'Noni Was Run Over By a Reindeer'

To most people, "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" is just a hokey, improbable Christmas song. To one Buffalo-area grandma who got run over by a deer, it's a very real hip replacement and suddenly not all that improbable. Such is the tale of 66-year-old Marlene Halt, reports the Buffalo News, who was out for an evening stroll a fortnight ago with a friend when she was unceremoniously knocked to the ground by—you guessed it—a spooked Bambi. "It just came out of nowhere," she says of the deer that slammed into her right side. "It sideswiped me. I could feel the pain. It was so quick. I fell on the right side." Halt was quickly en route to the hospital with her husband and her newly shattered hip, leaving it to her 16-year-old grandson to inform her daughter what had happened.

He did it with a text that read thusly: "Noni was in accident. Noni was run over by a reindeer." And it didn't stop there: After her hip replacement the next day, Halt underwent physical therapy where the song in question would often play. Her doc dubbed her "the deer lady," and her family got her a T-shirt that read "Grandma ain’t scared of no reindeer." As for Halt, she's home from the hospital and not holding it against Bambi: "I’m sure it wasn’t a crazy deer looking for me." And as for the jokes about that reindeer song, "it's quite appropriate." (Meanwhile, science is explaining the importance of Rudolph's red nose.)