I can't get Zoe to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with me. She insists it's too babyish. I point out that she never watched it as a baby, either.
We go over her viewing history, each December since birth. Here's what she watched year by year in the weeks preceding Christmas.
Year Zero: her hands
Year One: whatever sparkled
Year Two: whatever I wouldn't give her
Year Three: Elmo's World. Over and over, please fast-forward Sesame Street till we get there, OMG, I don't care about anything else!
Year Four: Little Einsteins or Paw Patrol
Year Five: Blaze and the Monster Machines and Paw Patrol
Year Six: Lion Guard and, a nod to Christmas, the Elf on the Shelf movie (which I do not consider a canonical work!!).
At seven, she's obsessed with watching other people play Minecraft on YouTube, so much so I've found myself saying, without irony, Are you sure you don't want to watch some TV?
Specifically, now, I want her to watch Rudolph with me.
Rudolph is for all ages, from one to ninety-two, I tell her. She is unmoved.
Then I sigh and take her little face in my hands, so I can lift it from the glow of the iPad, and say, "The only reason people have children, which you'll understand someday, is so they can relive their childhoods by watching stop-motion animated Christmas specials with them."
She rolls her eyes and goes back to her screen. As usual she is neither amused nor swayed by my attempts at absurd humor but we'll get there. I have a five-point plan, all five points of which are obnoxious.
Feigning defeat, I put Rudolph on in the background and make a big passive-aggressive show of watching it by myself---how's that for reliving my childhood? Ask my sister. I was a pain in the ass then too.
As I watch---both Zoe and I competing with each other by taking turns raising the volume on our respective devices---I'm actually hoping to enact a scheme that's reverse psychology adjacent, much like when I cut up fruit "for Daddy," knowing that when something belongs to someone else she finds that something immediately desirable.
I get through the first commercial with no reaction and then it happens, the sound I was waiting for, actually the lack of sound, when she pauses her video to watch.
What's caught her attention is the scene where the bossy elf foreman is unreasonably yelling at Hermey the elf because Hermey's more partial to dentistry than toy-making. She is transfixed. Until the singing starts. At which point she makes a disgusted sound and goes back to her video.
She resurfaces again after the "reveal" of Rudolph's horrible deformity at reindeer flight training, when the insults and jeering from the other reindeer fly freely. When that scene is over so is her interest.
And so it goes, Zoe only pausing her videos for the "dramatic" parts---Yukon Cornelius saying anything, the Bumble---and ignoring everything else.
I try one more time to get her interested, when the poor misfit toys are at last coming to terms with their essential unlovableness only to be interrupted by Santa, led by Rudolph, arriving to rescue them (spoiler alert) by handing them over to small children whose "love" is actually quite deadly if you're a toy.
Alas, Santa saving the misfit toys is apparently too saccharine for Zoe's taste, and she gets up from the couch and goes into her room.
Was motherhood ever so thankless? A child ever so heartless?
Tomorrow I'll try How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Zoe: 174; Universe: 0
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I need a win here, people.
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