How a Modest House in Cleveland Became a Christmas Tourist Destination

The first Saturday in December in Cleveland is chilly and gloomy, with a frigid bite in the air that serves as a harsh reminder that winter is indeed coming to Ohio. But neither gray skies nor unfriendly temperatures have dampened the spirits of visitors who have gathered to tour the modest house featured in the 1983 film, A Christmas Story.

The yellow-sided house with dark green trim is something of a hidden gem: It’s tucked away on a narrow, nondescript residential street in Cleveland’s popular Tremont neighborhood, diagonal from circa-1906 neighborhood bar, the Rowley Inn.

But when the holidays hit, the area around the house is a scene. Cars drive slowly down the street looking for parking, and groups of people mill around taking selfies in front of the house and examining era-specific sights like a vintage red car from the '40s, the decade when the movie is set.

In the cozy gift shop, the ticket line snakes through displays of merchandise: racks and shelves stuffed with themed T-shirts, holiday ornaments, neckties, mugs, shot glasses, and DVDs. Books by Jean Shepherd, whose 1966 memoir In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash largely inspired A Christmas Story, are stacked close to the door. A penny-flattening machine features the film’s bespectacled protagonist Ralphie dressed in his iconic pink bunny pajamas.

Outside, two men in full-body bunny suits are waiting for their turn to tour the house. A not-insignificant number of visitors make a beeline for the house’s porch for a photo-op with one of the tour’s star attractions: a comely leg-shaped lamp topped with a fringed shade, lit up brightly in the front window, just like it was in the movie. Appropriately enough, the gift shop also sells a generous array of leg lamps in multiple sizes, so you can (as the film puts it) experience the “soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window” of your own home.

Forty years ago, when A Christmas Story filmed on this very street, nobody involved would have predicted the house would become one of Cleveland’s most popular tourist attractions, with an average of 75,000 to 80,000 paid admissions per year. Today, visitors can even rent a room on the house’s third floor or the house next door, which has been preserved as the Bumpus House in honor of the film’s “hillbilly neighbors,” whose hounds draw the constant ire of the Old Man (and memorably ruin Christmas dinner, thus inspiring the “Stolen Turkey Suite”).

Yet upon release, almost nobody thought A Christmas Story had any cinematic staying power. Just ask Patty Johnson. The Cleveland-based actress—who played the cranky head elf tasked with dragging kids to see the film’s infamous department-store Santa—is cheerfully blunt about the film’s lukewarm reputation back in the '80s. “I didn’t even have it on my résumé for years,” she admits. “I didn't want to be associated. I was like, ‘It's just a dog of a stinker. Nobody needs to know I was in that thing.’”

Johnson certainly doesn’t feel that way anymore. And she’s not the only one who’s had a change of heart. Over the decades, A Christmas Story has grown into a full-fledged festive phenomenon—a family Christmas tradition as embedded in American culture as leaving cookies out for Santa.

The film’s memorable catchphrases—“You’ll shoot your eye out!,” “Fra-gee-lay—it must be Italian!,” “It’s a major award!”—are part of the pop-culture lexicon. On Christmas Eve, cable channels show the film for 24 hours straight. There have been multiple movies both directly and tangentially related to the original A Christmas Story, as well as a stage musical and Fox’s 2017 live televised interpretation, A Christmas Story Live!. And in 2020, the town of Chickasha, Oklahoma installed a 50-foot-tall leg lamp statue in a public park to honor artist and art school teacher Noland James, who is said to have come up with a prototype that inspired the movie’s own leg lamp.

So how exactly did A Christmas Story evolve from an embarrassment to a universally beloved holiday classic on par with It’s A Wonderful Life? It’s not from drinking Ovaltine—though you don’t need Little Orphan Annie’s decoder ring to tell you that.

A Christmas Story was made for a measly $3.3 million (that’s $10.19 million today). Its director, Bob Clark, had previously helmed another holiday film—1974’s decidedly not family-friendly proto-slasher Black Christmas—and was fresh off the success of raunchy sex comedy Porky’s. A Christmas Story co-starred veteran actors Darren McGavin (The Night Stalker) and Melinda Dillon (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as exasperated but loving parents to bespectacled dreamer Ralphie, portrayed by 10-year-old Peter Billingsley, who wants nothing more than a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, but is stymied at (nearly) every turn by the adults in his life.

Author and scholar Joanna Wilson, who penned Triple Dog Dare: Watching—& Surviving—the 24-Hour Marathon of A Christmas Story, says the “structure of the storytelling” driving A Christmas Story makes the film stand out.

