Awesome / A Christmas Story

• Ralphie finally snapping and delivering a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Scut Farkus.
  • Grover, Scut's cruel shrimp of a sidekick, foolishly tries to talk sense into the enraged Ralphie. He gets shoved to the ground for his trouble. Grover then prudently runs for the hills before Ralphie moves on to him.
  • Ralphie's mom hiding the truth from his dad is combined Awesome and Heartwarming.
  • The stage show adds a perfect capper after Flick has spent most of the show complaining about his "sore arm" from all the times Farkus has beaten him up.
    Schwartz: Hey... isn't this your sore arm?
    Flick: Yeah. But it just started feeling better!
  • The sequel, My Summer Story, reveals that Scut was demoted to "bully, second class" after the incident, with another, more benign bully named Lug who uses tops for dominance as opposed to physical violence taking his position, with Scut and Grover becoming his long-suffering toadies.
  • In the Alternate Continuity presented by A Christmas Story Christmas, we discover that the beating he took that day made Scut rethink his ways and become a Reformed Bully, eventually joining the Hohman Police Department in adulthood and bailing Ralphie out of some pretty serious trouble.^note In Shepherd's original telling, Scut was the top-wielding bully with no "Lug" to be seen, so neither possibility is necessarily more "canon" than the other.
• Mrs. Parker breaking the lamp and then telling the Old Man off about it.
  Mrs. Parker: That thing is the UGLIEST lamp I have ever seen in MY ENTIRE LIFE!
  • What's even more awesome is that even after the "Battle of the Lamp", both Mrs. Parker and the Old Man buried the hatchet and went on with their lives together.
  • In the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (which parts of this film are taken from), Ralphie remembers his parents actually sharing a laugh over the whole thing sometime later.
• One exclusive to the stage show for Ralphie's classmate Helen (whom, as Ralph mentions in his narration, all the boys respect and are frankly a little afraid of). When Scut Farkus is chasing Schwartz and Flick through the neighborhood, he bumps into Helen and Esther Jane. He stares them down for a moment... and Helen stares right back, crossing her arms as if daring him to move any closer. He promptly gets out of the way and politely tips his hat, letting the girls go without any hassle.
• Another combined Heartwarming one, the reveal that the Old Man, despite Ralphie never going to him about the Red Ryder and spending the whole film seeming a bit aloof from his family, actually was paying attention to what his son wanted and even goes to the trouble of making a huge event out of giving it to him, even hiding it from his wife.
• A minor example, but when Ralphie accidentally crushes his glasses (due to them getting knocked off his face after being hit in the face by a rebounding BB), he immediately hatches a plan to act like he got hit in the face by an icicle falling from the roof, and it works.
  • It doesn't in all versions but it's Christmas and his parents were thankful that only his glasses were broken so they cut him some slack. (Which gives them the awesome point.)

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