And then I thought I was done with the event. It was great, but it was a great that I got. But then this year, I was in Maryland again during December, and the theme for this year’s Gaylord ICE! event was the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, my favorite Christmas special of all time. For two reasons.
One, the Bumble. I love monsters. And I love Yetis as Christmas characters. And I love watching him get all his teeth pulled by freezing cold plyers at the tiny hands of an elf with bad leverage asking him over and over, “Is it safe?” Just kidding. That’s the only part of the show I hate. Well, that and Santa’s hypocrisy toward Rudolph.
Seeing Burl Ives and the Bumble carved in colored ice at life-sized proportions was too hard for me to resist, so I talked my family into braving both a snowstorm and the Beltway to hit up the Gaylord Resort at the National Harbor.
The experience overall was the same as my previous ones, a big joyful crowd and an artificial cold so cold that exiting the refrigerated building into the 35-degree snowy outdoors felt like stepping into a warm air current. No hyperbole on that one. It really felt warm. Also, this time, I made a fool of myself on the ice slide when it turned out my posterior and/or my pants fabric weren’t ice-o-dynamic enough to let me slide, so I had to repeat an awkward, inching scoot 40 times to get to the bottom in front of about 50 people taking footage of their kids sliding with glee down the other slides—and, inadvertently, me.
But all of it was worth it for the glittering sculptures of stop-motion Christmas icons and the payoff for my kids of making them watch the special every night for the past week. They still were just in it for the ice slides, though.
But I saw my Bumble. And my Burl Ives Snowman. And Santa can take the rest of the year off as far as I’m concerned.