National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

GETTING THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS RIGHT

by Erica U.

All month I’ve been contemplating which holiday movie I wanted to write about and I’m embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent googling “obscure Christmas film.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to put on airs of sophistication or intellectualism (I watched several seasons of The Hills and went to see Superbad the night it came out; No illusions of classiness remain.) It was that I’ve always been pretty dissatisfied with the superficiality of most holiday movies.

Of course they’re all very sweet and sentimental…but in such an airy and obvious way. Turn over a new leaf, Embrace generosity, Realize how much you have to be grateful for. Epiphany, epiphany, epiphany, cue a Christmas carol, and wrap it all up in a tidy satin bow.

I wanted to discover a holiday movie with depth and complexity. But days in to its pursuit I realized the film that meant the most to me personally – and maybe even carried the purest messages - was the least highbrow of all: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

How appropriate!

Every year, we’d rent the movie on VHS or find it just starting on one of our five network television channels. My mom was always too antsy to watch – fussing around with meal preparations and past-due Christmas cards and obligatory decorations. But my dad – my dad stretched back that brown corduroy La-Z-Boy and committed himself to the tradition.

My dad loved Christmas Vacation more than most people. By that I mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than most people do. But I also mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than he loved most people. (Ok, I stole that joke from Homestar Runner. Sue me. Please don’t.)

For two hours each December, my dad didn’t have to be stoic or driven. He could simply laugh. And I’d cozy up beside him, tucked into the big calico couch in the basement and furtively watch him roll and roll at the slapstick. Literally wipe his eyes at Clark sliding down a collapsing ladder or the squirrel launching out of the Christmas tree. I’d watch his face relax and now, it occurs to me that maybe Clark’s well intended buffoonery made him go a little easier on himself.

At a glance, Clark Griswold and my dad could not have been more dissimilar men. My dad was confident and stubborn, mostly serious back then and always larger than life. He snow shoed and winter-camped in Canada, built cabins with his bare hands and hitchhiked to California at 17; slept on the beach and ate loaves of bread for meals when his parents refused to wire him a single dollar. My dad was an adventurer, a perfectionist, an unrelenting worker, a wandering soul chained to domestic responsibility.

From my four-foot, twelve year old vantage point, he was Right about everything – unquestionably Right. From this age, I can understand that he may not have seen himself – as a husband and father - with the same unwavering certainty. His plumbing business was slow to take off in those early years and we lived frugally. When they took a chance and moved back to Minnesota from Denver, they bought for a song three acres of land on a small town river and he built our house as we could afford it.

The first spring and summer and fall, we lived in a tiny camper trailer behind the framed in split-level. Three kids and a wife, each getting ready for their day in a six by twelve foot tin can. That first winter, we moved in by the time the snow came, but it was still all cement and sheetrock and dry wall. My mom helped us string popcorn and cranberries for the tree that we harvested from the untamed backyard and my dad sprung for a string of tiny white lights from Pamida. That year, I started the tradition of sleeping at the foot of the lit tree at least once before Christmas. 24 years later, and I’ve never had a prettier tree than the one that rose up from hand me down clothes and roughed in bathrooms and no beds.

Those were the first years he tilled and planted the enormous garden that feeds us still. But maybe he didn’t see how worthy that was. This food producing and building of homes alone, from scratch like a super hero. Maybe he saw instead our faces the year he gave us too small, brown velour Carhart jackets from Fleet Farm. Picture the scoffing, snotty preteen hearts of my sister and me as we held up these clearance rack, boys jackets that came to our waists and forearms. This was Christmas, we thought? With such horrible ingratitude. And you could see the confusion on his face. They were new and warm, practical and soft – why weren’t we thrilled?

Or how about the Christmas he bought us matching white baseball caps – thin as onion skin. Mine was emblazoned with the British flag and my sister’s said “Damn I’m Good.” It’s debatable which makes less sense for a child. Looking back, they still make me laugh and laugh.

