Bianca Bowden was walking the New York City waterfront with husband Jonathan Bowden when her father told her over the phone, that a package he'd ordered was bound for the Bowdens' Bay Street, Boothbay Harbor home.

He didn't say what it was.

The early Christmas present for the couple's sons, Luca, 6, and Sam, 4, turned out to be a big surprise. Really big.

The package held an inflatable, 15-foot-tall Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, hero of the 1960s television special that still airs annually. The Johnny Marks song by the same name, first made famous by “the Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, is the boys’ favorite holiday song, their mother said.

“Oh, my gosh. I didn't know what to think,” she said about her father’s gift; it inflated quickly and easily with the air pump it came with. Rudolph’s been drawing onlookers to the neighborhood, especially at night when his nose, yes, it glows. That's when the towering reindeer looks his best, according to the boys' father.

“He's really cool at night, I have to say,” said Jonathan Bowden, owner of Tri River Marine in Southport.

But the super-sized decoration is eye-catching by daylight, too. Rudolph's motorized head turns left and right, as if he's surveying the rooftops below.

“Super big,” Sam Bowden said about Rudolph.

As the boy sat in the lap of his mother, who's director of operations at Boothbay Harbor Inn, the two conferred about their favorite part of Rudolph's story. They decided it's when the reindeer, who didn't get to join in reindeer games, lights the way for Santa and the other reindeer on that foggy Christmas Eve.

Older brother Luca agreed. “He was the reindeer in front.”

See Rudolph while you can, in front of the Bowdens' bungalow at 20 Bay Street. (Maybe you can blend in with those who learned about him after Bianca Bowden put him on Facebook.) Like his namesake who sets off with his friends on a piece of ice, this Rudolph's going traveling.

The Bowdens are taking their big new friend to visit family in Canada and in Cape Cod, where he'll be inflated at the home of Bianca Bowden's father.

“Payback,” she said.