It's a low-budget movie about a sort-of-dysfunctional family. It follows a boy's quest for a weapon that would now be illegal at any school. It was based on a book by a man who once said, "Childhood seems good in retrospect because we were not yet aware of the basic truth: that we're all losers." How, then, did a piece of work as prickly as 1983's "A Christmas Story" become as much a part of America's Christmas as stockings, eggnog and jolly old elves, earning annual round-the-clock holiday broadcasts on TNT? "There's something in that movie that everybody can relate to," says Jim Clavin, a Dumont, N.J., businessman who runs a Web site honoring the radio host who spun the tales the movie was based on. "It's almost like watching your own biography." "Everybody always had something special they wanted for Christmas - in this case, the BB gun," says Clavin, 50. "Then there's shopping for the Christmas tree, there's the kid brother, there's the typical father figure. (The movie) has an appeal to everybody. It's like watching my life." The film's plot: In Indiana about 1940, during a snowy Christmas season, little Ralphie Parker, 9, longs for "an official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle." Forget it, he's told by harried Mom, growly Dad and stressed-out Santa: "You'll shoot your eye out." Ralphie endures endless kid-sized trials: A bully with "yellow eyes" and a rancid coonskin cap terrorizes him. He blurts out the big daddy of all obscenities and gets his mouth washed out with soap. His long-awaited Little Orphan Annie Secret Society Decoder Pin translates a radio program's top-secret message as "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." Even Santa is a scary fraud. But Ralphie hangs tough and ends up getting his BB gun. His faith is rewarded. Christmas works after all. The film still hasn't knocked Frank Capra's 1946 "It's a Wonderful Life" off its pedestal as The Official American Christmas Movie - but that likely will happen before long. For today's audiences, "A Christmas Story" has many virtues: The film's quick pace, modest running time (94 minutes) and color photography run rings around the molasses-slow, black-and-white "Wonderful Life." And though both are set in the past, "A Christmas Story" is the past through a sardonic '80s lens - it feels like a modern movie in a way "Wonderful Life" never will. "I think ('A Christmas Story') will last for the next half-century," actor Darren McGavin, who played Ralphie's "Old Man," said a few years ago. "It says, 'That's the way people lived then.' . . . It's true. That's the way it was." * Every story has a beginning, and this one started with radio humorist Jean Shepherd, who died in 1999 at age 78. (A man with a woman's name: It wasn't pronounced like the French. Things like that force you to be funny.) Shepherd had made a career of spinning tales about his Indiana upbringing, some real, some fictional, on New York's WOR. "He was a great talker," Clavin says. "It was like he was sitting there next to you, talking just to you." Shepherd turned those radio stories into a nostalgic 1966 novel called "In God We Trust (All Others Pay Cash)." That book became the basis for "A Christmas Story"; Shepherd co-wrote the screenplay; Bob Clark, a Shepherd fan best known for the raunchy 1981 teen movie "Porky's," directed. That's Shepherd's rich voice you hear as the movie's narrator, the adult Ralphie. Shepherd's comic spirit could be famously black; he said in 1961, "Childhood seems good in retrospect because we were not yet aware of the basic truth: that we're all losers, that we're destined to die and death is a defeat." Neither he nor director Clark ever saw the film as a warm-and-fuzzy kids' movie, but as something darker, more truthful - "a sardonic, different twist on the idea of Christmas," as Clark put it. The movie was a modest success in 1983, taking in about $19 million. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called Ralphie's terrifying trip to the department-store Santa, shoveling kids along assembly-line-style and chanting "Ho! Ho! Ho!" like a North Pole curse, "the best visit to Santa I've ever seen." The movie, like thousands of others, drifted to television and entered stations' holiday rotations - it was titled "A Christmas Story," after all. And somehow, it stuck. In repetition is born tradition, and these lines have been repeated in a hundred million homes: - Adult Ralphie (narrating): I struggled for exactly the right BB-gun hint. It had to be firm, but subtle. - Young Ralphie (overplaying his "hint"): Flick says he saw some grizzly bears near Polaski's candy store! - Adult Ralphie: Aunt Clara had for years not only perpetually labored under the delusion that I was 4 years old, but also a girl. - Ralphie's mom (after her son has had a bar of soap for supper): Rinse out and go to bed. - Adult Ralphie (as the family rips open gifts): We plunged into the cornucopia, quivering with desire and the ecstasy of unbridled avarice. Haven't seen the movie yet this year? It's running at least 17 times during December on TBS and TNT alone. On Christmas Eve, TNT launched its fourth annual "Christmas Story" marathon. And on Christmas Day, TNT is showing the movie around the clock. The first time the network did this Ralphie marathon, in 1998, it was only a "stunt," says TNT spokesman Walter Ward in Atlanta. When TNT saw how well viewers liked it, though, the stunt became a tradition. "People look forward to this," Ward says. "It's become a Christmas hit for us. People leave (their TVs) on." This seasonal "Christmas Story" barrage can be a bit much, even for a diehard fan like New Jersey's Clavin, who created a Web site, flicklives.com, in 1999 to honor Shepherd. (Flick was the "Christmas Story" kid who learns the hard way not to lick a flagpole when it's below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Was he real? Yes. Did his tongue really get frozen to a pole? Probably not.) Clavin knows the drill: When he walks in the door of his house during December, the TV is on and the family is watching Ralphie, forever 9, forever reaching for his Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle. Ho ho ho. "I come home every night and it's on," Clavin says. "We can almost lip-synch the whole thing."