By Rosie Moore

Along with most people, I watch the Christmas movies that abound at this time of the year. My favorites have always been the same: White Christmas, It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol,  Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and many others. And I still love Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. However, since the movie Prancer came out, I have to admit that’s one of my very favorites.

Prancer first came out in 1989 with Sam Elliot,  (one of my favorite actors), Cloris Leachman, and a  little girl named, Rebekkah Harrell.  It’s the story of a farm girl who nurses a wounded reindeer she believes is one of Santa’s reindeer. It had fallen from a display that hung across the street. Her aim is to get him well enough to be able to fly on Christmas Eve with the other reindeer. Disillusioned by the girl’s mother’s death, her father doesn’t think he’s  capable of raising a little girl and wants to give her to his sister. Naturally, the little girl doesn’t want to leave her home and her father. He is unaware of the going-ons occurring on the farm between the reindeer and his daughter. Many hilarious scenes are involved here.

This is  a movie with a love story between two people who love each other and between a girl and an animal whom she learns to love. Of course, all ends well and Prancer does learn to fly through the air due to the ministrations of his little nursemaid. The father reads to his daughter near the end of the movie:

“You tear apart a baby’s rattle, and you see what makes the noise inside. But there is a veil covering the unseen world, which not the strongest man can push aside. Only faith, poetry, love, and romance can push aside that curtain and view the beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? In all this world, there is nothing else real in the body. Santa Claus, thank God he lives and lives forever, a thousand years from now, ten times ten thousand years from now, and he will continue to make glad the hearts of childhood.”

It is sad when one becomes an adult to lose the innocence they had when a child. To see things in a  different light as they really are and to lose the dreams we had when younger. This movie makes it clear to us that you’re never too old to dream.

Thought for the day: Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Send comments to: rosemerrie@att.net or call 865-748-4717. Thank you.