The city has been in love with A Christmas Story since the producers of the 1983 cult film turned holiday favorite made a Tremont home the place where Ralphie almost shot his eye out.
But it wasn’t until a Californian named Brian
Jones bought the abode on Ebay and turned it into a museum in 2006 that we full-tilt embraced the film as our own, along with its unforgettable image of a woman’s leg that had the power to light up a room.
In the movie, the infamous
leg lamp is presented as a tacky artifact from a bygone era, but no such thing existed until Jean Shepherd first imagined the lamp’s “soft glow of electric sex” in his 1966 collection of stories, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,
which was the basis for A Christmas Story.
Shepherd’s narrator explains that his old man won the lamp by completing a series of newspaper puzzles sponsored by a pop company whose name was some sort of “play on words involving
a lady’s knee.”
Shepherd was alluding to Nehi (pronounced knee-high) Cola, a popular fruit-flavored drink of the ’40s, which even had a print advertisement depicting a cola bottle beside, you guessed it, a women’s leg, from
the heel to just above the knee.
The job of immortalizing Shepherd’s vision for the lamp on film went to A Christmas Story production designer Reuben Freed. He says Shepherd and director Bob Clark approved his design after one quick sketch.
“I
immediately thought of something I had seen in my mother’s front room, which was sort of a gold-colored silk lampshade, pleated with fringe all around it,” Freed recalls. “I thought of it immediately and never thought of anything
else — just that classic, big ugly shape.”
