I was ten years old — just about Ralphie’s age, in fact — when A Christmas Story was released in 1983. Every so often, a Christmas movie comes along that connects with an entire generation (sometimes more than one) and encompasses the spirit of the holidays. Previous generations had A Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Meet me in St. Louis. When I was little, I looked forward to watching the Rankin/Bass stop-motion specials Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which were almost always followed by How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

But there was something about A Christmas Story that appealed not only to children, but adults alike. Based on stories by the inimitable Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story was a film that kids and parents could both relate to. The film has not only become a seasonal mainstay (often shown 24 hours in a row on multiple cable channels every Christmas Day), but permeated our lives. Who hasn’t uttered the phrase “you’ll shoot your eye out!” or intentionally mispronounced the word “fragilé” (at which point anyone within earshot must immediately respond with, “must be Italian.”)

And while the film is rooted in Ralphie’s desire to own a Red Ryder BB gun, there is another object that appears within the film that is so iconic and so deeply connected to A Christmas Story that the two are inseparable: Old Man Parker’s “major award,” the infamous leg lamp. The lamp, described by Ralphie as “the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window,” quickly becomes a point of contention between Ralphie’s parents in the film. Everything from the lamp’s shape to it’s eventual fate is burned into my mind.

Which is why when I learned someone was installing a 50′ tall leg lamp less than an hour away from our house, I had to go see it.

For what it’s worth, this was not our first time at visiting something related to the film. In 2013 while on our way to Niagara Falls, we stopped at the Christmas Story house in Cleveland, Ohio. This was the house used for the exterior shots in the film, although since then the interior has been retrofitted to exactly match the film as well. It’s also full of props and completely hands on, meaning kids can hide under the kitchen sink like Ralphie’s brother, use a plastic decoder to unscramble messages in the bathroom, and pose next to the Parker’s Christmas tree. Oh, and of course, they have one of “those” in the front window.

Last week over Thanksgiving, we heard that Chickasha had installed their own inflatable leg lamp at the corner of First and Main. Not only did this sound amazing, but Chickasha is a lot closer than Cleveland! Saturday morning, two days after Thanksgiving, Susan and I decided to drive out and see it for ourselves. When we arrived, this is what we found:

“Fra-gee-lay,” I said slowly, careful to use three syllables to pronounce the word.

“Must be Italian,” Susan replied.

All joking aside, we were a bit confused. I had already seen pictures of the leg lamp showering Chickasha with its soft glow of electric sex, and didn’t understand why the lamp was only now being installed. Later in the day we would learn that the custom inflatable had only been guaranteed for up to 20mph winds and had suffered a tear, forcing it to be deflated and patched. Somehow, by chance, we had stumbled on the leg’s second debut.

Approximately eight men pulled the majorly deflated award from a box truck and positioned it atop the mock shipping box. The box, we would learn, is 10′ tall; the lamp, another 40′. Standing downwind on a nearby sidewalk, we heard someone say that they had replaced a smaller blower to a larger one. As the motor fired up, ropes were attached to the lamp in various places.

In between all the brainstorming and rope tying, the men occasionally took short breaks to stare in our direction. I’m sure they hadn’t expected two spectators armed with multiple cameras to be on hand to document the event. Then again, we hadn’t planned on witnessing it.

After twenty minutes had passed, another tear was discovered in the lamp. One of the men (we weren’t sure if he drew the longest straw or the shortest one) was hoisted up atop a small forklift to patch the hole. The man’s attempt to repair the damaged lamp was more successful than Old Man Parker’s in the film.

It soon became clear that the blower would not be powerful enough to completely hoist the lamp. Tall stepladders were propped underneath to support the lamp while the forklift was again leveraged, this time to further elevate the lamp. Finally, the pre-attached ropes were used to raise the lamp.

As the anchor ropes were secured to nearby buildings, one of the men came over to talk to us. That man turned out to be Jim Cowan, the Economic Development Director for the city of Chickasha. Mr. Cowan, former general manager and owner of the Bricktown Brewery for almost two decades, informed us that the lamp is intended to be a unique landmark that drives people to Chickasha. While we spoke, Cowan pointed out several nearby businesses that had either just opened or were in the process of opening. During his time at the Brewery Cowan served as the Director of the Bricktown Association for three years, and knows a thing or two about revitalizing old sections of town.

