Father wants to teach the children about materialism. They're stuck in a mountain cabin on Christmas Eve with no presents or anything. It ends up all being OK, because a homeless squatter manages to break in to other unoccupied, but well stocked cabins in order to steal "rich people"'s personal belongings to give as gifts to the children. So, happy ending is a thief disguises himself as Santa Claus and saves the day by providing a wonderful Christmas to all- wait what happened to the "materialism"? I guess the moral is, if you can't afford gifts for Christmas, steal them from rich people. The park ranger allows the squatter to make himself at home in any of the cabins because he's "a harmless old man". Didn't he just steal things from a bunch of different cabins? If a park ranger let some homeless thief sleep in a cabin I owned I'd be livid.
Review of The Christmas Story
