While eagerly awaiting Christmas, and begging for and half expecting to receive, a Red Ryder BB gun, Ralphie learned a few lessons about life. For a young kid, he was quite observant, yet things did not always turn out the way he expected them to. That was one of the lessons in life; life is full of surprises.
One lesson dealt with a neighborhood bully named Scut Farkus. Scut was bigger than Ralphie and bigger than most of the kids he picked on, a common trait among bullies. After living in fear day after day that Scut would pop out from behind the fence along Ralphie’s path to school, the day came when Ralphie had enough. He lit into Scut with such ferocity that Ralphie’s mother, hearing the commotion, had to pull Ralphie away. Life lesson: If you don’t stand up to a bully, he will torment you forever.
Lessons Learned
Ralphie learned a great deal from his father about what a grown up man should be like. Ralphie was proud of his dad, ‘an Oldsmobile man’ who used profanity a lot and whose chief nemesis in life seemed to be the furnace downstairs. While he may not have been the greatest role model at times, he was a very good father.
Ralphie could be forgiven if he came to believe that adults could not be trusted. Even when they could, they often had their own agenda. In this respect, one lesson that Ralphie learned about was how a kid could be fooled by commercialism. A highlight of the movie was when the long awaited Captain Midnight secret decoder arrived in the mail. At the end of each radio adventure, sponsored by Ovaltine, a secret message was transmitted, letter by letter. If you didn’t have a decoder, you’d never know what it said. Ralphie had his decoder; the message came over the air – "Drink your Ovaltine." Ralphie had just learned a lesson about crass commercialism.
Ralphie learned that department store Santas aren’t always that jolly, especially towards the end of the day. When he asked Santa for a Red Ryder BB gun the response was, "You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!"
Ralphie got his RedRyder BB gun after all, and nearly shot his own eye out, his eye being saved by his glasses. Maybe adults weren’t so mean and uncaring after all, and maybe there is more to Christmas than the commercialism that goes with it.
One message from the movie might be to be careful what you wish for. That’s a piece of advice that a kid Ralphie’s age isn’t likely to understand. It’s something that often has to be learned. Another message from the movie might be we learn a great deal from experience, and not just from what others tell us. We learn how to handle a bully by confronting him, we learn that those who advertise or promote things sometimes have a hidden agenda. We learn not to do stupid things like daring a classmate to touch his tongue to a steel flagpole in the middle of winter, because we see what can happen. We also learn that Christmas is a wonderful time of the year.