I drove past Look Park in Northampton, Massachusetts, several times this week. The staff there organizes a holiday-themed light show in the park during various holidays, and some of it can be seen from the road. Most of the decorations are up year-round, and it’s clear that some of the decorations are re-purposed from holiday to holiday. One of these decorations is the back side of a very large, undulating dragon, its skeleton frame adorned with thousands of small lights. Our conversation went something like this, though:
“Oh, look! It’s Harvey, the Christmas dragon!”
“Oh, that’s just the dragon from Halloween.”
“No, no,” I say, “it’s clearly a different dragon. That one is orange and green. This one is red and green. That other dragon, that’s Humperdink, the Halloween dragon. This is Harvey.”
“Harvey looks just like the dragon they have out at Easter, though.”
“That’s because they’re relatives. But the Easter Dragon is Gertrude. Obviously.”
“Obviously. But what about the Valentine’s Day dragon?”
“The all-red one? That’s Henry.”
“I thought that was Hermione?”
“No, Hermione is the National Secretaries’ Appreciation Week dragon.”
And so on. We must have come up with fifteen or twenty different dragons’ names, continuing long after the park had been left behind. So. If you ever need to know the name of the Teacher Appreciation Day dragon, let me know. Because we know: It’s Josquin.
