“You’ll shoot your eye out kid!”

We’re all familiar with the classic tale of Ralphie Parker and his ineffable desire for the gift he wants more than anything in the whole entire world… “an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time.” If only the adults in his life believed he could handle it!

Growing up in the 1940′s isn’t easy for a kid Ralphie’s age.  He’s being harassed by bullies on his way home from school, his best friend Flick’s tongue is stuck to a flag pole, his Aunt Clara sent him some stupid pink bunny feety pajamas that his mom is forcing him to wear, and the neighbor’s dumb dogs demolished his family’s Christmas turkey – now, they’re sitting in a Chinese restaurant listening to the employees singing “Fa ra ra”.  And on top of it all, he got soap in the mouth for dropping the F-bomb.  This is like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Life. Couldn’t. Be. Worse.

But that BB gun…  oh, that oiled blue steel beauty…  how could anyone be discontented with their life with that gorgeous hunk of metal just waiting to have its trigger pulled over and over and over again?!  Thankfully, the old man (Darren McGavin) was a bit sneaky.  Thankfully, he understood the importance of a boy’s first BB gun. Thankfully, despite his mother’s reservations, Ralphie’s dad bought, wrapped & placed that gun under the Christmas tree for Ralphie to feast his eyes on when he opened it Christmas morning… and feast he did friends, and feast he did.

With a perfect cast and probably the best narration I’ve ever heard, this movie is as classic as Sinatra. If you call yourself an American and you haven’t seen this yet, shame on you.  A Christmas Story is just as the tagline read when it was released in 1983 – “A Tribute to the Original, Traditional, One-Hundred-Percent, Red-Blooded, Two-Fisted, All-American Christmas.” Make some hot cocoa, light up your leg lamp and get to steppin’.  This is as Christmas as it gets in the good ol’ US of A.