booktastic

As predicted, I finished A Christmas Story in roughly an hour and a half of straight reading. I feel kind of bad talking about it right now, as I was also recently reading the book Unplug the Christmas Machine, and one of the first things it mentioned was how Christmas is being messed up by the fact that people build up to it longer and longer but celebrate it less and less. (You know: stores encourage us to start building up to the day beginning in August now, so we build up and build up and build up - and then, BOOM, December 26th it’s all over, and we’re left depressed and empty feeling with a saggy tree that we feel obliged to leave up for a few extra days. Back in olden times, Christmas was a feast that you built up to for a limited amount of time [Advent] and then celebrated it for days and days… You know, I really should look up the exact quote from the book. My version is somewhat unwieldy.)

However, I also ascribe to the Ebeneezer Scrooge school of Christmas, which is that “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” So, rather than reading A Christmas Story as an attempt to build up to Christmas, I’m using it as a chance to make Christmas here, now, and every day. I feel even the authors of Unplug the Christmas Machine could agree with that sentiment.

… Anyway, I’ve rambled enough, so I’d better get back to the point, which is that I just read The Christmas Story. In case you didn’t know, this book actually did not exist before the movie: the movie was based on several short stories taken from Jean Shepherd’s book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. However, the interest has been great enough that they finally took the stories out of that book and assembled them together under the title of the movie, e.g. The Christmas Story.

In this compendium, you’ll find the true stories of the Red Ryder BB gun, the Bumpuses, the Old Man’s “major award” and so on. Some facts are different from the film - for instance, the holiday feast that was consumed by the Bumpus hounds was actually an Easter Ham, not a Christmas Turkey.  But the stories also enlarge on facts stated in the film but not fully explained: who knew that the gifts featured prominently at Christmas (the can of Simonize, the zeppelin) were Ralphie’s gifts to his family?

Criticisms: I wouldn’t call this book “laugh out loud” funny - because I didn’t. However, I did smile a lot, and I did actually chuckle out loud at one point. Though it’s worth mentioning… I found some moments of the book darker than the film. The story of the bully Grover Dill (Scut Farkas in the film) read like an essay on the savagery of man… Of course, it’s possible that it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. And a minor criticism (not really of the writing, since this book wasn’t even compiled by the author - it may even have been assembled after his death) is that, with the exception of the story of the Red Ryder BB gun, the stories in this book are not actually Christmas stories. But, as I said, that’s not really a proper criticism of the writing.

In the end, would I recommend this book? Yes. It was a light, enjoyable (and FAST) read. As a Christmas book I would give it three out of five stars because only one of the stories has anything to do with Christmas - but don’t let that put you off. If you want to really get a Christmas experience out of it, I’d recommend you do the following: skip the Red Ryder BB gun story (which is the first in the book), read the others, and then finish the book by reading that. That’s how the publishers should have arranged it, if you ask me! — Mrs. Hall

Trackback URI | Comments RSS