I received this card on Christmas. Inside the card was some money... and that was pleasing. But the card itself was a little unsettling. Let me explain why:

First off, there's no way the deer at the bottom left will make it through the night. No chance whatsoever. The sun is already starting to set and it's up to its neck in snow. And there are no tracks anywhere around it, which means it's been there, motionless, as long as the snow has. And it's not snowing presently, so this is probably quite a while. Perhaps it's stuck on that huge branch behind it, but whatever the cause, hypothermia is not new to this creature. I'll give it an hour to live. Tops.

Second, the sleigh has been impaled into the ground as if mimicking some sort of Transylvanian torture practice. I'm not sure what is going on here, but the tracks imply that it came from the right side of the house before being jarred to a stop at the riverbank. I would speculate that the rider was ejected into the river but for the other set of tracks. These other tracks are footprints which lead directly to the snowman, and then stop. It's a little bit hard to tell due to the resolution of the scan, but I can assure you this is the case. And so the obvious conclusion I came to was that the person riding the sled crashed, fled the scene (leaving the sled in its crashed position) and then went and became a snowman.

Lastly, how does one go to the house? There's a moat with no drawbridge. I'm not so much concerned for the family that lives there, but for the safety of their mailman, as the mailbox is clearly on the inside of the moat. It strikes me as pretty treacherous terrain for a mail truck to navigate. Every time I've forded a river in Oregon trail, I've either wound up with typhoid or lost some oxen. Forcing your mailman to do this daily seems a little bit impolite.






Courtney Jensen