When A Christmas Story was first released in 1983, it was an immediate hit, and although it has been almost 40 years since its debut, it is an annual classic that many families enjoy during the holiday season. Set in the 1940s, the memories of being a child during the holidays can find something relatable in almost every viewer, regardless of the times. Exploring themes of family and friendship, as well as classic sibling controversies, A Christmas Story represents childhood in a realistic way which everyone can relate to. 

Narrated by adult Ralphie, the movie begins with his young self and his friends pushing their noses to the glass of a Christmas window display. This is where we are first introduced to Ralphie’s most wanted Christmas present, the Red Ryder BB gun. The entire film is centered around this BB gun and the quest to convince his elders that he should get it for Christmas from Santa. The fact that the movie is narrated by an adult reflecting on his younger self demonstrates the variability in the target audience, since both adults and children can enjoy it. Adult Ralphie has eccentric diction throughout his narration of the film, for example when he says, “My father wove a tapestry of obscenities…”. At times this speech can go over the viewer’s head. This may represent how as a child we hear every word an adult says but on occasion it seems like gibberish or over-the-top nonsense. For first time adult watchers, this stream of speech may have the same effect from time to time, when one is more focused on the scene rather than the narration, as though they are transported back to their childhood when all speech was as such.  

One standout point of childhood was the vivid imagination that we all possessed. There are multiple scenes in which Ralphie looks off into daydreams, and they are possibly one of the most relatable parts of the film. In the first daydream in the movie, we watch as robbers come into Ralphie’s backyard in multitudes, and Ralphie, dressed modestly in a fully bedazzled western button up with cow skin chaps, has the task of saving his family. Of course, only Ralphie can save them because he has the Red Ryder BB gun. He points the gun out the window and starts to shoot some of the robbers until the rest run away, successfully saving his family. In all childhood daydreams, the child is the protagonist, and since anything is possible, Ralphie’s attire was at the peak of extra. This scene demonstrates that with imagination comes full control, and the directors were successful in portraying this. Everyone can relate to zoning out as a child. Daydreaming is about being transported to a place where we are the hero, where we can not only control our environment but also how we are seen. This allows us to explore concepts and situations which would never happen in real life. Ralphie desires to be a hero, to get an A+ on his school paper, to have his dream of getting a BB gun accepted and supported, and to be felt sorry for when he gets in trouble. In one daydream, Ralphie comes home blind as a result of “soap poisoning”, when in the scene before he was explaining how he was a “soap connoisseur”. Even though he got in trouble for a good reason, it is in the nature of being a child that one always has a level of innocence. Perhaps in a state of being afraid of losing his chance to get the BB gun, he imagines something horrible happening to him after getting in trouble, so his parents feel bad for punishing him. 

Along the lines of childhood punishments, it is known that no child is safe, even when they are truly innocent. Children will lie to save any part of themselves from a worse punishment. When Ralphie says a very bad word while helping his father change a tire, his mother asks where he heard that word from. Ralphie blames his friend, and the viewer can hear the punishment which ensues. The quest to stay out of trouble so close to Christmas was worth putting others under the bus. When Flick gets triple dog dared to stick his tongue to a frozen pole, his friends abandoned him when the bell rang at the end of recess. Ralphie was happy just to not get caught. However, Flick did not tell on him either. There is something relatable about doing what one must do to not get into trouble, which is a child’s worst nightmare.  

One thing that is refreshing about A Christmas Story is that the point of the movie is not about the “Christmas Spirit”, but what it means to be a child who is not perfect and doesn’t even know if they will receive the present that they want. Ralphie gets put down multiple times throughout the movie when he mentions the BB gun he yearns for, and it is believed that he didn’t’ even receive it at Christmas until all of the presents had been opened. In this movie, Santa is not some magical entity which sprinkles magic dust on his sled and flies into the air, he is just a guy in a suit who is tired of both children and his job. While Ralphie believes this is Santa, adult viewers can relate to knowing the truth, and the movie depicts both the view of a child and of the adult very well. 

For an almost forty-year-old movie set in a time two decades before that, the unforgettable times of being a child remain something that draws in every viewer. Accompanied by a white Christmas and the toy of his dreams, the story of Ralphie’s best Christmas remains a classic movie for the holiday season, and there is no wonder why it is featured on every TV channel on repeat during December.