“Ah, there it is,” the adult Ralphie intones in the opening scene of the holiday staple A Christmas Story. “My old house. How could I ever forget it?” Narrator Jean Shepherd, the author whose stories inspired the film, imbues the lines with innocent warmth. Matched with the sumptuous version of “Deck the Halls” that opens the movie, this beginning sets the stage for a nostalgic look at an innocent time in a WASP American boy’s life.
So sweet, so welcoming is the music and narration that we almost fail to realize what, exactly, we’re looking at. Accompanying the words and music is not some Hallmark-ready house, with perfectly ordered rooms, a clean street outside, and pure, white snow in the back. Rather the movie opens on a broken-down car surrounded by trash, with the establishing shot panning past a rickety fence to a regular middle-class home (well, regular in 1940, anyway) cramped together on a small-town street.
Is it nice? Sure! Especially today, it’s impossible to imagine that a single-income family of four could afford such a spot, even in a nondescript locale like northern Indiana. But is it perfect? No, of course not, especially when we see the inside the house, with its cramped rooms, constant drafts, and unreliable furnace. The very fact that we forget the imperfections of the scene testifies to the magic of A Christmas Story.
A Black Christmas Story
A Christmas Story released in Nov. 18, 1983. That’s 17 years after the publication of Shepherd’s short story collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, and more than 40 years after the movie’s setting. Even though the film earned praise from critics at the time, it didn’t become a standard in most holiday movie-lovers’ minds until Turner Broadcasting began showing it regularly in the 1990s, culminating in the first “24 Hours of A Christmas Story” marathon in 1997.
