Big Boy puts iconic face on Christmas

Christmas tree. Holiday tree. Christmas tree. Holiday …

The squabble over what to call this tinseled, time-honored symbol has been a rat dropping in the eggnog for a good many folks this season.

Not so for Karen and Rob Rickard, who have tossed the whole tree tradition like an unwanted fruitcake. There’s no mistaking what now occupies the spot where the family fir once stood.

The photograph doesn’t lie.

That there’s a Big Boy.

I’ve known the Rickards for years. These are fine, sensible Spokane residents.

So when I heard my friends had replaced their tree with a genuine 5-foot-tall advertising fixture from a national burger chain, well, there was only one course of action.

I hurried to their South Hill home to get a look before the white coats from mental health showed up.

Karen met me at the front door. She led me into the living room where Big Boy beamed at me from a piece of prime real estate in front of the picture window.

Oh, come let us adore him.

I haven’t eaten at a Big Boy since I was a kid. According to the restaurant Web site, both Washington and Idaho are devoid of Big Boy franchises. California’s the closest state with outlets.

Yet the company trademark, with his exaggerated hair curl and red-and-white checkerboard overalls, is still one of America’s instantly recognizable advertising icons.

With no disrespect to Santa, this jolly fat lad is pretty festive.

Karen adorned their Big Boy with a strand of multicolored bulbs. She topped his hoisted burger with a small artificial tree. She wrapped a tree skirt around his base and loaded it with presents and poinsettias.

I know what some of you are thinking.

A Bob’s Big Boy?

Instead of a tree?

Oh, Lord, what’s happening to CHRISTMAS?

“You know how you get, that you don’t want to put up the tree?” asked Karen. “I just decided I didn’t want to do it this year.”

Karen didn’t have to look far to find an alternative. The Rickard children – Joe, Scotty and Katie – discovered the Big Boy for sale on the Internet last year. They pooled their money and had it shipped to their parents for their 25th wedding anniversary.

It isn’t as weird as it sounds. Honest.

You see, the Big Boy has long held a place of honor in the Rickard household. The kids grew up listening to Karen speak of the wonders of Big Boy hamburgers and how her younger sister, Jill, liked to pat the Big Boy statue’s cheese for luck and …

OK. Maybe this is as weird as it sounds.

But here’s the point. No law says we have to get locked into the same stale old traditions year after year after year.

The Rickards are thinking outside the gift-wrapped box.

“I don’t know,” added Karen. “I just think it’s cool.”

It is refreshing. The Rickards even put a photograph of their decorated Big Boy on the yuletide cards they mailed out.

“Bells on Bob’s tray ring,” reads the message inside. Har.

If I had a Big Boy, I’d gleefully take a chain saw to my tree and join them. The Clarks, alas, didn’t have great luck in the tree department this year.

A couple days after we put it up our tree started dropping needles faster than a gang of West First meth addicts during a police raid.

I think the tree was harvested in June – of 2002.

The other morning, my lovely wife, Sherry, found the upper half of the tree slumping forward like Lincoln after the shot rang out. We ended up having to tie fishing line from the tree to the wall to keep it from tipping over.

There should be a lemon law for trees, I tell ya.

So I say hooray for the Rickards. There’s just one thing more we need to know.

So, is it a Christmas Big Boy?

Or a holiday Big Boy?