Summary
The play is a disaster. No one is learning their lines or any of the songs, and Mrs. Norton keeps adding new characters and scenes right before the play is supposed to premiere. She even brings in a first-grader to play Toto, Dorothy's dog. The good news is that the tree costumes will finally get armholes after one of the kids playing a tree trips in one and break his tooth.
But on opening night of the play, there's trouble. Rodrick has come with a video camera to film Greg while he's singing. Rodney James gets stage fright and has to be carried off in his shrub costume, and the kid playing Toto reads comic books on stage the whole time. Manny even shouts Bubby at Greg, so Greg has to deflect and make it sound like that's Archie Kelly's nickname. But the worst part comes when the trees have to sing their song together.
Greg refuses to sing, and all the other trees stop singing too. Instead, Greg gets them all to start throwing apples at Patty who is peeking out from backstage, and they end up breaking her glasses. That's the end of the play, and Greg's mom is pretty mad. The next day in school, Archie Kelly is getting bullied for his nickname, Bubby.
With Christmas coming around, Greg talks about how Rodrick only asks for new drums, while Manny has a giant list. Greg splits the difference and just asks for a few things so he can be sure he'll get what he wants. He talks about a previous Christmas when Uncle Charlie got him a Barbie doll, which was a divisive topic amongst his parents. Greg's dad wanted him to return it, but his mom wanted Greg to explore and not be constrained by gender roles. Greg did play with it, and ended up in the hospital with a Barbie shoe stuck in his nose. Greg also talks about the gift his mom buys every year for someone through the charity the Giving Tree. This year, Greg's mom bought the Giving Tree guy a red sweater, which Greg thought was a disappointing gift to receive.
On Christmas day, Manny gets every single toy he asked for, but Greg just gets books and socks. The worst gift he gets is a book of Lil Cutie comics, the worst comic in the newspaper, from Rodrick. Greg is hopeful when Uncle Charlie comes over since Uncle Charlie always has good gifts, but this year he just gives Greg a picture of himself. So Greg takes a few minutes to sit alone in his room, but is quickly interrupted when he dad comes to get him. They go out to the garage together and Greg sees a weight lifting set. His dad is obviously excited, but Greg doesn't have the heart to tell him that he lost interest in weight training when the wrestling unit ended.
Greg sits by the tree later in the day feeling sorry for himself when his mom comes with an extra present from Santa. Greg hopes its the video game Twisted Wizard, but it ends up being a big wool sweater. Greg is confused, but so is his mom. She did buy him a video game, but realizes she got Greg's and the Giving Tree guy's gifts mixed up. Greg thinks the Giving Tree guy was probably pretty upset to receive the video game too.
Greg goes over to Rowley's house and gives him the Lil Cutie book since he realizes he forgot to buy Rowley a gift. Rowley loves it. Since Rowley's parents have a lot of money, they get Rowley a lot of cool gifts, and this year they got Rowley a Big Wheel and Twisted Wizard. At least Greg gets to play it at Rowley's house.
On New Year's Eve, Greg gets grounded after he plays with Manny and drops a little ball of yarn into his brother's throat. Manny goes running to their mom and tells her what happened, and Greg ends up getting put in his room for the night at 7 PM, not allowed to watch the New Year's Eve special on TV. He makes a New Year's resolution never to play with Manny again.
Analysis
Part of what makes Diary of a Wimpy Kid so funny is that Greg is not the only person in this universe who seems bored and annoyed with all the middle school stuff. Mrs. Norton's production of Wizard of Oz is a good example of this. The kid who plays a shrub is always playing video games on the side of his stage since he doesn't have any lines, and the first grader who Mrs. Norton brings in to play the dog Toto sits on the stage with a pile of comic books for the whole play. It's a hilarious mess.
Maybe it's good to see Greg surrounded by other boys kind of like him, because these scenes during the play show us his worst side while also suggesting that other boys his age have the same struggles. After all, this is when Greg gets the other trees on stage to start throwing apples at Patty Farrell, which breaks her glasses. Greg starts it to get revenge on Patty for telling their geography teacher to cover up a map of the US so he couldn't cheat on a test, but the other kids just join in for fun.
During the play, we also get a taste of one of Greg's bad impulses that will really come back to bite him later. Greg is so deathly afraid of other kids in the school hearing his little brother Manny call him "Bubby" that he makes it seem like Manny was shouting "Bubby" at Archie Kelly. Archie ends up getting bullied for the nickname the next day in school. Greg is so terrified of anything bad happening to him, but he'll gladly make someone else's life worse to minimize any stress for himself.
We see Greg's self-centeredness really come out on Christmas Day, as he sulks when he doesn't get any of the presents he wanted and proves ungrateful when his dad gets him the weight set that he begged his parents for just a month earlier. But this is relatable, and Kinney isn't really trying to make Greg a totally insufferable brat. With these Christmas scenes, Diary of a Wimpy Kid starts to resemble the 1983 comedy film A Christmas Story, another tale of weird family dynamics and getting the wrong presents.
It's hard to say if Kinney was at all inspired by A Christmas Story when writing these scenes, but something that Sam Kashner said in his Vanity Fair article about the movie rings true for Diary of a Wimpy Kid too, and maybe helps us understand this Christmas part a little better. Kashner writes that A Christmas Story was a movie "That acknowledged—even relished—the 'unbridled avarice,' the commercialism, the disappointments, the hurt feelings, and all-around bad luck that, in reality, often define the merry season. In other words, what real Christmas was like in real families." And the Christmas in Diary of a Wimpy Kid seems to speak to what Christmas is like in real families too, complete with the weird uncle and the older brother who only buys joke presents.
A big part of the appeal of not just Greg as an anti-hero but this whole book is that we're constantly seeing a comic refraction of the kind of life we recognize. The characters in Diary of a Wimpy Kid have their flaws, and this family might not have the perfect Christmas, but you can imagine this is something that rings true and even proves comforting for all the other angsty middle schoolers reading this book.
