Sometimes, it seems as though the Christmas season never actually stops or starts; it merely crests and falls in waves throughout the year.
Just look around you. Each autumn, tangible expressions of the holiday become evident earlier and earlier. Grocery stores begin stocking Christmas candy (hello, Reese’s trees) the instant the calendar flips from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1. Department stores break out the decorations long before Black Friday, or even that noxious invention known as pre-Black Friday. The only things standing in the way of an autumn-long ramp up to Christmas are the intervening commercialized holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving) around which there is money to be made. Christmas in July loses meaning when holiday shopping gets going in August.
Yet the all-Christmas, all-the-time ethos of our present culture is not entirely without perks. One of the earliest manifestations of the phenomenon is surely the 24-hour marathon of the classic family film A Christmas Story, which has aired without fail since 1997 on cable channels that were once part of Ted Turner’s media empire, TBS and TNT.
The film itself richly deserves its status as a seasonal favorite. Drawn from tales by radio personality Jean Shepherd, A Christmas Story is an alternately antic and endearing tale revolving around a boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who, in a Midwestern town in the 1940s, concentrates much of his mental energy on how to increase his chances of receiving a Red Ryder BB Gun on Christmas morning. Yet the film’s popularity has surely been enhanced since TBS and TNT took it upon themselves to show it on a loop that commences on Christmas Eve and wraps up toward the end of Christmas Day.
Skeptics (and devoted film buffs) may say: “What makes A Christmas Story, a movie that opened to average reviews and acceptable but unsensational business when MGM/UA released it in 1983, worthy of a marathon of this sort? Surely, more conventionally respectable holiday films, such as Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940) or Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), are more deserving of such a treatment.” In fact, A Christmas Story was directed with admirable verve and spirit by Bob Clark, whose previous credits, the superbly menacing horror movie Black Christmas (1974) and the take-no-prisoners teenage satire Porky’s (1981), assured that the story would never descend to the depths of mawkishness. It’s a genuinely good, sharp-witted film, not just aimed at tykes. Witness the realistic give-and-take between Ralphie’s bickering but loving parents, the Old Man (Darren McGavin) and Mother (Melinda Dillon).
Even so, the aforementioned Lubitsch and Minnelli films are in some ways just too good to survive the marathon treatment. With shapely plots and dramatic twists and turns, those movies would be too emotionally draining for audiences to experience again and again over a span of 24 hours. By contrast, A Christmas Story boasts an easygoing, episodic structure — one moment, Ralphie’s little brother, Randy (Ian Petrella), is being shamed into eating mashed potatoes; the next, the Old Man is making eyes at a freshly basted turkey — that is eminently forgiving. Viewers, particularly those who grew up with the film on cable, can watch successive showings without expending too much energy.
In all honesty, I have never been so devoted to A Christmas Story to make the commitment to experience the full marathon or anything close to it. During most years, I check out the earliest airing on Christmas Eve, which actually adds to the eager, expectant mood of the evening. Then, on Christmas Day, I sample the film here and there. The marathon is especially rewarding when the on-screen action aligns with whatever festivities are taking place in real life. Who among us hasn’t started the process of opening presents just as Ralphie is pressured into donning his aunt’s hideous gift of pink pajamas?
But the primary pleasure of the marathon is the knowledge that it is happening. There is a cozy kind of comfort in knowing that, with the simple click of the remote, you can gain instant access to dozens of classic moments: say, the Old Man jealously guarding his “major award” of a lamp fashioned in the shape of a woman’s leg, or schoolmate Flick (Scott Schwartz) being on the wrong end of a most regrettable “triple dog dare” (a moment any child of the ’80s will recall with genuine horror).
In the end, I have more affection for our annual overindulgence of A Christmas Story than many other excessive holiday traditions. After all, when the once-a-year Christmas Story-palooza comes to an end, so, too, does Christmas itself. By then, the gifts are likely to have been opened and dispersed, and the turkey and fixings, whether prepared at home or (as in the denouement of the movie) at a Chinese restaurant, consumed. In the final scene, when Ralphie and Randy head to bed, our thoughts might even turn to the fast-approaching New Year’s Eve. That holiday is not without its nostalgic pleasures (the ball dropping on Times Square and throngs singing Auld Lang Syne and all of that), but it doesn’t have a tradition on par with the Christmas Story marathon.
So, this Dec. 24, flip the channel to TBS or TNT and leave it there for a while. Check in on Ralphie and family every couple of hours. You won’t be sorry you did.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Humanities.
