A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film

Our second book of December, based on one of my favorite holiday movies, is A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film by Jean Shepherd. The movie is so awesome that hopefully the book will be even better and funnier!

Here's what Amazon had to say:

Quote :

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family’s typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.
This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker’s shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father’s pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie’s duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie’s unstoppable campaign to get Santa—or anyone else—to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid”?
The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.

WOW, two weeks have almost gone by for the month that this book was chosen for and NO ONE has written about it!!! How sad.
But easily understandable, this book is just not what I thought it was going to be and by the time you finaly finish it, it is easily forgotten.
But I don't see how it can really count as one of our bookclub books until there is at least one posting about it. So I will bite the bullet and try to give you a little something.

The first chapter is the only chapter in the book that is about Christmas, it is the main basis for the movie and the additional chapters added a little more color to the film but were about other area's this kids life.
The hunt for the BB Gun was crucial for this kid. When I had dinner with my parents on New Years Day I asked them if when my sisters and I were kids if we ever were that obbsessed with having a specifc toy for Christmas, they said no. That there were certain toys that once we had them we were very attached to and but none that we begged for before Christmas. My favorite toys growing up were my twin dolls, Amby and Lindsay. My grandmother gave me these two dolls and said that they were my twin girls. I took them with me every where. I mean I really loved those girls. During the year my grandmother would sew together little dresses and shirts and pants and jackets for them and she would even make them little shoes. So then when Christmas came I would bring my girls out with me and there would be one box that was just filled with new outfits for them. It was my favorite gift to open.
Any way the other parts I liked about this chapter was when he talks about giving the gifts to his family. Picking things out for them and just knowing they were going to love them. When I was little every year at my elementry school they would open up this little gift shop in the gym during recess and everything cost like a dollar. And that was where I would shop for my parents gifts and my grandparents. They had a small little plastic travel size screwdriver kit that I am pretty sure I bought for my grandfather every year. I was so sure that he would love them and every year he would open them with a big smile and say how great they were.
There was also one part where he said something about how his family celebrated Christmas on Christmas eve, because "his" santa was more civilized. I think it is funny how each family has things that "their" santa does just for them. At my house it was the fact that we were santa's last stop so he would always leave our gifts inside his santa sack. I think when I have kids, if we do the whole santa thing and if we have a fire place, I'm just going to leave the gifts inside the fireplace. I think it is ridiculous that santa is expected to get up and out of his sleigh and up and down chimmney's for each house, when it would be so much easier for him to just fly over head and drop the gifts down.

The second chapter was about the decoder ring, I don't really have anything to relate to it.

The third chapter was about the pop art, I don't really have anything to relate to that either.

The fourth chapter was about the bullies. Now I still remember the first and last name of the serious bullies I had in my childhood. Jeffrey French, Brian DeLuca, Mark Neal, and Jason Green.
They used to pick on me and I would go home crying all the time. What was worst is that two of them Brian and Jeff, they were my bullies in daycare, but they both had crushes on my older sister, who also picked on me. And she basically encouraged them so they would torture me more just to win favor with her!!! What a bitch!
But none of them ever got really physical with me, I was never in a fight.
Since then I have actually reconciled with some of my bullies. One of my best friends in highschool, Christi, turned out to be Jeff's cousin. So I've run into him a few times when hanging out with christi. Brian and I ran into at a church camp called falls creek, it was the summer after I had graduated highschool. He just barely remembered me but when I told him that he used to send me home in tears he felt really bad. Mark I haven't seen since highschool, but Jason (who by the way my sister had a crush on) the last time I saw him he was running the little gas station in the Wal-Mart parking lot. But that was a few years ago.

The final chapter was about the Bumpus', probably the worst neighbors ever written about. Fortunatly I have never had neighbors anywhere near that bad before. The only part of this chapter that I remember taking note of was on page 112. The teacher is reading a story about Raggedy Andy and Delbert asks " Was this guy Raggedy Andy a bohunk?"
The only reason this made me laugh was because it reminded me of 16 Candles. They all call Jenny's fiance an "oily bohunk". And I also remember seeing one of those behind the scenes things on VH1 or E or something, where they interviewed the people in the cast and a lot of them were saying that they didn't know what a "bohunk" was. I was really starting to believe they had just made up the word for the sake of something funny to call him, until I read this book. The teacher corrects Delbert by saying "Well, no, Delbert, Raggedy Andy was not of Bohemian extraction. He was a doll."

So there you have it. The one good thing that came from reading this book. A life long search has come to an end. Well, okay, it wasn't much of a search, I hadn't really tried that hard to find out what a bohunk was. But I am glad to have come across the answer.