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He Didn’t Shoot His Eye Out, So There

December 21st, 2007

by Shelley Ontis

My family like to call me “Scrooge” and “Grinch” because I dread Christmas each year. They say I hate Christmas, but that’s really not true. I enjoy it from about 9pm on Christmas Eve until bedtime on Christmas Day. I say that’s long enough. Just because the moment Halloween is over there seems to be this timer tick-tick-ticking down the days and hours we have remaining to get it all done doesn’t mean I have to like it.

By the time my daughter goes to bed on Christmas Eve–with everything finally bought, baked, checked off a list, and mailed–I feel like Scrooge and Grinch have nothing on me! I could out-bah-humbug the best of them. I want it over yesterday. I want to sleep a while and not have to hear a “Merry Christmas” or a sleigh bell for the rest of my life.

Then I watch my favorite holiday movie, A Christmas Story, while I wrap “Santa” presents for the next morning. And I feel a little less like grabbing the bell from a volunteer outside a store and chucking it across the parking lot as far as I can.

A Christmas Story is set a few years before my time, but despite the obvious difference in dress, cars, and kitchen décor, the atmosphere in that movie matched that of my childhood. I had the stay-at-home mom who worried about what the neighbors thought and annually cooked the big turkey dinner. I had the old man who tackled every home improvement project much like Darren McGavin tackled the persnickety furnace, with great zeal and creative adult language that I, like Ralphie, was not supposed to ever have heard. We had the hillbilly bumpkin neighbors with many dogs—no, wait, we were the bumpkins with the dogs, but I digress.

Who hasn’t had to suck on a bar of soap for some spoken infringement? Well, okay, maybe not everyone, though it was popular when I was a kid. But who hasn’t had her old man glare at her, after being mostly patient for a little while, and demand her to shut up? Who hasn’t been afraid of a playground bully, and didn’t they all have yellow eyes?

Ralphie’s childhood could have been mine, twenty years later, and his desperate longing for that BB gun could have been mine, if you changed the BB gun into a 3-speed bicycle or my very own 8-track cassette player (state of the art at the time).

Photograph by Paddy Patterson. Some rights reserved.

A Christmas Story is, at its heart, about avarice. But it’s a child’s avarice, the innocent and even encouraged greed that we all felt at Christmas. (I dare say, some still feel it.) And instead of beating us over the head with some syrupy moral at the end like so much predictable Christmas fare, it turns out to be okay that he wanted that BB gun so badly he could think of nothing else all December. When a BB ricochets and we hear the crunch of his glasses underfoot, we giggle and shrug and think, “well at least he didn’t shoot his eye out”. The movie understands we’ve all been there: we’ve skinned our knees after begging for those metal wheels that clip onto our shoes, and we’ve danced on the bed when we’re not supposed to and heard the sickening crack of the new 8-track player hitting the floor. And then frantically tried to figure out a way to make ourselves look blameless!

We did that stuff, like Ralphie, because we were kids. And though messy, loud, and destructive at times, it’s okay to be a kid. And it’s okay to be an imperfect parent, too, doing the best you can with what you have.

The old man in A Christmas Story goes to work in the morning, comes home at night, and clearly has left the brunt of the child-raising to his wife, who seems to cook the same dinner perpetually and still can’t get the smallest one to eat in any kind of socially acceptable manner. Sound familiar? But they love each other. The old man and his wife have a tender moment at the end, drinking wine and watching the snow fall. Mother and son bond in a new way with the secret about the fight (and more cursing), as do son and father. If you missed Darren McGavin’s slight smile of amusement after Ralphie drops the F-bomb, you need to watch it again.

In a time when it seems that Christmas is about nothing more than going and doing and getting, this movie inspires in me a kind of humorous nostalgia, a feel-good feeling without the saccharine greeting card sentiment. I can’t seem to find that anywhere else. So I watch A Christmas Story while I wrap my daughter’s presents on Christmas Eve, a tradition that officially heralds in my Christmas Spirit.

For a couple of hours I’m taken back to my own childhood and the Christmases I loved, and all the Christmases with my daughter. I think of her running from her room each year like Ralphie and Randy did, and like I did, hoping for that one special thing that Santa just had to bring–because Christmas is magical and Santa knows everything. I watch it and reminisce, and I love Christmas again.

Until December 26^th.

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