My father wasn’t raised as a priority. Four sons and his parents fed themselves first if times were tight. Maybe we wore clothes from garage sales instead of from the Gap, but my dad never slowed from working for us until we were long past needing it. He put us through college and paid for summer camp and band lessons and I didn’t have the first damn idea of the stress those bills must have cost him. Still every year at Christmas – even as we adults promise over and over not to exchange gifts – he puts in hours at the mall, finding us each the perfect gift and wrapping it personally, all thumbs and lumpy corners. Wrapping as he has lived – getting the most important things right even if no one ever taught him how to do it all perfectly.

Here’s the thing Christmas Vacation taught me this year: My father did the absolute best he could for us - and Clark Griswold’s all-too-human fumbling maybe reassured him that he’d done well enough. I love the movie for both reasons.

And for one more: The heart of its protagonist.

I’ve always identified with Clark’s holiday giddiness despite the world’s increasing cynicism. There will be no city tree lot evergreen for the Griswolds: No! They will march into the snowy woods and uproot their own. A single train of rain gutter lining Christmas lights is unthinkable. It will be a twinkling Sistine chapel of a yard display or it will be nothing.

There is a risk to earnestness, isn’t there? There’s a risk to being the dreamy goof who won’t turn off the Christmas music, who sings poorly and proudly at church – who GOES to church!, who loves an old sweater with snowflakes woven in, who puts up a tree even if you’re the only one around to admire it, who hands out late gifts to those who may not do the same for you – late because you don’t want them to feel obligated to reciprocate, given because your heart is so bursting with gratitude and affection this time of year you can’t not spell it out through some tangible, nostalgic token.

The world is not a great admirer of such earnestness. And what I love about Clark is that he could give a damn. The mocking of his in-laws and scorn of his neighbors don’t thwart his enthusiasm for creating a reverent Christmas and that is a beautiful and rare sort of strength. You may argue that the analogy is a stretch, but I’ll tell you what: Clark is not on the snob side of cummings’ division.

He’s earnest and committed to the marrow of life, not the showy arrangements of the incidentals and accessories. As a coworker puts it, he’s the “last of the family men.” His Christmas bonus won’t be invested in sport cars or golfing trips – it’s already pre-spent to install a family pool. And when the check doesn’t arrive, it’s not himself he’s upset for; He’s devastated at the prospect of letting his family down.

Clark is the kind of man who gets it wrong sometimes with the very best intentions, who falls off roofs, gets stuck in the attic and causes city brownouts with poorly planned light displays. Who awkwardly, innocently flirts with voluptuous store clerks and nearly kills himself on greased snow sleds. But he is also the kind of man who loves his family unabashedly, primarily.

Halfway through the movie I find myself thinking maybe this is what life is all about. Not about the dashing men who say all the right things and charm your co-workers at parties and remain an intriguing arm’s length away. Maybe love is about a good (not perfect!) man who wears Santa hats and comes to bed faithfully every night, wanting to be there, and lets you call him Sparky. Who tears up at old home movies, who wants life to be better for his children. Who fights to defend the heart and adventure and fun in life and labors every day solely for the care of his family. Maybe a family man – like Clark, like my dad – is the very best sort of man.

Even more than the holiday classics, Christmas Vacation convinces me that a purposeful commitment to your family may be the noblest of pursuits.

And loyalty might be the purest definition of love that I know.

Erica U. is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

Summer Movies Week: National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)

I’M JUST TRYING TO TREAT MY FAMILY TO A LITTLE FUN

by Chad Perman

To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you first have to understand that my dad is Clark W. Griswald. Tone down the more extreme pratfalls and absurdly outlandish behaviors (especially in the film’s final act), strip away just a bit – and only the tiniest bit – of his enthusiasm for family adventures and traditions, and you have my father; he of the big plans and grand ideas; he of the boundless energy and optimism; he of the lists and schedules that hung like hornet’s nests over my childhood; he of the family outings, the family rituals, “the family above all else”; he of the big heart, and the loving, if misguided, grand gestures. And, though he’s changed a good deal since my sister and I grew up and left the house nearly ten years ago – has relaxed a bit more and learned to let life happen at its own pace every now and then - he is certainly still that same man at times and, forever, in our family’s collective remembrance.

