King of the Mountain

Used and Abused.

Feb 20, 2026

Back in 1989, my brother, Dennis, won a giant stuffed bear in a local raffle. It was freaking huge!

Growing up, I don’t recall us winning any other kind of prize, so this was sort of my family’s Leg Lamp moment from A Christmas Story (a major award!). Except my mom wasn’t jealous of the bear and she didn’t try to hide it from the neighbors or break it. Thank you, Mom.

When my family went to pick up the bear, all of the siblings got a picture taken with it for the local community newspaper.

After the picture was snapped, the person with the newspaper asked us for our names. I was giving the names and then my sister, Julia, insisted that she would give her own name and even spell it.

When the newspaper edition with our picture came out, the caption stated that Julia was Dennis’ brother, Julian. To this day, we still don’t know if she mistakenly added an “n” to the end of her name when she was spelling it or if the newspaper person thought she was a boy and assumed she must have been saying Julian. Julia was not pleased with the newspaper’s publication.

We welcomed our new family member into our home by quickly inventing our own version of the game called, King of the Mountain. We put the bear up on top of Dennis’ bed and we would all try to scale to the top of the bear. Whoever got to the top of the bear’s head became King of the Mountain. The other kids would then try to knock the king off of the bear and claim the spot for themselves.

It was a lot of fun! The bear was so big, it really did seem like a mountain to us and it was satisfying to see your siblings tumbling off in their failed efforts to become king.

We were rough with the bear, so he endured injuries that would require my mom to stitch him up. He was filled with tiny white styrofoam balls, so it was common to see those all over our floors. Sorry, Mom.

Eventually our rough play got the better of the bear and his wounds became beyond fixable.

I think we all kind of knew that moment was eventually going to happen with the way we treated the bear. A nice, polite family could have won him in the raffle and he might still be alive today - sitting in a basement somewhere and still wearing his bow. However, I think if given a choice, the bear would have picked the brief life that we gave him; supplying us kids with tons of joy, entertainment, and a few injuries.

Sadly, we didn’t give him a proper funeral. His styrofoam-drained remains were stuffed into a garbage can and he was put out to rest on the curb.