A Christmas Story Christmas (2022)
The year is 1973, and Ralphie — the young boy who wanted a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas more than anything in the world back in the 1940s — is now married, with children of his own. With the passing of Ralphie’s father (“the Old Man”), Ralphie and his family must rush from Chicago back to the home he remembers (the one we [i]all[/i] remember) in Cleveland to take care of family affairs while pulling off Christmas for the first time without help from his father.
Several actors from the original film have returned to portray adult versions of themselves including Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), his younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella), his childhood friends Schwartz and Flick (R.D. Robb and Scott Schwartz) and others. Sorely missed are Ralphie’s parents, The Old Man (originally (Darren McGavin, who passed away in 2006) and Melinda Dillon as the mom, who has been replaced by Julie Hagerty (of Airplane!), who plays the role completely wrong.
A Christmas Story Christmas has its own story of Ralphie attempting to pull of Christmas with a b-plot of him attempting to become an author, but there are so many callbacks and references to the original film that at times the plot gets lost. Multiple times throughout the film Ralphie reminisces about events from his childhood, after which we are treated to short clips from the original film. The original A Christmas Story is one of the most watched holiday films of all time. Nobody watching this film doesn’t remember the pink bunny suit, Flick sticking his tongue to a frozen flagpole, or what a triple-dog dare means.
Now that the Old Man has passed, it is up to Ralphie to put together Christmas for his family. Much of the plot is dedicated to how he’s going to accomplish this, but it’s almost played as if Ralphie has never seen or heard of Christmas before. Ralphie struggles to come up with things for his family to do, but he’s a married man with a roughly 10 year old son and slightly younger daughter. I guess… do what you’ve been doing the past 10 years? How much brainstorming is involved in putting up lights and a tree? Fortunately, everybody in the film takes a pact “not to be sad” early on, so little time is spent mourning, talking about, or even reminiscing about The Old Man. And how convenient that the Bumpasses still live next door, and still have a lot of dogs.
A Christmas Story Christmas isn’t terrible — it’s a Christmas story with people you know. There’s fun and laughs to be had, and more nostalgia than Cleveland has snow. The film relies heavily on nostalgia (in many cases nostalgia of the first film), but until the original which was about the magic of Christmas and a boy who would do anything to get the present of his dreams, this one is about a middle-aged man trying to hold together Christmas while dealing with the loss of his father. Merry Christmas!