Hidden gems: Jean Shepherd’s ‘A Christmas Story’ is WAY deeper than you thought

Based on the writings of master storyteller and radio legend Jean Shepherd, “A Christmas Story” is the tale of young Ralphie Parker as he endeavors to convince his parents, teacher, and Santa Claus that a Red Ryder Range 200 Shot BB gun is the perfect Christmas gift.

Funny, whimsical, and timeless, the film has become a beloved Christmas classic. What many may not realize, however, is that hidden within the story’s charm are parables and life lessons.

Glenn Beck invites Quentin Schultze, author of “You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out! Life Lessons from the Movie ‘A Christmas Story,’” on the show to share his memories of hearing the stories behind these parables from Shepherd himself.

From the leg lamp to the oft-quoted phrase, “You’ll shoot your eye out,” Schultze breaks down the hidden messages and metaphors Shepherd hid in the film.

“As far as I know, except for the director of ‘A Christmas Story,’ Bob Clark, I’m the only person still alive who knew what Jean Shepard was doing — how he told stories and what he was doing in the movie ‘A Christmas Story,’” says Schultze, who learned the art of storytelling from Shepherd after realizing that his formal training as a communications professor left him wanting.

“The No. 1 thing I learned from him is that every one of his stories is a parable,” he adds. “In other words, it works on two levels.”

Take, for example, the leg lamp. While arguably one of the funniest subplots of the film, Mr. Parker’s beloved leg lamp also functions on a symbolic level.

When Schultze questioned Shepherd about this quirky aspect of the film, Shepherd told him, “That leg lamp is a trophy wife.”

“Right away [Mr. Parker] is smitten by it, and he’s in love, and he said he wants to go put it in the front window for what reason? To turn on the neighborhood!” Schultze laughs.

“Jean explained to me that in his worldview, guys are incurably romantic toward women or secondarily other things — could be cars, could be rifles, could be other technology — and they fall in love, and they get so smitten by these other things that it interferes with their relationships. So Mom knew when she saw what was going on with the old man and that leg lamp that she was going to have to do something. She was going to have to … end the affair by breaking the lamp, which she did.”

However, the parable of the leg lamp goes even deeper in that it draws on biblical themes as well.

“The leg lamp gets placed among the plants because Jean said to me that those plants are Mom’s Garden of Eden that she waters … so when the old man takes this tawdry, ugly, humanly concocted leg lamp and puts it right in the middle of the Garden of Eden,” it “represents sin in a way because it’s an affair,” Schultze says.

However, on Christmas night after the boys are asleep, Mr. and Mrs. Parker sit affectionately side by side, gazing out the window — the same window where the leg lamp once stood, creating a rift between them. But now their view is of a picturesque snowy evening.

This represents the process of reconciliation, Schultze explains.

Another symbol in the film is Mr. Parker’s furnace, which malfunctions so often, it causes him to weave that “tapestry of obscenities” Ralphie claims still hangs over Lake Michigan. Multiple times throughout the film, Mr. Parker, having heard the sounds of imminent breakdown, descends in a panic to the basement where the furnace dwells, as black smoke billows up the staircase.

“The old man runs down the stairs because he’s headed toward hell,” specifically “to the seventh level of Dante’s Inferno, where with all the soot and all the heat and smoke and everything else, he is going to stare face to face with that demon of a furnace, and he is not going to win the battle,” Schultze says, recounting Shepherd’s words.

The furnace, he explains, is a metaphor for the pitfalls of technology.

“Sooner or later, we find out they don’t work as well as we thought, and we get into trouble,” he tells Glenn.

Mr. Parker’s 1937 Oldsmobile Six touring sedan — which “would freeze up in the middle of summer on the equator” — also functions as a metaphor for technology, as do the fuses he keeps blowing.

Perhaps the most noteworthy parable hiding in “A Christmas Story,” however, is the one connected to the famous line, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

After Ralphie fails to convince his mother and teacher that a Red Ryder BB gun is the perfect Christmas gift, his last resort is Santa. At the mall, Ralphie ascends a makeshift snowy mountain to petition Santa, who, much to Ralphie’s dismay, echoes Mrs. Parker and Miss Shields’ words.

“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid,” he says before pushing Ralphie and all his hopes and dreams down the slide.

Not only does this scene resemble “going up to petition God,” says Schultze, but the phrase “you’ll shoot your eye out” resembles “our lack of humility as human beings,” which Shepherd said was the “one big lesson in life to really be careful about.”

The phrase is a reminder “to be more humble and be careful and watch out for what we do in life.”

To hear more about the hidden meanings in “A Christmas Story,” watch the clip above.

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