My dad loved Christmas Vacation more than most people. By that I mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than most people do. But I also mean he loved Christmas Vacation more than he loved most people. (Ok, I stole that joke from Homestar Runner. Sue me. Please don’t.)

For two hours each December, my dad didn’t have to be stoic or driven. He could simply laugh. And I’d cozy up beside him, tucked into the big calico couch in the basement and furtively watch him roll and roll at the slapstick. Literally wipe his eyes at Clark sliding down a collapsing ladder or the squirrel launching out of the Christmas tree. I’d watch his face relax and now, it occurs to me that maybe Clark’s well intended buffoonery made him go a little easier on himself.

At a glance, Clark Griswold and my dad could not have been more dissimilar men. My dad was confident and stubborn, mostly serious back then and always larger than life. He snow-shoed and winter-camped in Canada, built cabins with his bare hands and hitchhiked to California at 17; slept on the beach and ate loaves of bread for meals when his parents refused to wire him a single dollar. My dad was an adventurer, a perfectionist, an unrelenting worker, a wandering soul chained to domestic responsibility. From my four-foot, twelve year old vantage point, he was Right about everything – unquestionably Right. From this age, I can understand that he may not have seen himself – as a husband and father - with the same unwavering certainty. His plumbing business was slow to take off in those early years and we lived frugally. When they took a chance and moved back to Minnesota from Denver, they bought for a song three acres of land on a small town river and he built our house as we could afford it. The first spring and summer and fall, we lived in a tiny camper trailer behind the framed in split-level. Three kids and a wife, each getting ready for their day in a six by twelve foot tin can. That first winter, we moved in by the time the snow came, but it was still all cement and sheetrock and dry wall. My mom helped us string popcorn and cranberries for the tree that we harvested from the untamed backyard and my dad sprung for a string of tiny white lights from Pamida. That year, I started the tradition of sleeping at the foot of the lit tree at least once before Christmas. 24 years later, and I’ve never had a prettier tree than the one that rose up from hand me down clothes and roughed in bathrooms and no beds.

Those were the first years he tilled and planted the enormous garden that feeds us still. But maybe he didn’t see how worthy that was. This food producing and building of homes alone, from scratch like a super hero. Maybe he saw instead our faces the year he gave us too small, brown velour Carhart jackets from Fleet Farm. Picture the scoffing, snotty preteen hearts of my sister and me as we held up these clearance rack, boys jackets that came to our waists and forearms. This was Christmas, we thought? With such horrible ingratitude. And you could see the confusion on his face. They were new and warm, practical and soft – why weren’t we thrilled? Or how about the Christmas he bought us matching white baseball caps – thin as onion skin. Mine was emblazoned with the British flag and my sister’s said “Damn I’m Good.” It’s debatable which makes less sense for a child. Looking back, they still make me laugh and laugh.

My father wasn’t raised as a priority. Four sons and his parents fed themselves first if times were tight. Maybe we wore clothes from garage sales instead of from the Gap, but my dad never slowed from working for us until we were long past needing it. He put us through college and paid for summer camp and band lessons and I didn’t have the first damn idea of the stress those bills must have cost him. Still every year at Christmas – even as we adults promise over and over not to exchange gifts – he puts in hours at the mall, finding us each the perfect gift and wrapping it personally, all thumbs and lumpy corners. Wrapping as he has lived – getting the most important things right even if no one ever taught him how to do it all perfectly. Here’s the thing Christmas Vacation taught me this year: My father did the absolute best he could for us - and Clark Griswold’s all-too-human fumbling maybe reassured him that he’d done well enough. I love the movie for both reasons.