'A Christmas Story Christmas' Looks More Like A 'Christmas Vacation' Sequel

Leaving the canonical status of the straight-to-video A Christmas Story 2 (which swapped out BB guns for cars and rampaging hormones) up in the air, we’re soon getting the new HBO Max movie A Christmas Story Christmas, all about an adult Ralphie coming home for the holidays, seemingly during the Nixon years. Judging from the recently-released trailer, it looks like a fitting sequel to … National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation? Seriously, it looks like they initially wrote a Christmas Vacation reboot, then had to swap out the characters at the last minute for legal reasons.

For starters, the basic premise of the film involves Ralphie being pressured into putting together a “wonderful Christmas” like his late father, who made it look “so easy.” But … that’s not what happened in A Christmas Story? It’s not like “The Old Man” in the original movie did all that much or tried to make Christmas into a huge deal – his reserved, laid-back demeanor was pretty much his whole deal. And he certainly didn’t obsess over anything other than his famously sexually-charged table lamp. 

But Ralphie’s self-imposed demands to craft a perfect Christmas, inevitably leading to slapstick chaos, is basically what happens with Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation. Ralphie’s life seems distinctly Clark-esque, not just because he’s impossibly struggling to host a big family Christmas, but now he has a young hot wife and a son and a daughter. And the trailer has several specific callbacks, not to A Christmas Story plot points but ones borrowed from Christmas Vacation, such as a perilous sledding scene –

And a bit in which Ralphie can’t fit his giant Christmas tree in the living room – which, again, wasn’t a thing in A Christmas Story. Sure, his dad blew a fuse when he plugged in the lights, but he never had a comically oversized tree – that was, very memorably, a Clark Griswold problem. 

Hopefully, this isn’t paving the way for a surprise, Christmas-ruining cameo from Randy Quaid.

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Top Image: Warner Bros.