Every now and again there’s a topic on the Internet that will go viral more than once. This time, the winner winner chicken dinner is the fact Home Alone mom Catherine O’Hara was only 36 when she appeared as Kevin McCallister’s mom in what would become one of the best movies of the 1990s. This is not the first time this movie factoid has gone viral, but it is the first time it is hitting me like a ton of bricks.
Here’s the gist: many years around the Christmas holiday a tweet will mention that O’Hara was 36 at the time Home Alone was filming. It’s been 34 years since the movie came out and O’Hara is now 70, but the point stands; she was a pretty young mom to have a daughter who was 15, a kid in middle school, and five kids in total, but times were different then. (Though there are some similar families today.)
It wasn't so long ago O’Hara and Macaulay Culkin went viral when they reunited during his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony. The moment went viral, and of course people started talking about the Home Alone mom again. Then, Buzzfeed recently put together a list comparing celebrities at age 36 based on the viral moment between the famous movie mother and her famous movie son (who is now 43–aka seven years older than O’Hara was when the flick filmed). But I’m having my own personal meltdown in regards to the topic.
This time, when reading this hot fact I am actually 36 years old. I have done some things in my life that are very grown-up, like paying off student loan debt and landing a mortgage. But I’m not anywhere near the grown-up with multiple children to watch or assets worthy of stealing in a Chicago suburb Mrs. McCallister is. I certainly don’t spend Christmas in Paris. And while jokes can be made about how she literally was such a negligent parent she left her kid at home whilst hiring a car service to travel to her vacation, otherwise, I am so miles apart from this reality this movie realization has been quite the sobering thought for me.
I’m not alone. I’ve, in fact, taken solace in myriad videos on this exact topic. This one really gets to the germ of how I'm feeling at this exact moment.
@bobdank69 ♬ Home Alone – Main Theme - John Williams
Or this one that uses Millennial fan-favorite series Brooklyn Nine-Nine to discuss how I’m feeling. (RIP Andre Braugher.)
@bsprad ♬ original sound - Blaine
When Culkin and O’Hara reunited, she wrote about her negligence as a movie mother, telling the actor:
Macaulay, congratulations. You so deserve your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And thank you for including me, your fake mom who left you home alone not once but twice, to share in this happy occasion. I'm so proud of you.
While she may have not have been mom of the year, Catherine O’Hara is certainly an icon outside of her work in Home Alone and has cemented herself as a comedy legend in roles as varied as leading the Schitt’s Creek cast and starring in many Christopher Guest projects. But even with her large oeuvre, it’s gonna be this hot fact I will think of forever, kind of similar to how I only remember that one kid in high school who never swapped out their gym socks because they never swapped out their gym socks. It's the one thing that sticks with me years later. My apologies to O'Hara, who has said many, many funny things in her life.
