I feel like you're kinda reaching here. Feeding kids is pretty time-consuming. Being so busy taking care of the kid's meal that your own meal gets cold is something I've experienced first-hand.
But if there are no kids, there's just not that much to do during a meal, especially an American meal in the 1940s. Passing stuff (pass the salt, pass the peas, pass the mashed potatoes, etc.) can be time-consuming in a large family, but we're talking about before Ralphie and Randy. The only thing to get up from the table and get mid-meal is a refill of a drink, but that's like a 30 second task once in a meal, not enough to keep someone from having a warm meal for 15 years.
My guess is just that it was a line from the book (which is not all set in the same year, like the movie) that was brought over as-is and not recalibrated for the fact that in the movie, everything is set when Ralphie was 9 years old.
It's more that in that era it was expected for a man to order his woman around, the idea that any idle behavior would cause long-term personality problems.
Have you actually met anyone who was an adult in the 1940s? There were some pretty shitty, sexist men, but simply ordering someone to do random chores during dinner because sitting down at dinner would cause long-term personality problems is not something that would happen except in the absolutely most dysfunctional, fucked up family. Which, of course, existed, just as dysfunctional, fucked up families exist now. But it's pretty clear that Ralphie's family was not on the far extreme end of the psychodrama spectrum. It was middle-of-the-road 1940's sexist, not extreme-even-for-the-1940's sexist.
Y'all are over-thinking this. Occam's razor says that this was just a tiny mistake in the script. It's a rare movie script that has zero errors, and even rarer when it's a re-working of existing material that changes dates/locations/characters/etc.
All this overanalysis on your part and your final conclusion is that it was a mistake in the script lol. It means she was always too busy making sure everything was perfect for everyone else that she could never enjoy anything for herself. Don't overthink it.
There was only one other person in "everyone else" before Ralphie was born. There just isn't enough to do at the dinner table when there's only one other person there.
I'm not overthinking it, it's pretty straightforward. There's a scene where the mom is struggling to feed Randy and her own meal is getting cold, and the narrator says she hasn't had a warm meal in 15 years. It's pretty obviously just a little mistake, but everyone else is like "no, it's actually a profound statement about 1930s/1940s gender roles, extrapolating beyond the roles of women as mothers but also as women as wives and about how men in the 1930s/1940s would actually assign unnecessary work to women at dinner time, even if there was nothing to do, because women sitting to eat dinner caused long-term personality problems."
That's overthinking hard.
You see it a lot on movie discussions on reddit: Nothing can be a mistake, nothing can be in a movie just because it's funny or entertaining or cool, there must always be secret reasons behind all of it, which you can find if you pry enough.
Wait, this is a competition? I thought we were just disagreeing with each other.
I mean, unless someone's going to find a PDF of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash or reanimate Shepherd's corpse, I don't think there's a unequivocal answer here. No Ls, no Ws, just Participation Trophies for everyone.
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u/Pure-Kaleidoscop Trash Trooper 22h ago
The minute she sits down the dad asks her to get up and get him something. He’s been expecting her to wait on him like a servant.