Countless kids grew up with A Christmas Story, and have gone from watching it with youthful
wonder to seeing it through older, wiser eyes.
In celebration of that inevitable shift in perception, here's a look at things only adults
notice in A Christmas Story.
One of the hallmarks of A Christmas Story is the rich fantasy life that Ralphie indulges
in on his road to Christmas Day and, hopefully, his Red Ryder BB gun.
The most elaborate of these fantasies involves him imagining what he might use the gun for,
as bandits led by Black Bart attack the family home, forcing Ralphie and his trusty new weapon
to defend his family.
It plays out like the perfect kid fantasy of a Western in their very own neighborhood,
but it takes a slightly dark turn when, at the end, it's pretty clear that Ralphie has
killed Black Bart's gang.
Kids might not notice this, but the lolling tongues and crossed out eyes suggest death,
and he was, after all, shooting them.
Yes, it's just a fantasy, but it's a grim one for a kid who mostly just wants to shoot
targets in the backyard.
Ralphie is nine years old as most of A Christmas Story unfolds, placing him in a rather interesting
in-between age.
He's young enough to still consider things like Christmas and Santa Claus the most important
parts of his life, and to care deeply about things like Little Orphan Annie secret decoder
rings, but he's also old enough to fancy himself more mature than his younger brother.
It's subtle, but this budding maturity comes out in a couple of key moments when it becomes
clear that Ralphie is becoming interested in women.
When The Old Man sets up the leg lamp for the first time, Ralphie basically cops a feel
of the thing, and in both his fantasies and in real life it's clear that he at the very
least wants his teacher to like him.
He might even have a little crush on Miss Shields.
Ralphie's quest for his Red Ryder BB gun culminates when, feeling all of the adults in his life
have forsaken him, he decides to appeal directly to Santa at the local department store on
Christmas Eve.
This backfires spectacularly, as Ralphie spends the entire time waiting in line trying to
focus on his goal, only to forget everything he was going to say when he finally climbs
the towering North Pole structure.
To make matters worse, the Santa at the top seems unusually intimidating and even frightening
to Ralphie's eyes, as he panics amid a closing store and a group of pushy elves.
It's clear that Ralphie blew his shot, but what's less clear is why.
What about his past history with Santa made him so nervous about asking for something
from the big guy?
Was he just psyched out by all of the rejections that came before, or is it more specific?
A Christmas Story is a tale of kid concerns and kid perceptions, so everything in Ralphie's
world is just a little bit heightened.
This includes his encounters with the bully Scut Farkus, who seems to lurk around every
corner and takes his sick delight in the pain of other kids to near supervillain levels,
at least until Ralphie finally finds it within himself to fight back.
To any kid watching, bullying is, if not a reality, at least a familiar abstract concept
they've had to deal with in their lives, so they may simply accept it and move on with
the story.
For adults, though, there's a sense that the bullying in A Christmas Story is particularly
dark in part because the adults surrounding the children don't really do that much about
it, and the kids don't necessarily want them to.
Farkus haunts Ralphie and his friends all the time, but they don't tell on him.
Flick walks into class with a black eye one day, and Miss Shields pays little attention to it.
Even when Ralphie finally beats the hell out of Farkus, his mother ignores the other kid
in the fight and focuses only on her son, never really stopping to ask what happens.
It calls to mind a world in which kids are entirely on their own, and to modern audiences
that can be a little scary.
Ralphie's father, only ever referred to as The Old Man, is a typical representation of
a Midwestern father figure in the early 20th century.
He's stern but not cruel, caring but not affectionate, and distant but not absent.
He's a man's man, and he spends most of the film just trying to read his newspaper and
enjoy a little bit of turkey while his sons get into trouble around him.
If you look close enough, though, there are little hints of eccentricity in The Old Man's life.
He insists on being timed when he changes a tire, for example, and went through the
trouble of burying his "major award" in the backyard and supposedly playing "Taps" in
tribute to it as he did.
He even takes some time in the department store to skip along with the Wizard of Oz characters.
Ralphie doesn't think much about it, but there's more to his Old Man than newspapers and furnace battles.
He has a rich inner life that we only see glimpses of.
Despite being a ubiquitous movie, there are still things about A Christmas Story that
some viewers can't agree on.
A key point of contention comes midway through, when the Old Man's beloved "major award" is
broken, and he's unable to glue it back together.
The mother readily admits to breaking the leg lamp, but claims it was an accident that
happened while she was watering plants.
Some viewers believe her, while others think that she did it deliberately because she was
sick of looking at the thing, and indeed she does confirm she thinks it's
"the ugliest lamp I have ever seen in my entire life"
So what really happened?
Look at the expression on her face just as she heads into the front room with her watering
can, knowing she will be alone with the lamp for a moment, and listen to the sheer force
of the breaking sound.
She definitely meant to do it.
