‘Home Alone 2’s Turtle Dove Was A Bulls**t Gift

It’s been 30 whole years since the release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the beloved comedy about the importance of family, Christmas, credit card fraud, attempted murder, and American Airlines’ gross incompetence. There’s a lot about the movie that seems pretty weird in hindsight, not the least of which is how a motion picture featuring both Donald Trump and Rob Schneider is somehow still completely watchable.

But we have another nit to pick with Home Alone 2 – even aside from how it tricked a generation of kids into desperately wanting a toy that didn’t actually exist. We all remember how Kevin befriended a stranger in Central Park and even went back to her Carnegie Hall-adjacent hovel to chat about life, thus teaching kids a valuable lesson: always implicitly trust strangers you meet in Central Park. 

Luckily, she turns out to be an emotionally-damaged but super-nice person, and later she even saves Kevin’s life from the Wet Sticky Bandits with the help of a trusty flock of pigeons which, in our headcanon, she controls telepathically. 

So to thank this kind-hearted, unhoused friend, Kevin gifts her … half of a Christmas ornament. Yup, he gives her one of the two turtle doves so that they’ll always be friends. Then he … heads back to his luxury suite at the Plaza Hotel while she spends the rest of Christmas day in a goddamn freezing cold park. 

Look, it’s a nice sentiment, Kevin, but you also could have brought her, I don’t know, some food? Or, at the very least, invited her back to the hotel, at which point, you’d think Peter “I’m flush with mob money” McCallister could perhaps cut her a check for helping ensure that his son wasn’t gunned down by a pair of filthy burglars on Christmas Eve while he took a “World’s Worst Parent” victory lap.

Not to mention that, of all the things this rich kid could have given his impoverished pal, he picks something he literally got for free. Yeah, Kevin didn’t even buy those turtle doves, they were a bonus gift from the toy store because he blew so much dough on random crap and donated some of his disposable cash to other needy people who definitely didn’t ever save him from being murdered. 

As further evidence that Kevin didn’t give two craps about the fate of the pigeon lady, he never even bothered to learn her real name – and she’s literally just billed as “Pigeon Lady” in the end credits. Which seems unnecessarily cruel. 

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