On Religion: Life lessons Woven Into ‘A Christmas Story’
(ANALYSIS) Humorist Jean Shepherd was a teenager when his father came home from work and began packing a suitcase.
“What are ya doin’, Dad?”, asked Shepherd.
Describing the scene to communication scholar Quentin Schultze, he said that his father replied: “I’m leaving. You’ll understand when you get older.”
Shepherd’s father moved away and married a “trophy wife.”
This wasn’t the kind of dark, life-changing event that tends to inspire a crucial symbol and theme in a beloved Christmas movie, noted Schultze. But Shepherd wove parts of his own life story into his storytelling, including work that became “A Christmas Story.”
Americans who watch this 1983 family comedy — about 40 million watch the 24-hour marathon on TBS and TNT starting on Christmas Eve — know that it centers on a boy named Ralphie who is obsessed with a 200-shot Red Ryder air rifle BB gun.
But another iconic image is the leg-shaped lamp, wearing a fishnet stocking, that Ralphie's Old Man received as his “major award” after winning a contest.
What was that all about?
Schultze learned the answer when, for three years in the 1980s, he taught a college-level storytelling class with Shepherd, saving notebooks full of insights from their time together.
“As Shepherd told me, the leg lamp became the Old Man's trophy wife, which he had to show off to the world. He was unable to carry on his 'affair' with discretion," wrote Schultze in “You'll Shoot Your Eye Out! Life Lessons From the Movie ‘A Christmas Story.’” He is now professor emeritus at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The quest for the Red Ryder air rifle has a heartwarming final act, with a boy bonding with his volatile Old Man, the father's only name in the script. And the leg lamp story also has a happy ending, even though it's clear that Ralphie's mother broke it on purpose.
Shepherd didn't sneak sermons into his work, but his humorous parables contain “deeper” and even “biblical” symbols and themes, said Schultze, reached by telephone.
In the language of contemporary polling about religion, the storyteller — who died in 1999 — was a “none of the above” believer.
“Shepherd knew that people are fallen things that do stupid stuff, but somehow things often turn out well,” said Schultze. “I considered him a closet Calvinist, but he didn't want to have anything to do with organized religion. He was agnostic to religious institutions, yet he just couldn't shake the reality of God. ... I would say that his stories contained 'common grace,' but he wouldn't have used that term.”
“You'll shoot your eye out,” the movie’s famous catchphrase, was Shepherd's way of saying that people shouldn't act like fools while living in a messy, broken world, Schultze explained.
The father's raging, profane clashes with the cantankerous basement furnace were like symbolic journeys into the lower rings of Dante's “Inferno.”
The storyteller knew that evil was real, bullies were real and so were heroes. But “A Christmas Story” also dug deep into the actions of characters, especially men and boys, who let their dreams become obsessions.
Ralphie’s mother becomes the hero who has the “will, if not the power, to control how the family protected its morals.”
While watering her garden, she shatters the leg lamp, which was “at least implicitly sensual, not just ugly,” wrote Schultze in his new book. Her plants are a “Garden of Eden” symbol representing everything that's good in their family.
In the end, the children have a wonderful Christmas, including the Old Man getting emotional while giving Ralphie his Red Ryder air rifle.
Later, as “Silent Night” plays on the radio, the mother turns out the living room light.
Schultze describes the scene: “She and the Old Man sit next to each other, facing the very window where they battled over the leg lamp, next to the lit tree with the crooked star. Snow is falling, gently, peacefully, beautifully. They lift their wine glasses as a sign of peace, even as a declaration of gratitude for one another. The fight over the tawdry leg lamp has been resolved. ... ‘All is calm.’”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.