The moment the lamp was finally vertical, Susan and I temporarily put down our phones to cheer and applaud. The men clapped as well. “It’s a major award!” I shouted, holding two thumbs up. I’m sure they’ll get tired of hearing that soon enough.

I don’t know how long they are planning to keep the leg lamp up, or how it will fare in Oklahoma’s winds. I don’t know if people will drive to Chickasha just to see it, or if they will stay for a cup of coffee or a meal.

What I do know is that there’s something magical about taking a selfie while standing in front of a 50′ tall leg lamp. I had the same gleam in my eye that Ralphie had as he ran his hand along the side of that plastic leg. The glow of electric sex is underrated.

My earliest memory of Pat Deckard involves eating French toast in her kitchen. I was seven, maybe eight years old at the time, and it must have been the morning after a sleepover. The Deckards had a back garage separate from their house where anywhere from three to eight boys from the neighborhood would have slumber parties. We slept on old mattresses with metal coils exposed, too dirty for dogs to lie on, and huddled around space heaters to keep us from freezing to death when the temperature dropped. The following morning, cold and hungry, we would go inside the house to warm up and eat breakfast. The funny thing is, the Deckard’s back garage sat directly between their house and ours, so it would have been just as easy for me to walk home and eat breakfast there. But Pat Deckard’s specialties were French toast with too much powdered sugar and cinnamon toast with too much cinnamon sugar, so we ate breakfast there instead.

My parents bought their house in Sun Valley in 1978, which is when we became the Deckards’ next door neighbors. There was Pat and her husband Johnny, and three boys: Jeff, Greg, and Doug. Doug, the youngest of the clan, was a year older than I was. (I was four years old; he was five.) Between the three Deckard boys next door and the four Roarks boys across the street, there was always a game of football or baseball or backyard golf going on.

Pat Deckard worked as a realtor in Yukon for fifty years. When you’re a realtor in a small town for half a century, I can’t imagine there aren’t too many people you haven’t run into. There was a time when you couldn’t drive through a neighborhood in Yukon without seeing Pat Deckard’s name attached to a metal “FOR SALE” realtor sign sticking in someone’s front yard. Most of Yukon has seen Pat’s name on a sign or her face in a newspaper ad. If you dropped Pat’s name in conversation to a local stranger, there’s a pretty good chance they either knew her or one of her boys, had bought a house from her, or had received a pumpkin from her.

Yeah, about those pumpkins. Pat used to hand paint faces on pumpkins and deliver them to her former clients around Halloween. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins here. Each October for many years, Susan and I would wake up to find a pumpkin (sometimes two) sitting outside on our porch or our mailbox. I believe in later years Pat’s grandkids helped paint the pumpkins. I never once caught her delivering our pumpkin. Each year we would just wake up one fall day, find a pumpkin outside our house, and know Pat had been there.

Sun Valley ended up with more of those pumpkins than any other neighborhood. Pat Deckard was the matriarch of Sun Valley. For as long as I can remember, Pat organized Sun Valley’s annual Neighborhood Garage Sale. Years (decades?) before neighborhood garage sales were common, Sun Valley hosted its own. Pat took care of the advertising and the permit. One weekend every April, the residents of Sun Valley would host garage sales and people would flock to the neighborhood like you wouldn’t believe. Garage Sale Day hasn’t been as popular lately due to competing neighborhood sales, but as anyone who lived in Sun Valley in the 1980s can attest, there were years were getting in or out of the neighborhood — or simply driving down the street — was nearly impossible. All day long, both sides of every street were lined with parked cars, with just enough room for a third to squeeze through the middle.

Garage Sale Day wasn’t just about all the fun things you bought. It was about seeing the people in the neighborhood. In the early years, it was about running into your neighbors, whether they were out shopping or hosting their own sale. In later years, it’s become more about running into people who used to live in Sun Valley. And sooner or later on Garage Sale Day, we would always run into Pat Deckard. Sometimes she would just be checking in on people to see how things were going and sometimes she would be out shopping, but she was always out and about. And the best thing was, somehow Pat knew what everybody was selling and what everybody wanted to buy, so if you ran across her, she would point you to something you wanted.

“Robbie,” she once said to me, “I know you guys are looking for a couch. There is one for sale three blocks over, and it is awesome.” For the record, “awesome” was Pat Deckard’s favorite word. I’m not sure I had a single conversation with her where she didn’t utter it at least once.

