Now, normally, Liz is all over this sucker like the feds on my wallet, but I couldn’t help but throw in my own on this one.
This year is special, you see–it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of a fantastic Christmas movie release called A Christmas Story, and every year I watch it it just keeps getting better.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet–and for the love of all that’s holy do so soon!–it’s the extremely charming yet somewhat unlikely story of a little boy in the forties who takes on what apparently were standard travails for kids in the forties: fighting bullies, dealing with the disappointment of promotional giveaway items, swearing in front of the folks, horrible gifts from well-meaning relatives, and fending off hordes of imaginary villains with a toy rifle whilst wearing the most ridiculous Western garb EVER.
Our little boy in question just wants one thing for Christmas, and it’s not a football or a bike or early enlistment papers so he can go fight the Huns with the rest of Easy Company, he wants an Official Red Ryder carbine with a compass in the stock. And he’s willing to go to fairly outrageous lengths to get it.
The first time I saw this movie was back in the wilds of middle school band class, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen years ago. My band teacher was absolutely enamored with this movie, and showed it to her classes every year just as school was about to let out for the holidays. It’s hard to run that last day of class, especially in band–chances are the Christmas concert you’d spent most of November preparing for was already done maybe a week or two before break, and any other concerts were a couple months away so you had a bit of a lacunae in there that required FILLER. Any work you did to get ready for those next concerts that day would be wiped out by the two-week Christmas vacation, so what was the point?
Thus, our band teacher would wheel in a TV / VCR cart assembly, set it up in front of the rows of folding chairs that comprised our orchestra pits and show A Christmas Story. I must’ve seen that movie half a dozen times by the end of my high school band career, and I never failed to get at least a chuckle out of it. No matter how well I knew the jokes, and I KNEW Ralphie would be coming down the stairs in that godawful pink bunny suit, it was still a laugh.
A laugh that I discovered, much to my joyous surprise, would still be there even fifteen years again as I just watched it a few days ago.
This is a good movie. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great distraction from all those sappy Christmas specials out there.
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