Why does Ralphie’s Mother never get her due respect?
When I watched “A Christmas Story” recently for the 20th time (at least), my pandemic-weary brain zeroed in on something I’d never really noticed. I looked past the cute kids and the leg lamp and the famous tongue-stuck-on-the-pole scene and became laser-focused on the mom. One look at her disheveled hair and shabby robe and exasperated stare and I thought: This woman is a damn hero.
“A Christmas Story,” which TBS has played on a loop Christmas Eve into Christmas Day every holiday season for over a decade, takes place in early 1940s Indiana and follows a boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, even though his mom (Melinda Dillon, referred to as “Mother” in the credits) says his dream gift is too dangerous. That’s pretty much the plot, but director Bob Clark and writer Jean Shepherd somehow created an oddball, timeless Christmas movie that manages to be both darkly comic and sweet. Every year I’ve watched this movie assuming Ralphie is the protagonist. Now I’m not so sure.
When we meet Mother, she’s frazzled, serving food and wearing dowdy clothes that look like rags next to her husband’s comparatively haute-couture suit. While The Old Man (Darren McGavin) reads the paper or grumbles about the faulty furnace, Mother cooks, cleans, wrestles the kids into their gigantic snowsuits and frets about everyone’s well-being, even though no one frets about hers.
Normally, I wouldn’t find her plight so enthralling, but on this viewing, as soon as her husband and kids left for the day, I desperately wanted to know what this woman did with her alone time. She wasn’t
juggling home-school and work during a global crisis, so did she just keep on cleaning? Maybe she mixed herself a clandestine Tom Collins and took a bubble bath. Where were the scenes of her celebrating her freedom by dancing through an empty house, like Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman”?
At the end of “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie and Randy tear open their many presents, and The Old Man opens a gift from Mother, a shiny blue bowling ball. As I watched her observe her husband and sons’ delight around the Christmas tree, I noticed she was holding a fly swatter. I hoped that whatever her gift was, it was not that. Suddenly, on the umpteenth viewing of this movie, I needed to know if this woman, the saint of the film, got a Christmas present.
So I emailed A Christmas Story House & Museum in Cleveland, the site of the actual house from the movie, hoping for answers.
“Who cares what the mom gets for Christmas,” the museum’s owner, Brian Jones, replied. Turns out he was joking, but still. “No one has ever asked me that in nearly two decades in the business,” he wrote.
If she gets any presents, we never see them. Is her Christmas gift the fact that her husband and sons are all happy and fulfilled? Where is her reward for multitasking and keeping everyone fed and clothed and protected from blizzards, all while sacrificing her own time and energy to make yet another cabbage stew? They could have at least given her a card!
From now on, when I watch the end of “A Christmas Story,” I won’t be focused on Ralphie’s BB gun or Old Man Parker’s bowling ball.
I’ll be rooting for the mom, and imagining a deleted scene where she kicks up her feet, has that Tom Collins and gets a quiet moment all to herself.