Home Alone is about how 8-year-old Kevin (brilliantly played by Macaulay Culkin) gets left behind when his rather dysfunctional family leaves for a Christmas vacation in France. And if being left alone was not enough, Kevin has to protect his house from a pair of incompetent burglars.
What most of us remember is Kevin’s ingenious defence of his home with the kind of violence more commonly associated with cartoons. Yet there are deeper issues in the film. Take the title Home Alone: the friendliest word in the English language attached to one of its most unfriendly adjectives.
The fact is that Kevin’s family are not nice either to each other or to him. His first reaction on finding that there is no one else at home is to look straight into the camera and with a triumphant smirk say, ‘I made my family disappear!’ This Christmas there will be many people who look around at their parents, relatives or even children and wish they could say the same. Families aren’t always fun.
However, it soon turns out that although Kevin spends quite a bit of time enjoying his new freedom and doing all the things that he is not supposed to do, he misses his family.
At the start of the Bible God announces, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’ That principle is even truer when applied to an 8-year-old boy.
Yet partly through interacting in a church with a gruff old neighbour, Kevin reverses his wish for solitude and, with the burglars spectacularly vanquished, his family reappears.
Because our culture has pushed away the ‘true reason for the season’, we find that ‘the family’ has often come to replace the Christ Child at the core of the festivities. Although nothing should get in the way of what Christmas is really all about, as Kevin and his parents and siblings come to realise, families are important. This Christmas let’s do what we can to bring our family together, and think, too, about those around us who are not of any family and include them in our celebrations.
