One of my all-time favorite holiday films and films in general is A Christmas Story. Over the years there have been a couple of follows ups including the 1994 film, My Summer Story and the 2012 film A Christmas Story 2. Now they have brought yet another follow-up this time bringing back most of the original cast including Ian Petrella, Scott Schwartz, R. D. Robb, and Zack Ward all reprising their roles as well as Peter Billingsly as Ralphie with Julie Haggerty taking on the role of Ralphie’s mother from Melinda Dillon who has retired from acting. Could this new feature bring some of the same holiday laughs and cheer or would you rather shoot your eye out?
 

A Christmas Story Christmas follows thirty years after the events of A Christmas Story (placing the story in the mid-1970s), where Ralphie returns to his former home in Hohman, Indiana with his wife and children and reunites with his old friends. His mother, now widowed after the passing of the Old Man, convinces Ralphie to give his family the kind of magical Christmas the Old Man always did; Ralphie soon realizes that the task is much more difficult than it seemed when Ralphie was a child.
 

Anytime a film like this is done to revisit a classic I am both excited and worried. The trailers looked fine, but could this actually work? The answer is happily yes. Of course it is not the original film, but it does a perfect job in my opinion of continuing the story, bringing the same fun and doing its own thing. There are elements that don’t always work, but for me this is exactly what I had hoped for and was all in revisiting these characters.
 

The story is simple enough to set things up to get Ralphie and his family back home in familiar territory. When doing this sort of thing you need more than just one character to get fans to invest and they did just that. There are