To understand my love of National Lampoon’s Vacation you also have to understand that, as a child, I would have laid down my life for Mr. Chevy Chase. Outside of my father, he was the funniest man I knew, a bumbling and hilarious presence no matter where he managed to show up.  It’s no doubt a bit difficult for a modern audience to appreciate just how good Chase was in his heyday - how he brought the funny on a consistent basis in films like Foul Play, Fletch, Seems Like Old Times, Spies Like Us, and The Three Amigos - before his career devolved into an unfunny tailspin brought on by poor decisions, arrogance, and a really bad talk show.  Chase was our God growing up: the question at sleepovers wasn’t should we watch a Chevy Chase movie but rather which Chevy Chase movie should we watch?  We quoted the films back to one another endlessly, a short-hand that confused our parents to no end.  So, to say Chevy Chase was some kind of important key to understanding the road map of my childhood isn’t entirely that far-fetched.

To understand my love of Vacation, finally, you have to understand what it represented to me way back when, what it symbolized to a boy being raised in a sheltered, religious family and community (thank you, Seventh-Day Adventism!), a world where a Rated R movie was a movie that would never be seen.  Of course, we had our ways around this – we couldn’t be monitored 24/7 after all, so we managed quick peaks at Beverly Hills Cop, Tin Men, or Flashdance - films my parents had recorded on VHS tapes during those random childhood Godsends known as “free preview week” on the pay cable stations.  Netflix it wasn’t, but it still allowed us to hear some bad words, see some sex and violence, and walk away feeling like we’d maybe gotten away with something.

Into this mix, then, comes National Lampoon’s Vacation, a film I was sure I’d love before I’d even seen a single frame - but a film I’m ultimately kept from seeing, even on video, due to its rating.  My parents see how much this kills me, and make vague promises that we can rent it and all watch it together some day (a well-intentioned decision no doubt, but still an oddly premised one: that they can pause the video and put whatever possible sex and/or violence we view into some kind of context so that it doesn’t scar us as much, a pattern of logic that one day led to the enormously uncomfortable experience of my entire family sitting down to watch My Own Private Idaho together because it had the guy from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure in it.). So, I decided at age 10 that the very day I turned 18, I would go to a video store and rent Vacation. By the time I turned 18, of course, I had far different things on my mind.

But still - the promise and allure of Vacation! The dream of a life where I was finally grown up enough to watch a movie like Vacation whenever and wherever I damn well wanted; where I could spend my days doing nothing but watching forbidden movies and shoving gallons of ice cream into my face (which I also wasn’t allowed to have, due to a childhood allergy to dairy).

This vision of the future appealed to me on such a deep and basic level as a sheltered kid, played over and over in my mind so many times, that the association between Vacation and a yearned for adulthood will likely never leave me.

And then there’s Vacation itself, stripped of all the subjective meanings I bring to it, still more than standing up as a fine comedy 25 years after its release: one man’s grand quest to drive the family he loves across the country to visit a Wally World, and all the misunderstandings, crazy characters, and hilarity that they encounter along the way.

It’s hardly groundbreaking — as either a comedy or a road movie –but it works like gangbusters, largely due to the chemistry between Chase and Beverly D’Angelo (his wife in all four Vacation films, despite the rotating cast of children), as well as the strong writing and Chase’s (at the time) impeccable comedic timing. Despite memorable performances from Eugene Levy, Christie Brinkley, Randy Quaid, and John Candy, this is still every bit Chase’s show, and though he’d manage to run the character into the ground by the time he all but phoned in 1999’s Vegas Vacation, here the role was still shiny and new, his to play around in, and he dove in head first.

Griswald continually subjects himself to such hardship and humiliation for no other reason than that he loves his family and wants them to have a fun vacation, dammit. And in that sense I could relate to it endlessly, could project my own father’s noisome imperfections onto the screen and laugh as they were transformed into Chevy Chase’s exaggerated cluelessness and well-meaning mistakes. Chase’s performance became funnier because I knew my Dad, and my Dad, in turn, became a less frustrating, better-intentioned person seen through the prism of one Clark W. Griswald.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle, and the editor-in-chief of A Bright Wall in a Dark Room. He watches Rated R movies and eats ice cream whenever he feels like it now.