The glow-in-the-dark deer is for you.

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen.
But do you know what fate befalls
A deer that strays near paintballs?

The story, as it was related to me, involves retirees living in a gated community in the southern United States. In such environs, deer cannot (legally) be hunted. So with the deer population booming, food becomes scarce, but Blitzen’s still gotta eat. And that’s why Blitzen starts nibbling at the wooden siding on Bo James’s* house within the friendly confines of the gated community. While I’m no botanist, I understand that certain flavors of wooden siding are high in sodium content, and deer find that tasty. But Bo James likes the outside of his house devoid of deer dentures, and there’s the rub.

*Last names are omitted throughout, in order to protect the innocent.

Bo James discovers that his grandson, James Russell, has a gun that shoots balls of paint, and he gets an idea to see whether he can hit the broad side of a Blitzen. Once Bo James discovers that paintball welts effectively deter deer dentures, Blitzen Blue becomes all the rage within the gated community, and sales for paint-related munitions soar among local septuagenarians.

But then the septuagenarians decide that, because they can’t hang the antlers of live deer on their walls – which, fortunately, are still standing – they need some other way of identifying which deer they’ve shot. So they have a town hall meeting to divvy up paintball colors. Bo James already has blue. Oscar Neil takes yellow. Billy Bob reserves pink. And so on. Until they run out of colors. So then they have to throw fluorescent colors into the mix.

The long and the short of it is this: If you’re ever near a certain gated community in the southern United States after dark, and you see a brown and fluorescent green quadruped meandering through the woods, and then it turns around and appears bright orange, you’ll know that Odie Ray splattered Dasher’s left side when Dasher came snacking at his house, and Johnny Mack tagged Dasher’s right side when a case of the munchies carried him across the street.