The Wife’s after Thanksgiving schedule does not involve trips to the stores for Black Friday. Rather, it involves setting up the Christmas tree.
This year it also involved separating the kids for a time. Blame it on turkey hangover. They sat around most of the morning watching TV and then went right at each other’s throats when the TV went off. Their energy was redirected towards chores, where they continued to fight and snipe at each other.
The Wife and I, in the mean time, took care of the grunt work of tree setup. No natural trees here. We’re all plastic and fantastic. Complete with lights. We also did our best to ignore the yelling and screaming upstairs.
When an eerie silence began to emanate from the upstairs, we had them come down and begin the fun part of tree setup: putting on the ornaments. The kids have various fun ornaments from Hallmark involving Looney Tunes, Rudolf, Harry Potter and so on. The Wife and I also have our own ornaments, which involve Star Wars and A Christmas Story.
The boy became curious about the Christmas Story ornaments. They highlighted some of the better known moments from the movie such as the flat tire scene with “F-U-D-G-E” and the flag pole scene with Flick complete with audio with the push of a button. Of course, having never seen it, he had no appreciation for the scenes depicted. But I think my own fondness for them made him curious in a “What’s the big deal with this movie?” kind of way. So we agreed to let him watch it before going to bed.
Most of the humor was lost on him. Though he did get a kick out of some things like when the Mother is dressing Randy up in his snow suit, or when Randy falls and can’t get up without help. He also chuckled at the over-the-top nature of the two bullies and when the duck got it’s head lopped off at the Chinese restaurant. He even empathised with Ralphie when he got his mouth washed out with soap.
It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that we were running a bit of a risk in letting him watch the movie. In particular, the Santa scene in the mall and then the gift unwrapping scene could have led him to start asking questions. Thankfully, it didn’t. But he did have a couple of comments during the Santa scene. First, when Ralphie finally got his turn and the movie had all the extreme close-ups with the mall Santa bellowing “HO-HO-HO!” in his face, the boy commented “That’s creepy.” Which was actually pretty accurate, really. He also commented on the elves being mean.
When it was all said and done, he was happy Ralphie got his Red Ryder BB Gun. But it’ll be a while before he enjoys the movie like I do.