A CHRISTMAS STORY A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana”the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film.The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year.  Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family™s typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It™s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film.  Here is young Ralphie Parker™s shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father™s pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie™s duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie™s unstoppable campaign to get Santa”or anyone else”to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle.  Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, You™ll shoot your eye out, kid?The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey™s Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.