As I got older I found out knowing Pat Deckard as an adult was even better than knowing her as a kid. She and I were both thrifters, and more than once she called me with a tip. She once called me to let me know about an upcoming estate sale that was selling a couple of arcade games. “I was over there today and saw the machines,” she told me over the phone, “and they are awesome.” (I went to the sale, and bought both machines.) One time, Pat asked me to stop by her house and take a look at her computer. Before I could leave, she had dragged me out to the back garage to show me some Star Wars cups and glasses she had won at an auction, which she ended up giving to me.

I have a million stories about Pat Deckard, but I’ll leave you with this one. My son Mason was born in December of 2001, just two months after Pat’s husband, Johnny, passed away. On Mason’s first Halloween, we dressed him up in something and drove around to show him off to friends and family. The next year, Mason was walking and a bit more into Halloween. That year he wore a Tigger costume, and again we drove him around to half a dozen people’s houses to show him off and let him trick-or-treat. One of the last houses we stopped at that night was Pat Deckard’s. Pat invited us inside, and the four of us sat around talking. Pat showed Susan her coffin — she had a coffin that was lined with cowhide, fur and leather that sat in her living room and doubled as a coffee table for a while. I think that was the night Susan and Pat bonded. Susan used to call Pat Deckard a “spice of life,” one of those people who just made life more interesting. Before we left that night, Pat told us it had been a slow night for trick-or-treaters and proceeded to dump her gigantic bowl of Reese’s peanut butter cups into Mason’s bag. I think Mason bonded with Pat Deckard that night, too.

“Mason, I love your Tigger costume,” said Pat. “That is awesome.”

Pat Deckard was a spice of life.

Pat Deckard was awesome.

“I’m getting a generator today,” Susan announced Thursday morning.

“Baby, there’s not a generator for sale within a hundred miles,” I replied.

We were both right. As I was gathering all our dead electronics into a single pile to take to work so I could recharge them, Susan was searching for generators online. As the stack of drained laptops, phones, flashlights, and other devices grew, I could tell they wouldn’t all fit in my backpack. Instead, I grabbed a suitcase from under the bed and began stacking the devices neatly inside.

“I found a generator,” said Susan. “And paid for it. Now I just have to go pick it up.”

“But, I thought they–”

“In Denton, Texas,” she replied.

The Home Depot in Denton, Texas is 220 miles from my house. The generator they had in stock was bigger, more expensive, and had more bells and whistles than what we needed. That being said, it was in stock, and now it was ours. We just had to go pick it up.

“You go to work,” said Susan. “Charge all the things. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

And so I did go to work to charge all the things, and Susan returned home around 4:30 p.m. with a 200+ pound DeWalt generator in the back of her car. Mason, who has been staying with a friend while we’ve been without power, came home to give me a hand. My next door neighbor saw us working on it, and also came over to help. It took about an hour to get it assembled, oil and fuel added, and the whole thing up and running.

The first thing we hooked up was our home’s heater. We have a gas heater, so all that needed to be connected was the blower motor in the attic. We ran a heavy duty extension cord down the attic ladder out into the backyard, plugged it in, and the heater fired right up!

The next thing we plugged in was our refrigerator. The minute I connected it, the lights on the front of the fridge flashed and the ice maker began to make noise. Ultimately we lost everything in the refrigerator and freezer, but it would be nice to have it running again. Two for two!

Then I plugged the third extension cord into the generator and connected it to a power strip with only a lamp plugged into it. When I did, the entire house lit up. My first thought was, that’s some lamp!, and then I realized it wasn’t just the lamp that was lit up. Every light in the house came on at exactly the same time. I thought Susan had done something, she thought I had done something, and it took us about ten seconds to realize the power had just come back on.

Just to recap: Susan drove to Texas, paid a thousand dollars for a generator, and brought it back to Oklahoma. After getting the generator running, we connected two things two it. While connecting the third, our power was restored.

Buying a generator is a lot like fixing a hole in your roof. It’s no fun to fix when it’s raining, and there’s no motivation to fix it when it’s not. We’ve talked about buying a generator for years, but it’s tough to justify the money when there’s no emergency, and when there is an emergency, there aren’t any available. The next time power goes out for an extended period of time we’ll be ready, and if that doesn’t happen anytime soon, I’m okay with that, too.

If any of our local friends are cold or need things recharged, please let me know. I am off work today and will be working around the house, getting things back to normal.