A Christmas House

I’m going to tell you about a movie that changed my life. Unexpectedly, to say the least. Until then my fa­vorite films were all about flying, movies like Top Gun or The Right Stuff. That’s because I planned to be a mili­tary pilot like my father and then someday an astronaut.

The posters on my bedroom walls showed F-4s, the space shuttle and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars movies. But that particular after­noon my mom was chuckling over a movie on TV called A Christmas Story. “Come watch this with me,” she said. I was 13.

I laughed at the boy with the horn-rimmed glasses who wanted a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas and seemed destined never to get it. Everything seemed to go wrong with the Parker family—the faulty furnace, the neighbors’ dogs that ate up their turkey dinner, the lights on the Christ­mas tree that blew a fuse.

And yet, every­thing was right with them too—their affection for each other, their warmth, their forgiveness and their sweet trust that, de­spite the disappointments of life, things would turn out all right for them.

A Christmas Story became an annual ritual for our family. Mom, Dad, my sister, Jennifer, and I would sit on our couch in sunny California and get a real dose of a wintry Midwestern Christmas. We could repeat snatches of dialogue like a code.

Take the lamp. The fa­ther wins it in a contest, a leg in a fishnet stocking with a shade on top. When the box arrives, it says “HIS END UP,” with the “t” missing, and “FRAG­ILE” on top. “Fra-GEE-lay,” the dad says. “It must be Italian.” My sister and I could crack each other up with that one man­gled word.

“It’s a major award!” the father announces, and that made us laugh too. The whole movie is incredibly silly, yet it touched something in our family, a quirky kind of joy that drew us closer. A kind of affirmation that no matter how crazy life got, we always had each other.

Flying still consumed my imagination, though. I enrolled in the U.S. Naval Acad­emy at Annapolis, my father’s alma mater. From there I’d enter flight school and then on to NASA. My dream, though, was about to come crashing to earth.

Once I got to flight school at Naval Air Station Pensacola I had to have a physical exam. In those days you needed near per­fect eyesight. The flight surgeon checked my heart, my blood pressure, my weight, my height (you had to be able to reach the controls). Everything was perfect.

Then the ophthalmologist asked me to read the smallest line on the eye chart…several times. “Why don’t you try again, son,” said the flight surgeon. He wanted me to pass.

“Sir,” I said, “I tried three times and I still can’t read it.”

Devastated. That’s how I felt. Just blown away. It was the worst day of my life. I went back to my apartment, gave my roommates the thumbs-down, called up my dad and then flopped on the couch. I was in shock. Couldn’t even watch TV. It was like something died in me.

I’ve heard people say that our dreams come from God. Well, at age 22 I wondered why God would give me so much disappointment.

I bounced around, ended up going into Navy intelligence, but I never had the pas­sion for it like I did for flying. I’d been at it for a couple months when I came home to find a huge crate at my apartment, sent by FedEx.

In intelligence training we’d been warned not to open anything that looked too weird, but something about this box was strangely familiar. “FRAGILE,” it said in block lettering, “HIS END UP.”

Like the dad in A Christmas Story, I had to use all my strength to pry the huge thing open. I took off the top and dug in­side. Out came a plastic leg draped in a fish­net stocking. The lamp from the movie! I laughed till I cried. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and my first real moment of joy since flunking the eye exam.

“It’s a major award for dealing with life’s disappointments,” my dad said on the phone, laughing. My parents had made it themselves, buying the mannequin leg in the garment district in L.A., gluing some fringe on the lampshade, finding fishnet stockings at a ballet shop.

Its warm glow reminded me that things would turn out all right like they did for the boy in the movie. God had other dreams in store for me. I just had to trust. And laugh a little, right?

Good things did happen. I got married to a wonderful woman I met in the Navy. Beverly was in intelligence too, but her ca­reer took her on long stints onboard ship while I worked on base. Shortly after our wedding I told her I was thinking about getting out of the service.

We talked a lot about possible careers for me. But then, sit­ting at my computer, I had a brainstorm: I’ll make leg lamps. Crazy, right? Still, the leg lamp cheered me up. Maybe it could others too. I checked out mannequin legs at Victoria’s Secret (with Beverly’s help!) and found a way to order them.

I got a supplier for lampshades, fishnet stockings, high heels, everything I needed (the suppliers must have thought I was into something pretty weird). I assembled the lamps, took orders through a website, a couple a week at first, but they kept coming…and com­ing.

I quit the Navy and went into business for myself. By my second Christmas, I was selling 2,000 lamps a year. Yep. You heard right. Two thousand fishnet-stockinged leg lamps annually.

Poor Beverly. Just imagine her trying to explain what her new husband did for a living! Everybody onboard teased her—but they also bought my lamps! Even the captain.

In the winter of 2004 they were at sea when the captain noticed that the old Cleveland, Ohio, house used in the movie A Christmas Story was up for sale on eBay. He forwarded the listing to Beverly. She e-mailed me: “BTW, the house they used in the movie with the leg lamp is on sale on eBay. LOL.”

I didn’t LOL. I got right on eBay, con­tacted the owner and wrote, “Hey, I’d like to buy your house.” In less than 24 hours we cut a deal. I suppose you could say it was an impulse purchase. Something as crazy as might have happened in the movie.

I knew exactly what that house looked like. I could see the lace curtains at the window and the staircase where Ralphie stood, humiliated in his pink bunny suit. I could picture the old cast-iron sink and hear the furnace rat­tling.

It wasn’t just a sentimental idea, you see. Having sold thousands of leg lamps, I knew how many other people were out there, obsessed with this gentle movie and its funny family. There had to be something in that. I e-mailed Beverly: “The Parkers’ house is mine.”

I redid the interior to look exactly like in the movie. Same wallpaper, same fix­tures, all the same furniture.

In 2006, right after Thanksgiving, I opened the house up to visitors, seven dol­lars for adults. That first weekend we had over 4,500 guests, and they kept coming, no matter what the season!

We opened a museum and gift shop across the street, and sell all sorts of souvenirs, including a Christmas Story Monopoly game, and, of course, more leg lamps. It’s brought a lot of business to the area, which people are grateful for.

Today I often think about who I was when I first saw that movie and what my big dreams were then. I didn’t become a jet pilot or an astronaut, but the new dream God gave me has made me happier than I ever could have imagined.

I love this little business. I love the way it makes people happy. I love listening to the comments visitors make when they come through the house, especially families.

If anyone asks, I can tell them that lots of good things still happen to you after you’ve gotten the biggest disappointment of your life. But then they probably know that already. They’ve all seen that little, funny, charming, oddly life-changing movie, the movie that changed me.