Your column nailed it. I grew up more or less a decade after Ralph, pretty much in the same sort of family. I lived on a quiet suburban street, in most of the houses of which resided a typical nuclear family. Divorce was unthinkable. The families all stayed intact, as far as I knew, although you could see, as we grew up, that some of the other kids were going to succumb to the worst pathologies of the Sixties, by the time they got to college. Nonetheless, it was all & all a pretty good life. Comfortable enough, but no material surplus. Boys had imaginations just like Ralph. We played army with toy guns, in the woods out back, baseball, sandlot football, signed up for Little League at age 9, and all took the same bus to the nearest public school (aside from the Catholics, who wore uniforms to go to their own parochial schools), which back then only propagandized about 3% of what they do now.

Dad put on a tie to go to work, and did battle with the furnace, figured out how to fix whatever broke down at home, because we had to stay on a budget. We all went to church on Sunday, and assumed our neighbors, poor things, were all going to hell, if they weren’t going to ours in particular. Backyard cookouts in the summer were more frequent than barbecues at the Wilkes Plantation. All and all, not a bad life. We took it for granted that everyone lived that way, because so many did. Glad I remembered to tell my octogenarian mother recently that I regretted not expressing my gratitude more than I did. To Mom’s credit she took no umbrage for thanking her for something in her opinion, every parent was supposed to do. I can even say that I was denied a BB gun and was actually told I’d shoot my eye out. Lol, I would have. At least I got a pretty badass toy machine gun for Xmas @ age 7…5 weeks after JFK in Dallas.

Shepherd was a discovery I shared with
my folks. He used exaggeration, but in a good way, and he really tapped into the normal human’s nostalgia for the days of their youth, especially if it was a youth filled with happy memories. Based upon the the film’s continued success, I’d say that the post war years, until, say, Vietnam, was a Golden Age.

PBS, when it still provided quality programming, made three other films based on Shepherd’s work, the best of which is probably “The Phantom of the Open Hearth,” 1976, based on Ralph’s teenage years. The late James Broderick (father of Matthew) memorably plays a slightly harder edged Old Man. The only thing lacking in A Christmas Story, regrettably, is any mention of Wanda Hickey, “The Algebra Shark,” a rather nice, if plain girl, who Ralph must settle for taking to the prom (where she is transfigured into a charming young lady, in Phantom). But of course Ralph is only 9 in A Christmas Story, and girls don’t figure into the lives of 9 year old boys—or didn’t back then.

I’ll just add that I can confirm that we all had some Ovaltine moment, when the little promotional gewgaw we’d waited months to receive turned out to be a shameless piece of junk. I also can recall having martyr fantasies similar to Ralphie becoming blind from having soap in his mouth. Mothers packed their youngest off to school in movement-paralyzing layers, as depicted by the younger brother. Dogs ran free like the Bumpus hounds, and were for the most part friendly, if overly -rambunctious and always ready for any food they came across.

Several years ago, they showed a live TV performance of the Broadway musical version of the movie. I couldn’t turn it off fast enough. So much smug PC, interracial main family, perfect pitch/perfect enunciation Chinese waiters. I think most of the smarter fans of Bob (Porky’s) Clark’s masterpiece, steered away from that one too.

Bob, of course, was tragically killed in a traffic accident some years ago, an accident caused by a drunken illegal alien. Seems like a mournful metaphor—a microcosm—for what’s happened to our whole civilization.

Again, I am glad you appreciate the universal truth that underlies the best American Christmas movie.