind Charlie Brown refused to buy in A Charlie Brown Christmas), ornaments dating back to the 1940s, and loads of vintage decor items around the house.  I attribute much of my fondness for midcentury kitsch to being surrounded by it during the holidays growing up.

So imagine my delight when I happened across these cute deer at Goodwill a couple of months ago!  They're rather shabby and badly-painted, but I quite liked them; they reminded me of the miniature deer I used to tie to Scotch tape dispensers and cram into the branches of our tree.  (Hey, when you're five years old, a tape dispenser looks kind of like a sleigh from the side.)

Christmas kitsch at its kitschiest.

But I noticed something odd -- that seam around the neck.  At first I thought they were containers of some kind, but on closer inspection I decided that it was just easier for the manufacturer to line up the hollow molds there than to do a side-by-side mold with the skinny antlers and legs.

A major problem with vintage items is that some of the materials don't age well.  In this case, it was the adhesive that failed.  Because when I tried to pick up one of the deer...

GAAAAAHHH!

Well, that was disturbing.  So much so that (after taking the photo) I initially walked away without buying them... and when I went back later to pick them up, they'd been snatched up by some other lover of kitsch.  A week later, I saw someone selling a similar pair of deer for ten dollars, and there were at least five people fighting over them.  Apparently I'm not the only one who's nostalgic about Christmas decor.

Lesson learned: Always buy your undead headless zombie Christmas deer the first time around.