It’s amazing that Bob Clark followed Black Christmas, arguably the greatest American Christmas horror film, with A Christmas Story, arguably the greatest American Christmas comfort film. A Christmas Story is an adaptation of the work of humorist Jean Shepherd, especially his 1966 collection of short stories In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, which revolves around the loosely autobiographical Parker family of Northwest Indiana. Shepherd narrates the film, which is primarily told from the perspective of Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) as he describes the travails of his father (Darren McGavin), his mother (Melinda Dillon), his brother Randy (Ian Petrella) and his friends and neighbours in the buildup to “the greatest Christmas I had ever received or would ever receive” in the early 1940s. In keeping with the corpus of American humorism more generally, there’s a strong regional focus here, with the film unfolding as a series of vignettes that together constitute a playful Midwest sociology. We learn, for example, that all kids at the time fell into one of three categories – bullies, toadies and victims – and all about their various rituals and traditions, such as the escalation of dares from a mere “double dog dare” to the irrefutable “triple dog dare.” While these vignettes encompass a wide range of characters, Ralphie’s father, known only as “the Old Man” is the centre; the film is a tribute to him as emblem of these Midwestern peculiarities.

Much of the film’s absurdity comes from the fact that it is set at what may well be the apex of American Christmas consumerism at mid-century. This was a period when capitalism was reaching a new era of dominance and the post-war liberation movements hadn’t yet splintered the American consensus around Christmas. In that sense, Shepherd’s vision, like that of A Charlie Brown Christmas, reflects the kind of wry self-awareness that existed within the system before a new generation came along to try and break it. The very title of Shepherd’s collection, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, is a playful wink at this inextricable relation between American Christianity and the consumerist marketplace. No surprise, then, that the film opens with a department store window that, for Ralphie, is the apotheosis of wonder. Its incredible, cluttered cornucopia of toys and tableaux pave the way for one lush mise-en-scene after another, from the unbelievable array of confiscated toys that Ralphie’s teacher keeps in her desk drawer to the basket of exotic fruits that he provides her in the hopes that she will give his essay on the Red Ryder BB gun an A+ and so convince his parents that it is a worthy Christmas gift. Later in the film, a Wizard of Oz troupe from the town’s Christmas parade dance around this department store window as if it’s a Technicolor wonder commensurate to Fleming’s movie, the very height of American aesthetic ingenuity.

Insofar as the film has a narrative arc, it’s driven by Ralphie’s yearning to receive the centrepiece of this window display – the Red Ryder toy gun – as a Christmas present, despite the entire adult world’s warning that “it’ll take your eye out!” With that in mind, he continually attempts to incept the toy into his parents’ consciousness, inserting an advertisement into his mother’s Look magazine, bringing it up casually at the Christmas table, and preparing a request for Santa’s appearance at the department store, which marks the peak of the film’s vision of Christmas consumerism. Poised at the top of a three-storey artificial mountain in the foyer of the store, Santa treats each child like consumer items on a conveyor belt, taking their requests before dumping them, invariably crying and screaming, on a slide that deposits them in a foam pit nestled amongst a panorama of possible presents.

This wry yet affectionate vision of the commodified season quickly blooms out into the broader signature of the film: what might be described as the Bourdieuian status symbols of American “high” culture as they were processed by and refracted through Midwestern normalcy at mid-century. Ralphie is certainly a part of this, whether in his daydream of his teacher reading his homework task on the Red Ryder gun clad in operatic garb as an orchestra plays in the background, or when his mother places soap in his mouth after he utters the most unutterable expletive, and he describes its textures and flaws like he is reviewing a gourmet dish. But this comically distorted version of cultural status is most pointedly and affectionately focused on the Old Man: “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium.” Early on, the Old Man asks his family to “name the great characters in American literature” but only for the sake of a $50 000 prize, throwing Tonto’s name into the ring. The Old Man’s most prized status symbol is a lamp that arrives late one night as a prize for a write-in competition (we never find out what kind exactly). A lurid design, this “symbol of the Old Man’s victory” takes the form of a disembodied woman’s leg, the lampshade situated where the low-cut dress would hang. Positioning it at the front of his loungeroom, as a “soft glow of electric sex in the window,” it becomes a cipher for the ultimate achievement of middle-class life: subsuming sex into domesticity and repackaing it as a commodity. Accordingly, when the Old Man becomes hyper-fixated upon it as a fetishistic sexual object, Ralphie’s mother conveniently knocks it over, subsuming its import once again.

In that respect, Ralphie’s main growth moment, and the second narrative arc after the quest for the Red Ryder gun, comes with his “Little Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder Pen.” Ralphie checks the mail for weeks waiting for this device to arrive, which will supposedly allow him to transform a series of random numbers on the Little Orphan Annie radio program into a message that is meant just for him. As with the Old Man’s lamp, and the pull of the Red Ryder gun, Ralphie has a sense that some kind of symbolic prize (or as he describes it, “honours and benefits”) has been reserved for him alone. It’s tragic, bathetic and comic when the Decoder message simply turns out to be another advertisement for the radio program’s main sponsor: “Don’t Forget To Drink Your Ovaltine!” Yet the magic of A Christmas Story is that this never feels like disillusion per se; rather, it’s another testament to the absurdities of childhood, the American condition, and the twin poles of Midwestern and consumerist culture. Likewise, Ralphie describes the heap of presents beneath his Christmas tree, the culmination of all the consumerist cornucopias of the film, as “an ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” but it’s still enormously touching when the Old Man casually tells Ralphie to look behind his desk for one more gift, which turns out to be the Red Ryder gun, to Ralphie’s mother‘s shock. This moment is like a microcosm of the film – consumer objects abound but it is still possible to sequester individual objects and endow them with real human sentiment.

That makes A Christmas Story an interesting counterpoint and challenge to the 1980s’ fascination with the 1950s and the Eisenhower era as a moment when the balance of American capitalism was in total equilibrium. Situated just before this period of simulacral nostalgia, in the 1940s, Shepherd and Clark’s vision playfully insists that the rampantly hypermediated consumerism of the 1980s was already in full force well before the hallowed land idealised in films like Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. A Christmas Story is distinctive among 80s period pieces about mid-century in that it celebrates the wonder of childhood and is nostalgic and affectionate in all the right places without ever quite forming what Fredric Jameson described as the “nostalgia mode” – films that reduced the 1950s sanitised and dehistoricised images. Shepherd narrates the film and you feel his lived presence in the sheer heterogeneity of the vignettes, even as these also capture the endless present tense of childhood, the sense that life might simply go on in this episodic way forever. Against the timelessness of postmodern “nostalgia,” Shepherd and Clark present us with the timelessness of childhood, implicitly infantilising the 80s’ fixation with the 50s in the process. Perhaps that’s why A Christmas Story is so endlessly rewatchable, why it feels that it could go on forever, especially on television, destined to run 24 hours a day during the holiday season.