A Christmas Story has touched a few nerves in recent memory. I’ve read articles, blog posts and Reddit threads vilifying this film.

Last December, in an article for The Independent Picture House, Ryan Thomas wrote, “It’s a bitter and misanthropic movie that’s become a belated holiday classic, filled with vindictive kids, helpless mothers and horny, lamp-obsessed fathers.” However, Thomas goes on to say that the movie does get it right when it comes to evoking Christmas memories.

Whoever said that Christmas stories were required to be tales of redemption or teaching moments? And why do we continue to try to legislate films made 40 years ago? Sometimes, these movies are just slices of life, moments in time. And that’s what this one is.

A Christmas Story is based on the 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd. In the 1983 movie directed by Bob Clark and narrated by Shepherd himself, Peter Billingsley stars as Ralphie, Darren McGavin of Kolchak – The Nightstalker fame – plays his father, and Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) plays his mom. You may not know that Zack Ward, who plays bully Scut Farkus, went on to play an Umbrella Corporation mercenary in one of the Resident Evil movies.

Shepherd’s tale of childhood Christmas has become a cult classic thanks to TNT/TBS bringing it back as a Christmas day marathon several years ago. The story is set in Indiana in the late 1940s and was actually filmed in Cleveland. You can visit the actual house as it has been transformed into a museum in recent years.

This may be set 20-some-odd years before I was born but I swear it’s my childhood Christmas brought to life on screen in more than one way. We’re not talking about parallels here, we’re talking about direct correlations.

Now, I could give you the synopsis for the film but I’d rather explain how this movie relates to me or how I relate to it.

First of all – the furnace. Darren McGavin spends a lot of time in the basement battling the wonky furnace while shrouded in a cloud of black smoke. Now, we didn’t have furnace issues but I lived in a duplex for much of my childhood, age 5–14 if I remember correctly, and we had oil heat. We were poor for a good number of years — not too many but enough. We didn’t always have money for oil and I remember my dad borrowing some from the neighbor and transferring the noxious, black fluid via used plastic milk cartons.

I remember what seemed to be the slow build-up to Christmas while suffering through endless days in the classroom. Trips to see the department store or mall Santa Claus were a highlight of the season, not quite the nightmare Ralphie encountered. In my hometown of Rochester, N.Y., Midtown Plaza downtown was the place to go at Christmastime. It was always decked out for the season and the monorail was a must-ride attraction. It has since been dismantled and put away in storage. Sad. You can find videos of what Midtown used to be on YouTube.

The scene where Ralphie’s father plugs in the Christmas tree lights into the multiple plug adapter cracks me up every time. I remember such adapters as a kid. We also had those 4,000-candlepower Christmas tree lights too. It’s a wonder we didn’t burn the house down. My father hated all things electric. He wouldn’t touch the house wiring, ever. After my electronics training in the Navy, he’d wait until I came home for a visit and ask me to install a light fixture or a ceiling fan. The house he bought when I was 14 still had the original 1920s wiring, complete with a fuse box.

I’ll never forget visiting my parents one time when dad had the microwave plugged into the wall with a three-prong to a two-prong adapter. He had the coffee maker, toaster, and miniature nuclear reactor all going at the same time. He smoke-checked that adapter and I had to pull two feet of burnt wire out of the wall so I could install the three-prong outlets he left sitting in the drawer for six months.

Dad never won a major award in the form of a (fra-gee-lay) leg lamp but I do remember the weatherproofing we had to do every winter with plastic covering the windows and foam in the air gaps under the doors.

We didn’t have the neighbor’s dogs barge into our house and steal our turkey, but I did get not one, but two BB/pellet guns for Christmas. We won’t discuss what I did with the second one when I was a freshman in high school. I didn’t shoot my eye out (or anyone else’s) but let’s just say the cops were involved.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the movie for me is the rush of opening presents on Christmas day. The thrill of coming down the stairs, or entering the living room (I did live in a duplex on one floor until I was 14) and seeing that Santa had in fact been there was the stuff dreams were made of. As an only child, I always made out like a bandit, money or no money.

When it comes to A Christmas Story, the late 1940s weren’t much different than the 1970s when it came to the Yuletide season. Technology and expensive gadgets hadn’t taken over just yet. Jean Shepherd’s childhood Christmases and mine weren’t all that dissimilar and every time I watch it, I feel like I am home for Christmas.

This is a must-see but I’ll only watch it on Christmas day, and I’ll watch all the way through uninterrupted at least once.