“Ah, that’s it,” adult Ralphie intones in the opening scene of the holiday staple. A Christmas story. “My old house. How could I ever forget him? Narrator Jean Shepherd, the author whose stories inspired the film, imbues the lines with an innocent warmth. Paired with the sumptuous version of “Deck the Halls” that opens the film, this beginning sets the stage for a nostalgic look at an innocent period in the life of an American WASP boy.

The music and narration are so gentle and inviting that we almost don’t realize what exactly we’re watching. The words and music are not accompanied by a Hallmark-worthy house, with perfectly ordered rooms, a clean street outside, and pure white snow in the back. The film instead opens with a broken down car surrounded by trash, with the long shot moving past a rickety fence to an ordinary middle-class house (well, regular in 1940, anyway) at the ‘narrow on a street in a small town.

Is it nice? Of course! Especially today, it’s impossible to imagine that a family of four on one income could afford such a place, even in a nondescript area like northern Indiana. But is it perfect? No, of course not, especially when you see the inside of the house, with its cramped rooms, constant drafts and unreliable boiler. 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 on November 18, 1983. This is 17 years after the publication of Shepherd’s short story collection, We trust in God: everyone else pays in cashand more than 40 years after the film was shot. Although the film received critical acclaim at the time, it did not become a standard in the minds of most holiday moviegoers until Turner Broadcasting began airing it regularly in the 1990s. 1990, culminating with the first “24 Hours of A Christmas storymarathon in 1997.