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Do you know the stories behind ‘A Christmas Story’?

Jean Shepherd’s tales of his Indiana boyhood inspired the movie, which smoothed out some of the rougher edges

December 13, 2022 at 6:48 a.m. EST
Peter Billingsley as Ralphie, left, with Ian Petrella as Ralphie's brother, Randy, and Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon as their parents in a scene from “A Christmas Story,” the 1983 movie based on short stories by Jean Shepherd. (MGM/UA/Kobal/Shutterstock)
7 min

Late on a weekday afternoon in November 1983, I sat amid the scattered handful of moviegoers in a multiplex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, awaiting the opening frames of the new film “A Christmas Story.” The measly turnout confirmed my sense of being part of a cult following, one of those fortunate few who shared the inside joke that was the humor of Jean Shepherd.

I had grown up in central New Jersey, well within range of Shepherd’s nightly radio show on WOR, and as a teenager had treasured the short stories about his Indiana childhood in the collections “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” and “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories.” As the credits on “A Christmas Story” indicated, the movie was based on those books, with a screenplay partly written by Shepherd. The moment the voice-over began, I recognized Shepherd’s own voice doing the narration.

While “A Christmas Story” logged a few decent weeks at the box office, at least for an indie film with a budget of just $3.25 million, it performed as a boutique item, attracting the fan base from Shepherd’s radio show, books and public-television series. Its 1983 box office total of $13.2 million ranked 53rd, and for the full year of 1984, its $6.1 million take lagged at No. 111.

By this holiday season, nearly 40 years later, “A Christmas Story” qualifies as an unexpected juggernaut, a yuletide staple akin to “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The home-video version had sold $66 million worth of copies by the end of 2021. The film has spun off a Broadway musical with a national tour and a live TV performance, as well as two movie sequels, including this fall’s “A Christmas Story Christmas.” Since 1997, Turner Broadcasting has aired a 24-hour marathon of the original from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day.

Yet the phenomenon of “A Christmas Story” leaves those of us familiar with Shepherd as a writer wondering just how many of the multitude of viewers ever read, or even know of, the original short stories, which both inform and interestingly differ from the film. As Eugene B. Bergmann put it in his 2005 biography, “Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd”: “Ask ten people who Jean Shepherd was and maybe two will know. Ask them all if they know of A Christmas Story and nine of them will know … but probably only a few will realize that the movie is a Shepherd creation … based on written stories; the written stories based on tales spun live on the air.”

As Bergmann pointed out, Shepherd began shaping the tales of his boyhood in the steel-mill town of Hammond, Ind. (which he renamed as Hohman), during his nightly show on WOR from 1955 until 1977. Sometimes, he would free-associate about philosophy and literature; at other times, though, he would embroider his childhood experiences during the Depression into works of audio fiction.

Shepherd’s on-air style anticipated the spoken-word narratives of Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray and inspired Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of an overnight disc jockey in the film “The King of Marvin Gardens.” No less a scholar of mass media than Marshall McLuhan praised Shepherd for utilizing “radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly.”

By the mid-1960s, Shepherd began adapting his autobiographical monologues into stories, initially for Playboy magazine and then for his books. The plot of “A Christmas Story” — the misadventures of stand-ins for a youthful Shepherd, here named Ralph, and his parents and younger brother — was assembled from pieces of a half-dozen different stories in “In God We Trust” and “Wanda Hickey.”

The overarching narrative, inasmuch as the episodic film has one, depicts Ralph’s pining for a BB gun for Christmas and (spoiler alert) the near-realization of the warning from his mother, teacher and even department store Santa that “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Other comic set pieces in the film — an attack on the family’s Christmas turkey by a hillbilly neighbor’s hounds; Ralph’s fixation on a decoding game from the “Little Orphan Annie” radio show; his father getting the sweepstakes prize of a lamp shaped like a showgirl’s sexy leg — stood alone in their initial literary versions.

As craftily as Shepherd and the film’s director, Bob Clark, massaged the mishmash into a relatively cohesive whole, the sentimental tone of “A Christmas Story” belies the subtler textures of the original stories and the deep awareness of human frailty that permeated even Shepherd’s funniest yarns. In that respect, in rereading “In God We Trust” and “Wanda Hickey” recently, I was brought to mind of the mordant, tragicomic wit of novelist T.C. Boyle.

Although Shepherd’s father held an office job for a bread company, young Jean grew up in a blue-collar town ravaged by the Depression, came to adulthood serving in World War II and never lost sight of such grim realities. Setting the scene early in his story “Duel in the Snow,” he wrote: “Off on the far horizon, beyond the railroad yards and the great refinery tanks, lay our own private mountain range. Dark and mysterious, cold and uninhabited, outlined against the steel-gray skies of Indiana winter, the Mills. It was the Depression, and the natives had been idle so long that they no longer even considered themselves out of work. Work had ceased to exist, so how could you be out of it? A few here and there picked up a day or so a month at the Roundhouse or the Freight Yards or the slag heaps at the Mill, but mostly they just spent their time clipping out coupons.”

It took Shepherd just one or two unfussy sentences, embedded within the surrounding humor, to paint life’s aches and losses. Watching Ralph head off to a junior prom dance, his father cruelly comments within his wife’s earshot: “Yep. Too many guys settle for the first skirt that shows up. And regret it the rest of their lives.”

In the new film “A Christmas Story Christmas,” the adult Ralph returns to Hohman and is reunited with his childhood friends Flick and Schwartz. But in the final story of “In God We Trust,” similarly set on a grown-up visit back home, there is a radically different tone when Ralph stops by Flick’s tavern:

“‘Too bad Schwartz couldn’t have been here,’ I said.”

“Flick grunted, busy with his change counting. We both knew that Schwartz had been shot down over Italy. They never found him.”

The adult Ralph who narrates “In God We Trust” speaks of his “despised hometown” and is acutely aware that as a New Yorker now, he fully fits in to neither place. “I looked again at my Rolex,” Shepherd writes toward the book’s end. “For some reason I didn’t quite recognize it at first as belonging to my arm. Somehow that sleeve and that watch all belonged in New York. Another world. Back there they would probably not even believe there was such a man as Flick.”

“A Christmas Story” made Shepherd rich, and more famous than ever, by the time he died in 1999 at age 78. And certainly it led many new readers to his books; the copy of “In God We Trust” that I recently bought was the title’s 55th printing in its 56-year history. But the film’s many charms are also simpler, more slapstick, than its genesis on radio and in print.

“Innocence is ever so pleasant,” Bergmann observes in his biography, “but leaving Eden for a more unsettling understanding is part of the tragedy and triumph of being a fully human adult. Shepherd insisted on it.”

Samuel G. Freedman, an occasional contributor to The Washington Post, is the author of the forthcoming book “Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.”

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