Beyond A Christmas Story: Watching the "Parker Family Saga"

Though it's a Christmas staple for many, A Christmas Story (1983) isn't a movie I grew up with. I think if you're from Cleveland, it's mandatory viewing because it was filmed there, but I of course am from Cincinnati. I am pretty sure I never saw it until after I began dating Hayley. Early in our relationship (winter break 2007/08, I think), we took a tour of "emerging Cleveland," and one of the places the tour went was Tremont, where the Christmas Story house resides; now it's a museum devoted to the movie, but that was still in development then. Many houses in the neighborhood, though, had the famous "leg lamp" in the window, and from that, I believe, Hayley realized I'd never seen it. I don't know if we watched it right then, but if not, I'm sure it was soon thereafter.

Famously, the movie is run in a twenty-four-hour marathon on cable on Christmas Eve; Hayley's stepmother always tunes into this, so whenever we'd stay with her dad's family over Christmas, I'd catch at least pieces of it.

The movie is adapted from the semiautobiographical stories of Jean Shepherd (1921-99); what many people don't know, I think, is that before A Christmas Story, his memoirs formed the basis of two tv movies aired on PBS. After A Christmas Story, there were two more PBS tv movies in the late '80s, plus the (long-term) success of A Christmas Story itself resulted in a number of follow-ups: a second theatrical movie (1994), a direct-to-DVD sequel (2012), and an HBO Max original (2022). There's very few overlapping cast members between all these movies, aside from a couple of the PBS ones; Peter Billingsley, who plays Ralphie in A Christmas Story, for example, doesn't pop up again until the 2022 movie. The one constant is writer Jean Shepherd himself, who narrates as the adult Ralphie in all the movies that were produced during his lifetime.

I don't know when I learned this fact; it's perfectly possible to watch A Christmas Story ignorant of it. Now the lede of the A Christmas Story article on Wikipedia notes it's part of the "Parker Family Saga," but the article on the "saga" was only added in 2020, so it probably wasn't so prominently noted back then. In our lore-obsessed era, people even wonder if it's possible to watch A Christmas Story without seeing the "first" two movies... even though those movies are set later, and made by an entirely different group of people!

What is a bit surprising is that you can find a lot of people who note that A Christmas Story is part of an overall "series"... but seemingly no one who has actually watched their way through all its constituent movies! But if you read my blog, you know I love excuses for complicated marathons (I am, after all, the person who nonsensically watched (most of) the James Bond movies in book publication order), and this Christmas when watching the marathon at Hayley's aunt's house during the family Christmas party, I was reading about the "Parker Family Saga" on Wikipedia on my phone, and I discovered that there's actually a DVD set you can get from Amazon (out of stock now). So I took advantage of an Amazon gift card I had got in my stocking, and placed an order.

(I should say I have some doubts about the provenance of this set... but hey, it sure is convenient, and there's no other way to get the PBS ones on home media as far as I know.)

My plan: to watch the movies in internal chronological order and blog my way through them over the next couple months. (This means I will somewhat unseasonably end up watching A Christmas Story Christmas in March, but given others of the movies take place on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, there's not really a way to marathon them that doesn't include some amount of unseasonability.)

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Hayley and I began this process this past weekend with the first movie chronologically: A Christmas Story itself. Released in 1983 (so third in production order), the movie is set in (approximately) 1940, when Ralphie is nine years old. As I said, I've seen it once all the way through before, and many times in bits and pieces during the cable marathon. 

I don't have much to say about it, to be honest, except that I really enjoy it. I'm sure there are people who don't like this movie, but it seems to me that if you're sympathetic to what the movie is trying to do, you must like it, because it's one of those stories that is so completely itself. Is it "great art"? I don't know, but it does accomplish exactly what it sets out to do perfectly. If you want a set of anecdotes about childhood that are nostalgic without being saccharine, that capture the perspective of a child but with the knowledge of adulthood, I don't know that you could do better. I've always liked the parents, and this my first time really watching the movie since becoming one myself, and the moments of parenthood ring true, both the dad's eternal exasperation and the mother's alternation between punishment and support.

That the movie succeeds as well as it does is surely a testament to the casting. It would be possible to look at the smarmy picture of Ralphie's grinning face on the merchandise and dismiss Peter Billingsley, but he's actually a pretty gifted comic performer, doing a lot with his face. Ian Petrella as his little brother Randy is hilarious. The standouts for me, though, are the parents, Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon, who I think just embody their characters. Were they really 1940s parents? No they were not, but I believe it when I watch the movie. McGavin gets lots of great bits throughout, but I think it would be easy to overlook the skill of Dillon, who also gets a lot of nice moments, particularly the hilarious bit with the soap.

The movie is set in northern Indiana, and mostly filmed in Toronto, but the house exteriors and department store scenes were filmed in Cleveland. The department store, Higbee's, was a real place... but in Cleveland. Despite this, it appears as itself in the film, apparently as part of the deal to allow filming. Higbee's was an eleven-story behemoth; my wife's mother likes to talk about her Christmas trips to Higbee's, and it sounds like a magical place. Alas, it became a Dillard's in 1992, and now the building is a casino.

Having established the foundation of the "Parker Family Saga" movie that everyone knows and likes, I am curious to see where things go from here!

This is the first in a series of posts about the "Parker Family Saga." The next installment covers My Summer Story.