“The story is told from the perspective of young Ralphie, with commentary by adult Raphie,” she explains. “Looking back or reminiscing about a previous Christmas is an activity that most people do each year. By setting the film in the 1940s, the story adds nostalgia on top of it all—another popular activity most people indulge in at Christmastime.”

A Christmas Story also stands out because of its casting. Instead of generic supporting characters, you get a deep bench of vivid personalities: cruel bullies, dramatic teachers, adult authority figures, irritating siblings, and snot-nosed kids.

According to Yano Anaya—the actor who portrayed Grover Dill, the stout sidekick to Zack Ward’s yellow-eyed head bully Scut Farkus—this depth of character helps the narrative resonate. “People can relate to their childhood and a schoolyard bully, or relate to their father being that strict, or their mom really trying to do her best to give you more opportunities, right?,” he says. “All of these little nuances that are in A Christmas Story—[they] relate to a lot of people's experiences in life.”

When the film was released ahead of Thanksgiving 1983, reviews of A Christmas Story were mixed. A syndicated review published in The Charlotte News called it “the first Christmas movie in years that wouldn’t turn Santa into Scrooge overnight,” while New Jersey’s The Daily Record dubbed it a “piece of fluff that lets you laugh at corniness and feel only a little ashamed.” However, The New York Times didn’t mince words: “There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in A Christmas Story, but you have to possess the stamina of a pearl diver to find them.” A Christmas Story came in third at the box office during its first week—trailing The Big Chill and Amityville 3-D—but grossed just $12.8 million overall. A theatrical re-release the following year didn’t perform much better, generating a paltry $1.3 million.

But a funny thing happened: A Christmas Story eventually found an audience in the emerging home video market. Johnson says after the movie came out on home video—and was available in rental stores like Blockbuster—it started to draw attention. “They started doing categories like Halloween movies, Christmas movies,” she says. “And I think that's where some people started to find it, because it was on those shelves.” That the movie kept being reissued in other formats helped, too.

Much like It’s A Wonderful Life—which also initially bombed—A Christmas Story also found new life on TV. Johnson noticed that awareness increased after the film began airing on cable channels in the late 1980s. And in 1997, TNT programmed a 24-hour marathon of the movie on Christmas Eve—a tradition that continues to this day.

The film’s easy availability, coupled with the marathon turning into an annual event, was crucial to the movie’s endurance, says Wilson. “A generation of now-adults have experienced that 24-hour marathon cycling through the background of their past Christmases,” she says. “Since Christmas in many ways is about tradition, people return to watch A Christmas Story with their families because it's what they did last year, and the year before.”

For their part, Clevelanders take immense pride in the fact that A Christmas Story was partially filmed in the city, with many boasting personal connections. It’s always a delight to see the now-defunct Higbee’s in the film—as a young child growing up in the area during the 1980s, my parents took me shopping there every year—and my late grandmother recalled seeing festive vintage decorations hung up in the city’s Public Square during filming.

Unsurprisingly, references to the film crop up everywhere in the Cleveland area, especially during December. The beloved (and delicious) Rudy’s Strudel and Bakery in nearby Parma makes A Christmas Story pierogies stuffed with potato, cheddar, and meatloaf, while bars and houses all over Cleveland boast leg lamps as décor. You can visit a replica of the Santa slide at Castle Noel, a year-round Christmas destination. And, per a proclamation issued in 2023, November 18—the day the movie premiered in 1983—has officially been deemed “A Christmas Story Family Day” in Ohio.

Family and tradition are central to why the movie appeals to Arek and April Helcberger. The former grew up on a Cleveland street with the kind of houses seen in the film. “The movie reminded me a lot of my childhood,” he says. April, meanwhile, grew up watching the movie with her brother—and continued this tradition after she married Arek. “We started watching together, and now we get to watch with our kids.”

In 2015, when the Helcbergers wanted to renew their vows after 10 years of marriage, they leaned into their shared love for the movie. “[We were] like, 'We should get married at the A Christmas Story House,’” April says. “They hadn't done anything like that at the time.”

Sure enough, the house was happy to accommodate. The couple, their kids, and select family members had a ceremony inside the house’s cozy living room. “We were able to get married by Santa,” April says. “They made it so nice for us. It was really a special time.” Arek also has a permanent place in the neighborhood: A sketch he made of Ralphie in 2020 now hangs in the museum.

That the A Christmas Story House is in Cleveland has always resonated with Ryan McCartney. Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, he sought out the abode even before it was spruced up and opened to the public. Part of that was because he likes to see the real-life locales where movies were filmed. However, the local tie-in also made a difference.

“I would love to know how I would feel about it if it didn't have the Cleveland connection,” he says. “I don't know if I’d feel as close to it, because that's what really drags me in, knowing that so much of it was done right here in our backyard.”

