About the WonderCafe Advent Calendar.

A boy and his search for a Red Ryder BB Gun

A Christmas Story

The great thing about Christmas in popular culture is eventually things that were not initially popular become icons of the season. Every year producers put out Christmas-themed movies in time for the holidays that drop into obscurity. Some stay there—like Santa Claus: The Movie—but others somehow emerge thanks to TV and word of mouth. There was a time when It’s A Wonderful Life was Jimmy Stewart’s most obscure movie; now it’s lauded as a must-see holiday event and that’s entirely due to the existence of UHF television stations showing it so much in the 1970s. There’s something reassuringly democratic about this; meritocratic as well; a sense that if it’s good enough one day it will eventually be acknowledged —that said, by this system Santa Claus Versus The Martians also has had a resurgence…

Probably the greatest beneficiary of this phenomenon in recent times is A Christmas Story. I remember seeing the ads for it in 1983 and being unimpressed.

See: 

Grotesque Santa. Kid in jam jar glasses. Gross little kid. Snorting. Yelling. It looked, to this 14 year-old, mean-spirited.

Shame on the marketing people who came up with the ad campaign (and the TV spots were even worse—emphasising Santa kicking Ralphie down the slide). And shame on me for believing them. And thank goodness this film experienced such a resurgence through video rentals and TV broadcasts. The fact is, if I had seen A Christmas Story as a 14 year-old in December 1983 I probably would have totally identified with it.

There are lots of movies about kids at Christmas but A Christmas Story does something I’ve never seen any other film do: it gets into the mind of a kid. It portrays all the small terrors and little victories that make up childhood as the epic struggles that they actually seemed to be at the time…and probably actually were. A time when the greatest hope is a Red Ryder BB Gun; when the greatest social conglagration was to triple dog dare someone to touch a frozen flagpole with their tongue; when the greatest mistake was to swear in front of one’s father; when the greatest terror was the yellow-eyed bully blocking the route home and the greatest mercy was mom not telling your dad you beat up the bully.

When I finally watched A Christmas Story in my thirties (idiot!) I realized: this was my life, only it was merely set in Oakville in 1976 and not an Ohio town in the late 1930s. But it felt right. It realized a fundamental truth: when you’re a child, you’re so small that your whole world is huge.

Like the social intricacies that leads Ralphie’s friend to destruction via a flagpole. The United Nations isn’t nearly so complex.

See:

The narration taken from Jean Shepherd’s memoirs helps. He is able to make the inarticulate yearnings of a kid and put it into language that, while ironic, is also incredibly poignant. When Ralphie’s teacher asks the perpetrators of his friend’s mishap on the frozen flagpole “Don’t you feel remorse?”, the Older Ralphie (Jean Shepherd acting as narrator) reflects, “Adults loved to say things like that but kids knew better. We knew darn well it was always better not to get caught.” Which says everything about childhood.

The other thing about A Christmas Story that works is Bob Clark’s direction. The overblown, arch, grotesque quality that I balked at in the ads as a kid is actually perfect for the world created here. A child’s world does have a sort of off-kilter sort of view when you look back on it and Clark understands this in a way I’ve never seen before or since. The characters are exaggerated but seem all the more real for it. This is true of even the smallest parts: one of the funniest scenes in the film is when Ralphie and his brother are stuck in a line-up to see Santa with a total nerd before the term was invented and it’s beautiful because the nerd has no clue that he’s annoying as he gushes about Wizard of Oz characters he likes. With the lead characters it’s like watching art unfold before your eyes. Old Man and the Mother’s battle over a lamp won in a trivia contest that is shaped like a woman’s leg is brilliant because we’ve all seen bizarre battles of wits between parents over even stranger things.

See:

And the scenes on Christmas Day are wonderful because all of all the things that go right and wrong at the same time. In the middle of all the laughter and heartbreak comes a sense that one doesn’t get very often while watching a film—these people are wonderfully ordinary. And their Christmas is just as full of tragedy, triumph and just plain weird, absurd stuff as yours and mine.

If you haven’t seen A Christmas Story, go see it. I triple dog dare you.