Seems like I’m always thinking of threads at the borders between fora. I don’t know if this one belongs here or in GQ, but I’m going with here.
The “major award” won by the “old man” in A Christmas Story was a lamp shaped like a sexy woman’s leg in a high-heeled shoe and a fishnet stocking.
My question is, was there ever such a lamp in production? In the late 1940s? And was it ever given as the award in a contest such as the one Ralphie’s dad entered?
I think it was just a delusion on the part of the Old Man, but if you want one, you can go here.
Great site, but it’s based on the movie, it doesn’t pre-date it.
The book and movie were from the memoirs of Jean Shepard, right? And everything else in the movie seems so realistically drawn, that it seems unlikely to me that the leg lamp would have been made up out of whole cloth.
As opposed to, say, the hard-edged realism of the fire department and police having to come by in order to free someone’s tongue from a flagpole?
Shepard exaggerated things for comic effect. The lamp was probably another exaggeration.
An exaggeration of what?
An exaggeration of some kind of embarrassingly ugly thing that his mother wouldn’t want displayed in her front room, would be my guess.
Doesn’t answer the OP, but I had to say that just the other day I noticed the electric glow of sex emanating from “major award” smack dab in the front window of a house a couple blocks down the street from me. Wow!
My husband and I had this exact same discussion last week after we saw Leg Lamps for sale at the mall. I didn’t even know they really existed until then, but since these were being sold as “Christmas Story” merchandise in a video store that didn’t answer our question at all.
I recall reading in another of Gene Shepard’s books about the promotional “major award.” It was from some soda pop company with a seductively-posed woman’s legal as their logo. I’m willing to believe.
Tacky lamps modelled after women & women parts were around then. Service men returning from Hawaii and other places would bring home lamps of scantilly clad Hula girls and such. There are collectors of such tacky things.
Now, that doesn’t mean the lamp existed, but the spirit of the lamp is without question.
Me too! I saw one of these in the front window of a house just a few blocks from mine last week!
(probably not the same one, though… “it’s a small world, afterall …”)
I believe that the [url=http://www.artandartifact.com/]Art and Artifact* catalog sells a version of the lamp.
D’oh-could a mod fix my coding? Thanks!
The book refers to it as a lamp form of Nihi soda’s logo, but I don’t know how accurate that is.
D’oh.
I just realized the play on words there with Nehi and a woman’s leg.
Weird thing about the first time I saw the movie…I’d told my husband I’d never seen it (and I hadn’t!), but when the dad kept harping on the “major award” out of nowhere I said “Is it a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg?” Turns out I’d read Jean Shepard’s book and it was so forgettable that I hadn’t recognised the story until that point. (Of course, I grew up in Indiana, so things like the stench of starting up the furnace every winter were old hat to me…perhaps Mr. Shepard was a far better historian than I suspected!)
