GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — For a lot of families, movies help define the holiday season, and at the top of that list is usually "A Christmas Story".
According to Quentin Schultze, author and professor emeritus at Calvin University, that’s because it’s more than just a classic movie. It teaches valuable life lessons too, as he explains in his book "You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out: Life Lessons from the Movie A Christmas Story".
“I talked to a lot of people about the movie, and this is what they told me. They think it is a universal movie that deals with their time, whenever they lived, and their experiences wherever they had those experiences," Schultze told me.
Quentin grew up listening to Jean Shepherd, the movie's writer, on the radio and had a chance to teach with the storyteller at Calvin University.
"He [Shepherd] taught with me. He did not have the credentials to be a professor," Schultze said. "And in fact, he was so artistic that he was completely disorganized in his life. And so he needed me to organize the course, to do the course, to do the grading and all. And then he would sit on the desk up front, and he would pontificate about how you tell stories. And he would tell great stories...he couldn't do the course without my organization, and I didn't know storytelling without him."
Working with Shepherd in the classroom, Quentin learned a lot about the stories and lessons behind the most famous scenes in "A Christmas Story", and the stories were not all happy ones.
"His [Shepherd's] father got in a convertible with his blonde, young secretary and took off, and he never saw his father again. So Jean had this sense that men are obsessed with things, with women or substitutes, like leg lamps.”
Themes like that appear throughout the movie according to Quentin.
"Jean would say to me, Men create technologies, they develop technologies, they distribute technologies, but they'll never, ever completely control them."
But from those experiences, Shepherd could also tell a timeless story with a happy ending.
“One of those life lessons is to give thanks because grace happens. Good things happen. And in this case, there's reconciliation at the end, the old man and mom are together in the dark, and there. Looking out that very window that had the leg lamp in it.”
Good things can happen.
This an excellent message to keep with you this holiday, along with remembering not to stick your tongue to a flagpole.
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