A Christmas Story
Authors: Jean Shepherd
A CHRISTMAS STORY
. Copyright © 2003 by The Estate of Jean Shepherd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Chapters 1 and 4 originally appeared in
Playboy
, Copyright 1964 and 1965 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc. Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 subsequently appeared in
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
(Doubleday, 1966), Copyright 1966 by Jean Shepherd. Chapter 5 originally appeared in
Playboy
, Copyright 1966 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc. Chapter 5 subsequently appeared in
Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories
(Doubleday, 1971), Copyright 1971 by Jean Shepherd.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Illustrated by George Peters Design & Illustration
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepherd, Jean.
[In God we trust, all others pay cash. Selections]
A Christmas story / Jean Shepherd.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: Duel in the snow, or, Red Ryder nails the Cleveland Street Kid—The Counterfeit Secret Circle member gets the message, or, The asp strikes again—My old man and the lascivious special award that heralded the birth of pop art—Grover Dill and the Tasmanian devil—The grandstand passion play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds.
1. Indiana—Fiction. 2. Boys—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H3964I5 2003b
813’.54—dc21
2003050249
eISBN: 978-0-307-76873-5
v3.1
The characters, places, and events described herein are
entirely fictional, and any resemblance to individuals
living or dead is purely coincidental, accidental, or the
result of faulty imagination
.
Jean Shepherd
In 1983, a low-budget film titled
A Christmas Story
was released during the holiday season with little fanfare. Directed by Bob Clark, starring the wide-eyed Peter Billingsley as the young main character Ralphie Parker, and written for the screen by the cult humorist and radio monologist Jean Shepherd, it offered an affectionate but also slyly satirical portrait of a midwestern family’s rites of Christmas during the Depression. It did modest business at the box office, but the second, televised life of
A Christmas Story
has proven nothing short of astonishing. Year by year, it has garnered more and more fans of its reality-based screwball comedy, so knowing about the ways of kids in an adult-controlled universe, until it now has become a cinematic holiday tradition to rival
It’s a Wonderful Life
and
Miracle on 34th Street
. The film is ubiquitous on cable television in the week leading up to Christmas, and Ralphie Parker’s dogged quest to have a Red Ryder BB Gun in the face of reported adult warnings that “You’ll shoot your eye out” has entered the mass consciousness as an archetypal childhood experience. In a reconsideration of the film in his “Great Movies” series, famed film critic Roger Ebert writes that “there are many small but perfect moments in
A Christmas Story”
and that “some of the movie sequences stand as classic”—a verdict the film’s millions of fans readily accept.
What has largely escaped notice in
A Christmas Story’s
rise to fame is that the film is drawn from a book by Jean Shepherd first published in 1966 (and never out of print since),
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
. In writing his screenplay, Shepherd used material drawn from four of the fifteen autobiographical essays that comprise the book and wove it into the narrative of the film. This book version of
A Christmas Story
reprints those four pieces. The first and longest piece, “Duel in the Snow,
or
Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid” recounts Ralphie Parker’s quest for a BB gun for Christmas and various other incidents in the film. “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message,
or
The Asp Strikes Again” deals with the Little Orphan Annie Decoder ring episode. “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” tells the story of the struggle between Ralph’s father and mother over the leg-shaped lamp. And “Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil” is the almost epic narration of Ralph’s victory over a local bully—here named Grover Dill but in the film called Scut Farkas. These essays together contain almost all of the anecdotes and the period and family details that make up the content and texture of the film.
The one exception is the climactic moment when the voracious hounds from the Bumpus family next door break into the Parker house and make off with the Christmas turkey. That incident is part of a longer essay about the Parkers’ long-running feud with the Bumpuses, a terminally obnoxious family of hillbillies, titled “The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds.” It is included here as a bonus selection—it is a ham, not a turkey, that disappears on Easter, not Christmas—taken from another Jean Shepherd collection,
Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories
.
Jean Shepherd died in 1999, but his legacy as a master of humorous Americana endures, thanks to the film of
A Christmas Story
, his earlier books and now this new compilation. Readers who have enjoyed this book are urged to seek out Mr. Shepherd’s other prose works—and, of course, to watch the film next Christmas.
OR
RED RYDER NAILS THE CLEVELAND STREET KID
DISARM THE TOY INDUSTRY
Printed in angry block red letters the slogan gleamed out from the large white button like a neon sign. I carefully reread it to make sure that I had not made a mistake.
DISARM THE TOY INDUSTRY
That’s what it said. There was no question about it.
The button was worn by a tiny Indignant-type little old lady wearing what looked like an upturned flowerpot on her head and, I suspect (viewing it from this later date) a pair of Ked tennis shoes on her feet, which were primly hidden by the Automat table at which we both sat.