McCartney’s A Christmas Story fandom extends beyond the house to a full-size leg lamp. “We usually put it up November 1,” he says. “We like to get two good months out of it.” Since getting married, he and his wife Jessica have sent out elaborate custom Christmas cards based on scenes from the movie, often starring their dogs and daughter.

In recent years, one card design was particularly special: The couple surprised their friends with a card that doubled as a pregnancy announcement. “I'm holding a mini leg lamp wrapped in a blanket,” he shares. “It says, ‘It's another major award.’ My daughter, who's now three, is in the picture [with] my wife and me, the real leg lamp in the background.”

Much like it took decades for the movie to catch on, the house in A Christmas Story grew into its status as a tourist magnet over time. Growing up on the West Coast, former owner Brian Jones and his family were fans. But all Jones wanted to do was be a jet pilot and astronaut. He was on track to fulfilling his flying dreams, studying aerospace engineering at the US Naval Academy, until he failed the vision test for flight school. To make him feel better, his mom sent him a leg lamp as a joke.

Jones never forgot this gift. In 2003, he decided to start selling leg lamps out of his 1,000-square-foot condo. The business took off much quicker than he anticipated; at one point, he sold 2,100 leg lamps in a single year. A few years later, the house that appeared in A Christmas Story went up for sale on eBay, and in 2006, Jones purchased it for $150,000.

That's when the work began to make the house an exact replica of what you see in the movie. “Basically, it was a complete gut and a re-do,” Jones says, noting they had to do things like move windows, rewire the electrical system, and reinforce the floors. “I went through the movie frame-by-frame and handed the contractor [directions]: ‘Make it look like this.’”

That attention to detail was crucial. “The house is a big star of the movie,” Jones says. “When I first saw [it] I was like, ‘Wow.’ I got goosebumps.”

McCartney recalls being similarly in awe when he saw the A Christmas Story House for the first time. When it opened to the public in 2006, he stood in line for hours waiting to get in. Today, McCartney’s been back many times, and has a standing tradition with his mother to have lunch together and make an annual pilgrimage to the house and museum.

“Every time we go, we're in line and we're talking to people, and they're like, ‘Oh, I’m from Minnesota,’ or whatever, like, ‘We wanted to make a weekend of this, check this out,’” he says. “There was probably a time in my life where I thought the reach was mostly local—that's definitely not the case.”

Arek Helcberger and his family moved to Cleveland from Poland in 1988. During his first Christmas in America, he worried about whether Santa was going to be able to find him in his new home. This was an especially pressing issue because he wanted an original 8-bit Nintendo system—the 1980s equivalent to the Red Ryder BB gun.

But just like Ralphie and his own much-wanted gift, Arek received the Nintendo on that Christmas morning. “[When I saw] the movie for the first time, it was exactly that feeling,” he recalls.

Arek experienced a similarly strong reaction to Max’s recent A Christmas Story Christmas. Set in the 1970s, the charming film finds Peter Billingsley reprising his role as Ralphie, only this time as an adult with two kids of his own. An aspiring writer struggling to find his place in publishing, Ralphie comes home to face Christmas without his Old Man, who has just passed away. Shenanigans ensue, partly involving the grown-up versions of some kids from the original movie. But the references to mortality and navigating cruel passage of time are deeply affecting; like the original A Christmas Story, family is an anchor even when the real world is stormy.

“This is very much the origin story of A Christmas Story,” Billingsley says. “You really learn that at the end of the movie. It’s very much in homage to the Old Man and to Jean Shepherd, who wrote the source material.”

The Helcbergers were invited to watch a screening of the new film with the cast members, which included Anaya. The environment, coupled with the movie’s themes, invoked a deep emotional response. “It really tugs at your heartstrings,” Arek says. “I lost my dad in January of 2021, and this just brought all that to the forefront.”

At the end of the day, the charm of A Christmas Story lies in its familiarity and simplicity—and the way it transcends eras and genres, getting at the very things that make us human.

“It’s a celebration of the ordinary stuff that we have to go through,” Billingsley says. “In the original movie, there's no big set pieces. It's not some complicated, overly plotted movie. It's just those things you want to go right that invariably go wrong: trying to light the tree, trying to buy a tree, trying to make a turkey. For the kids, it’s just trying to get to school without the weather or bullies trying to conspire against you.

“It’s these very low-tech things, but they mean so much to the characters. And it’s that pressure we all feel during the holidays—you want it to be right, but it can bring out the worst in people,” he continues with a laugh. “You have to forgive and forget—ultimately, Christmas Day has a way of taking care of all that.”

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