My Christmas Story
“Skunked again.”
I thought I’d been smart to wait until the afternoon to visit A Christmas Story House, the one in which young Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) lived in the 1983 film of the same name. But when I showed up around 4:00 pm, the entry line still snaked all the way down the block.
I’d been planning this trip for about a year. The first weekend of December, I’d head to Cleveland to run A Christmas Story 10K and to see the famed movie house, a perk of race entry. Technically though, I’d been waiting to visit this establishment for three-quarters of my life.
The sun would be out until 5:00 PM, and I was bundled up enough for the cold. I could wait at least an hour longer.
My memory of A Christmas Story is that it’s always been mine. It was the first Christmas movie I discovered on my own. When my parents finally had a chance to see it, they claimed they didn’t like it — or rather, my dad did, and his control of the remote meant the sentiment counted for both of them.
Occasionally, my brother would watch A Christmas Story with me when he stayed at my parents’ for the holidays. But for most of my life, it’s been my movie: the one I can’t miss, the one I have to see — usually in bed, on Christmas Eve, after everyone else has fallen asleep — for my holiday to feel complete.
I first saw A Christmas Story, an adaptation of Jean Shepherd’s pre-WWII northwest Indiana memoirs, when it opened in theaters in December 1983. Ever since I saw the trailers on TV, I’d eagerly awaited the screening.
I was in fifth grade at Whitehall Elementary in Anderson, South Carolina. My friend Carmen and I saw it the last school day before Christmas. The theater was at least half-full with fellow rowdies just liberated from classrooms, and we raucously engaged with the movie as though no adults were watching.
The movie theater was close to my house. It was the one where I went most often with my family, where my Pops would surprise my brother and me with matinees to Splash and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was the theater I eventually walked to all by myself, through woods and a pasture in front of our house, and past a used bookstore where I would inevitably stop before or after a screening to pick up a new-to-me read.
The sojourn signaled my burgeoning adolescence; the theater nurtured my blossoming cinephilia.
A Christmas Story wasn’t the first time I visited the movie theater without my parents: I was already used to being dropped off for flicks with a friend.
But this screening felt different from the others, mostly Disney films or movies I’d already watched with my family. As my now-adult mind understands it, seeing the indignities and absurdities of childhood and family life presented without condescension or tidy resolution was revolutionary.
Not unlike the John Hughes teenpics that would start appearing the year after A Christmas Story and inform the next phase of my development, Jean Shepherd’s narration acknowledges its younger audience’s cognizance of their circumstances. The plot might be made of what many would see as silly, simple stuff — schoolyard dares and family battles, childhood desires and pop culture ephemera — but Shepherd and co-writer/director, Bob Clark, understood the significance of these in a child’s everyday life and the effort (if not always smarts) it takes to devise strategies and negotiate them, successfully or not.
Likewise, the Parkers’ torrent of triumphs and tragedies suggests only temporary resolution to their many problems. A Christmas Story may have been the first movie I ever saw to imply that nothing is final, for better or for worse. For instance, you might be unfairly punished for accidentally uttering a word your old man used every day, but you might also get off scot-free when caught using the same word in a fight with the neighborhood bully.
I was bewildered by A Christmas Story’s finale for most of my childhood. Ralphie gets the Red Ryder BB Gun he’s wanted all along, and then he nearly does shoot his eye out!
That’s not what’s supposed to happen. He’s supposed to go into the backyard and dazzle us with his spectacular hip shots — not break his own glasses after the gun’s kickback knocks them off his face.
But of course, that’s exactly the kind of thing that does happen all the time beyond the screen. For your wish to backfire (almost literally) may seem like a depressing lesson, but for me it became an important revelation about how the world works. Be careful what you wish for, but also, expect the unexpected — good, bad, or in-between.
These are good lessons for the holidays. People expect a lot out of this season. When you’re a kid, the expectations tend to involve presents. When you get older, the expectations seem to involve experiences: that everyone loves the gifts, that family arrives safely and gets along, that your version of a beloved recipe turns out right, that all who join you in the festivities enjoy themselves and feel as though they belong.
Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don’t. But no matter what, you always get more than you bargained for, and that’s usually where the magic is.
That’s what I realized while standing in line to visit A Christmas Story House. Waiting behind me was a family — two sisters, their tween daughters, and one husband — who decided to visit after they heard about the 5K/10K on the news.
I’m not one to talk to other people in lines (that’s my mom’s job), but over the hour, we exchanged small-talk, and I got to hear the young cousins — not far from my age when I first saw A Christmas Story — entertain themselves by playing games, making jokes, and talking about their favorite parts of the movie.
As we got closer to the house, the kids squealed with excitement and imagined what they might find inside. Would there be a basement with the furnace the dad yells at? Would creeping marauders be hiding out in the backyard?
The father scoffed at their ideas, but I grinned inside. No matter what lay ahead in the house, A Christmas Story was obviously more than mine, and sharing this experience with others — even if they made me wait longer, in the cold — only added to my already outsized love of it.
If you have a memory to share about a holiday movie or TV show, please let us know.
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