Everybody already knows about the movie version “A Christmas Story,” drawn from the late Jean Shepherd’s account of his boyhood quest to find a Red Ryder B.B. gun under the holiday tree. The movie, a staple of cable television each December, marks its 30th anniversary this year. I screen it at least once each Christmas season, but I also treat myself to a rereading of the Shepherd tale that inspired it. The story is a giddy joy from start to finish. “I imagined innumerable situations calling for the instant and irrevocable need for a BB gun,” Shepherd tells readers, “great fantasies where I fended off creeping marauders burrowing through the snow toward the kitchen, where only I and I alone stood between our tiny huddled family and insensate Evil.”
One of the happiest affirmations of our national good sense is the presence of “A Christmas Story” as a holiday classic, both as a film and as a book that’s still in print.