Could there be a better time to write about A Christmas Story than during the high holidays? The first breaths of crisp, chilly air are sweeping through the streets in the mornings, the leaves are shucking off their earthly green hues for bold new duds, large percentages of the nation’s public school students are staying home for reasons they can’t fully explain, and, in synagogues across the world, ram’s horns are being blown, chests are being symbolically beaten, and the high holiday spirit is in full swing. The Jewish versions of New Year’s and Christmas trade snow for late-summer humidity, jingle bells for the jaundiced tangle of the shofar, garish reindeered sweaters for black yarmulkes, and gift-giving for silent self-meditation and atonement for sin. And yet despite all these apparent shortcomings (which aren’t really shortcomings at all—solemnity is the new joy, haven’t you heard?), there’s one troubling difference between the Jewish holidays and their New Testament counterparts, and it’s more cultural than theological. Why, if Hollywood studios were founded, built, and operated by Jews, is there such a dearth of movies about our holidays?

Clearly, the question needn’t be addressed by religious scholars—everyone knows that Judaism isn’t as sexy as Christianity. If it were, Brooklyn Jew Neil Diamond wouldn’t have to record a Christmas album every three years. The resulting sociological impact, of course, is that multiple generations of Chosen tykes have grown up both watching and resenting Christmas movies, from that one with Jimmy Stewart to that other one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. We’re simultaneously informed that our celebrations don’t merit filmed representation and that everyone in the entire world is having a lot more fun than we’re ever allowed to have.

And so it came to pass that I wandered in the desert for 26 years and never once watched Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. It was hard to avoid every single cable channel from Thanksgiving to New Year’s every year of my life, but somehow I figured out that a combination of public access and scrambled adult stations would result in a Story-free yuletide season. A perennial favorite, A Christmas Story also seems to me the sort of film that’s passed down from relative to relative, and one that, without such a tradition, might never be introduced to young eyes at all, regardless of its seasonal televised ubiquity. TV broadcasts all sorts of cheerful treacle in December, and who’s to tell a young Jew with no cool older Christian cousin that A Christmas Story is worth watching?

Why I bypassed the film as a college student and adult is far trickier to explain, and while I’m not entirely sure of the reasons, I’d imagine they’re similar in some respects to the excuses our other writers might have for not watching films like Citizen Kane or The Godfather (also: laziness). Ultimately, I assumed that I’d missed the window of appreciation for a children’s Christmas movie and became convinced that watching A Christmas Story as a twentysomething would somehow be like watching The Care Bears Movie or Old Yeller, even though I knew I was just making excuses. I think it came down, in the end, to old-fashioned resentment—indignation that everyone else had a cool, irreverent Christmas film they could watch every year in their tastefully decorated living rooms with their big, happy, colorfully dressed Christian families, opening their numerous presents and eating sweet, lovingly glazed hams. A Christmas Story was not for me.

In A Christmas Story, Ralphie goes on a quest without ever leaving the semi-industrial mini-city of Hohman, Indiana. He quests for a Daisy Red Ryder 200-shot Carbine Action BB Gun, and battles bullies, teachers, parents, Santa Claus, and himself to get it. Old cars and milk with dinner make it a prewar midwestern odyssey, one that has only increased in popularity in the two decades since it was released. Much of what I’ve read about A Christmas Story trumpets the movie’s devotion to representing Christmas as a time of important togetherness, a good-ol’-days construct that wilts a bit when you realize the film is primarily about a boy’s materialistic desire for a firearm. That desire, of course, is used as a tool to elucidate the importance or relative irrelevance of those specific material impulses, but it doesn’t fully function in a film that drips with such heavy nostalgia. The film’s ultimate saving grace is Peter Billingsley, the boy who played Ralphie Parker, whose mastering of comic cues and timing seems almost supernatural for someone so young.

Director Bob Clark attempted to avoid sentimentality in A Christmas Story (something at which he was modestly successful in Porky’s and viciously successful in his pre-Halloween slasher film Black Christmas) but managed to replace it only with nostalgia, sentiment’s closest cousin. The result is something that’s cloying in spite of its attempts to avoid the same. Ultimately, this is not much of a drawback, as Christmas movies by definition trade on that sort of stuff. At times it even feels like the film’s sweet irreverence is a practiced trick to promote some sort of moral message about values, but it’s probably just my own Jewish cynicism kicking in. (Still, I’m sure that Mr. Parker—and Ralphie—would have voted for Bush in the last election if he weren’t fictional).

I suppose I was only partly right. A Christmas Story sort of is for me. It’s funny (if not laugh-out-loud funny for a first-timer in his twenties), it’s touching (if not Jimmy Stewart­esque touching), and watching it, I felt that I’d seen it 1000 times before (I had probably seen the entire film before, in half-second segments as I flipped from channel to channel, over the course of a full young life). There’s easily recognizable comfort to the Parker family’s holiday mishaps even though I personally can’t relate to them. I prefer my Christmas movies to flip the season’s warmth entirely on its head—Bad Santa is not only the best holiday film of this decade, but also one of its best comedies. Yet there’s no arguing the warm feelings that accompany watching A Christmas Story, and I suspect that the unchallenging humor mixed with nostalgia for an era most of the film’s viewers never experienced have created the legendary air that sustains the movie to this day. But does the film deserve this heroic status? Maybe I can’t really say—how’s a Jew supposed to know?