These days we think of Christmas as a season that begins roughly at the end of Thanksgiving,
a period of weeks packed with decorations, shopping, seasonal programming, and all manner
of parties and other events.
The way Ralphie obsesses over Christmas in the film, you'd think that it would be similar
for him, but in the 1940-ish era in which the film takes place, that's just not the case.
For the Parker family, Christmas as an observable holiday really only lasts a couple of days.
They go and get the Christmas tree, then Christmas Eve arrives shortly thereafter and the family
packs in a parade, shopping, decorating, and visits to Santa all in one night.
There is no Black Friday, no long period of shipping gifts to the front door, no early
December Christmas parades and no long slog of Christmas parties to march through on the
way to the big day.
The Parkers basically wait until Christmas as a day to arrive, and then celebrate.
It's not a huge plot point, and kids might not notice it, but adults whose entire schedules
are thrown out of whack in December definitely do.
The leg lamp in A Christmas Story has become so iconic that it's almost more famous than
any of the film's actual human characters, but until it arrives at the Parker residence,
it could be anything.
The Old Man comes home from work one day, says he's going to be getting "a major award"
that every night, and then a crate shows up.
"Ah, frah-gee-lay.
It must be Italian!"
"I think that says fragile, honey."
"Oh, yeah."
Before it does, though, the Old Man is just musing aloud about what the award might be,
and even dares to think that someone might be sending him the deed to his very own bowling alley.
This raises a couple of questions: What does the Old Man do for a living, and what on Earth
did he do to earn a major award that could range from a weird novelty lamp all the way
to a piece of commercial property?
We don't learn much about the Old Man's work, and the fluidity of this moment and what exactly
might have happened just further underlines a common kid truth: They often really don't
know what their parents do all day.
When the hard Midwest winter comes in A Christmas Story, Ralphie's mother bundles up Randy in
such a way that Ralphie even compares it to deep sea diving, and Randy famously complains
that he's wearing so many layers that he can't put his arms down.
Once outside, Randy can't even get up off the ground by himself because his movement
is so hampered.
It's comical, but it also makes you think of what exactly was supposed to happen when
he got to school.
Randy couldn't very well pull all of that stuff off himself, so who was doing it for him?
More importantly, who was re-bundling him when it was time to go home for the day?
Somewhere in that school there's a poor employee who had to be on Randy Parker Winter Wear
duty day after day, and they very likely weren't happy about it.
The Old Man in A Christmas Story has many different nemeses.
There's the furnace that won't stop acting up in the basement, the Oldsmobile that won't
run right, and of course, the dogs next door.
We know very little about the Bumpus family in the house beside the Parkers.
All we really know is that they have a lot of dogs and those dogs really hate the Old
Man in an almost pathological way.
They follow him from his car to his door, try to push their way into the house, and
ultimately devour the family's turkey when the door is left open just enough for them
to get through and wreak havoc.
Dogs will be dogs, of course, but the film doesn't tell us what else is going on that
allows this to happen.
Why hasn't the old man marched over and had it out with Mr. Bumpus?
Of course, the plot answer is so he still has to do battle with the dogs, but it's hard
not to wonder how things got this bad in the first place.
A Christmas Story is a film that depends in many ways upon seeing the world from Ralphie's
point of view, which means that our perspective on the various other members of the family
is slightly skewed, and emphasizes Ralphie's father more than his mother.
Frequent rewatching of the film reveals, especially to an adult audience, that Mrs. Parker is
in fact a much bigger part of Ralphie's emotional memory than we give her credit for.
Yes, she's there for him after his fight with Farkus, but she's also a tender presence in
other ways.
She leads the silly Christmas carols in the car, has an innate understanding of how Randy's
mind works, proves she has the most patience of anyone in the family when it counts, and
even reveals a moment of real tenderness with her husband in the film's final scene.
Mrs. Parker is much more than a put-upon wife and mother within this story.
She has, in many ways, an inner life that's just as rich as her husband's.
One of the most famous scenes in A Christmas Story is the moment when Ralphie makes a mistake
and utters the curse which the movie renders as
"Oh, Fudge."
This moment, and the resulting fallout, is mostly about Ralphie getting punished for
cursing in the first place, and then blaming it on his friend, something a lot of kids
have no doubt done.
But while the kids are busy relating to the punishment phase of that story, the adults
are probably paying a little more attention to the way Ralphie's mother reacts.
A Christmas Story is a PG movie, so we don't hear too many curses thrown around, but Ralphie
makes a point of telling the audience that he's heard that particular bad word frequently
from his father, something Schwartz's mother even guesses over the phone.
We as an audience also hear Mr. Parker's nonsensical cursing wafting up from the furnace throughout
the film, so we can guess at what else he might say in other situations.
Why, then, does Mrs. Parker seem to have no clue as to the kind of words her husband might
use in a high-stress moment?
Whatever's going on there, this family has an unhealthy relationship with profanity,
and they need to all get on the same page.
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