A Christmas Story Christmas is more a rumination on mortality than a holiday romp

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

A Christmas Story is, to a certain population, among the quintessential ruminations on the seasonal experience — at least from the perspective of a couple of smart-aleck kids, one of whom has a hyper-active imagination. 

So of course, we’re now treated to a retread, with the HBO Max sequel A Christmas Story Christmas, featuring many of the same characters (including Peter Billingsly as Ralphie Parker, who famously — almost — shot his eye out with a coveted Red Ryder BB gun on Christmas Day, 1940). 

In this version of the tale, Ralphie is in his mid-40s and it’s the 1970s, in all its avocado-and-mustard-colored glory. He’s married to the slightly exasperated but ultimately supportive Sandy (Erinn Hayes), and has two kids of roughly the same age as he was during the legendary Red Ryder BB gun Christmas. 

Ralphie is clearly in some kind of major mid-life slump. As the often-stilted narration (courtesy of Billingsley) informs the audience at the outset, Ralphie and Sandy have agreed to save up enough money to give him a year off from the amorphous “rat race” to write a novel and get it published. That’s OK, but there’s a bizarre caveat that if he isn’t able to place the manuscript with a publishing house, he has to quit his dream of ever becoming a writer. Ever.

Peter Billingsley, right, reprises his role as Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story Christmas. Courtesy photo.

When we meet sad-sack Ralphie, he’s jumpier than a jackrabbit on a date, as the calendar pages fall away toward the self-imposed deadline at the end of the year, and he’s been rejected by damn near every publisher in Chicago, where he now lives.

Sandy and the kids are giving him the side eye as his sci-fi epic novel has swollen to more than 2,000 pages, and the bookish gatekeepers are slamming doors in his face. Into this morass of holiday stress, Ralphie gets a call from his long-suffering mother (in this version played by Julie Hagerty, because the original Mrs. Parker, Melinda Dillon, is 83 years old and retired). It’s bad news: His dad, known mostly as The Old Man, has died, and the Ralphie Parker family has to come home to Cleveland Street in the fictional town of Hohman, Ind.

Played in the 1983 original by the inimitable Darren McGavin — fun fact: born in Spokane in 1922 — The Old Man loomed large, with his obscenity laced furnace fighting, longtime battle with the neighbors’ smelly hound dogs and “major award” of a bordello-style lamp shaped like a woman’s leg in fishnets, which has itself become a subversive symbol of the season.

McGavin died in 2006 at age 83, so he doesn’t appear in A Christmas Story Christmas in any form other than old photographs; yet, his presence is everywhere animating the plot (including its end). Ralphie feels like a failure, his family looks at him like a dopey dreamer and suddenly he has to become “The Old Man,” who delivers a magical Christmas despite his mourning. What’s worse, he’s tasked with writing the obituary for the local paper because, of course, he’s “the writer in the family.”

What does he do? Hits the bar, a lot, owned by his childhood pal Flick (Scott Schwartz) and haunted by cheapskate barfly and fellow Cleveland Street running partner Schwartz (R.D. Robb).

They’re all rundown to varying degrees — though Flick, honestly, seems to be doing better than most of them — and rally around Ralphie to prop him up.

Mad-cap escapades ensue, bullies are confronted, family relationships are strained and mended, and lessons are learned.

A Christmas Story Christmas has many of the same parts and pieces as its predecessor, down to including many of the same actors, but it exerts a kind of depressing weariness. Maybe that’s because Jean Shepherd wrote the source material, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, from the perspective of kids on the cusp of wise-assery and wide-eyed wonder, and A Christmas Story Christmas revolves around the desperation of a middle-aged man whose ambition flows from inferiority, dread and regret.

That’s life, I guess, but it certainly doesn’t explode with the heart and humor of the original. And how could it?