I get the appeal - when the film came out, its mixture of wistfulness and snark, of toasty conventionality and youth-movie anarchy, with Jean Shepherd’s narration poured over the whole thing like spiked maple syrup, was very much of its time, and only grew more universal with time. I love Christmas, and I love countless Christmas movies and TV specials and pop albums, but “A Christmas Story” always stuck a bit in my craw.

The holiday week will involve a handful of minor mishaps, a few broken bones, a touch of criminality, as well as several run-ins with key characters from “A Christmas Story,” all played by the actors who played them before. And in this movie, of course, you can go home again. To comfort his mother (Julie Hagerty), Ralph drives his family to Hohman, Indiana, to spend Christmas in the same mustard-yellow Cleveland Street home where “A Christmas Story” took place. But then he gets the word that the Old Man has died.

He’s penned a sci-fi doorstop entitled “Neptune’s Oblivion” that’s been turned down by just about every publisher in his hometown of Chicago. Ralph, an aspiring novelist, has taken a year off from the rat race to make it as a published author. Darren McGavin, who played “the Old Man,” died in 2006, but his spirit hovers over the movie as surely as Chadwick Boseman’s does over “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” The new movie, set in 1973 (33 years after the first film), is about how Ralph tries to give his family - his wife, Sandy (Erinn Hayes) and two kids, Mark (River Drosche) and Julie (Julianna Layne) - the kind of memorably old-fashioned Christmas his own dad gave him. He now resembles the former NBC News anchor John Chancellor crossed with a depressed Rick Moranis. In “A Christmas Story Christmas,” Billingsley, as the grown-up version of Ralphie Parker, is still a likable actor, but he’s lost any trace of that rascally BB-gun exuberance.

Jean shepherd in a christmas story