It was late one November Night, and I asked my Dad if he would watch “A Christmas Story” with me. Every year he’d throw it on at the holidays, and most years I’d sit and wait through it. I never hated watching it; A Christmas story is one for the books. It’s about a kid who wants nothing more for Christmas than a Red Ryder BB gun, but everyone tells him: “you’ll shoot your eye out!” The film began, and Ralphie Parker and all the kids of Hohman, Indiana fogged up the corner window of Higbees’ Department store. Their flat faces pressed on the bottom of that glass pane, ogling at the great altar of Christmas joy: the annual toy display. “I remember doing that.” he recalled with a smile, and so did I. Not so long ago, but So did I. Later, when Ralphie’s little brother gets stuffed into a Winter Onesie so thick it might as well be lead lined and so stiff that he can’t even move his arms, he told me about when his shoe tore a hole. How he had to walk through bitter cold snow without the dignity of some solid footwear.
It reminded me of the time I took the wrong coat home from elementary school, and ended up wearing the garment of a girl half my size. We are tapestries of all the people we know and have known, and very often we’re a stamped and bona fide carbon copy of our parents, for better or worse. Most of all, I’ll never forget this. When Ralphie and his little brother go to see Santa Claus, Ralphie freezes in the face of the man he thinks is his last hope of getting that blued-steel barrel carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time: The Red Ryder BB gun. The Phony Santa reminds him again. “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Ralphie feels that odious blighting feeling: Powerlessness. He couldn’t convince his mother, didn’t have the guts to ask his old man, and got kicked down a slick red slide of doom into the fate of a crummy Christmas. Finished with their shopping, Mr. and Mrs. Parker were leaving the store with Ralphie and Randy. “Did he ask you… if you’ve been a good boy all year?” the old man asks Ralphie. Ralphie says no, and his father says with a smile and a knowing tone “Oh, he already knows.”
“When he said that, I bet he already bought the BB gun.” We’d seen the movie countless times, and I knew Ralphie got his wish, but when my dad said that, my whole perspective on the holiday season changed. I really choked up, I knew how hard they worked, my dad and mom, to make Christmas Day special. Even though I knew how much magic relied on them, At 19 years I finally realized just what it meant. It was a joy to them, seeing me so happy to get that Lego Set, or that robot, or that combining robot, or that other combining robot (I had a fixation) it was a Joy that was without return, merely a feeling of warmth that no other experience quite replicates. I know one day it’ll be me. One day, I’ll be playing Santa, and when I see that look in someone’s eyes that just says “I got it, I really got it.” I’ll feel even more like my Dad, and he’s a good one to be.
