Second only to "It's A Wonderful Life" on TV Guide's list of the greatest holiday films of all time, "A Christmas Story" (1983) is an amalgam of warm-heartedly cynical vignettes hung on the through line of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker's quest for a Red Ryder airgun. Based on the stories and monologues of late radio personality and Hammond, Ind., native Jean Shepherd (catalogued in his best-selling book "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"), "A Christmas Story" looks at Depression-era Midwestern Americana with satire biting at the heels of its sentimentality. The low budget movie, narrated by Shepherd, went from a modest hit (MGM spent more time and money producing and promoting the box office bomb "Yentl" that year) to a contemporary classic, thanks to repeated television broadcasts. Basic cable's Turner Broadcasting Station annually telecasts "A Christmas Story" 24-hour marathon in late December. According to Variety magazine, 38.4 million people -- one-sixth of the United States -- regularly tune in to watch mothers, teachers and even Santa Claus warn BB gun happy Ralphie not to shoot his eye out. In an interview with editorial commentator Alan Colmes, Shepherd admitted his original short story, "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails The Cleveland Street Kid," was a war parable -- not an allegory for American Christmas capitalism. Nonetheless -- across multiple generations and religious creeds -- few lines of dialogue are as synonymous with the holidays as "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" What continues to dramatically change, however, are the social contexts through which Red Ryders -- introduced by the Daisy Airgun corporation in 1940 -- were once considered wholly appropriate Christmas presents. "The BB gun is a symbol representing 'that one thing' we all wanted for Christmas and were afraid we wouldn't get, whether it was a gun, a Barbie doll or a toy crane," said Jim Clavin, creator and webmaster of flicklives.com, dedicated to Shepherd's work and legacy. "BB guns, air rifles and six-shooters were the ultimate Christmas gifts for kids in [the 1940s and '50s], in part due to the popularity of westerns on television. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger and Cisco Kid were Saturday morning addictions for us as kids. "It was a different society back then," Clavin continued. "Parents taught their kids that airguns were not to point at one another. They taught us to respect what might happen if [airguns] were used incorrectly. "Respect with kids today has 'faded into the sunset' since it is not stressed enough in the home, and the entertainment industry has made it irrelevant [through] so many of the television shows, movies and music lyrics." John Ford, co-curator of the Rogers Daisy Airgun Museum in Rogers, Ark., said many mothers and fathers in the 1940s and '50s had fewer reservations about giving their children Red Ryder guns. "Receiving an air rifle no longer represents a right of passage for a 10- or 11-year-old child," Ford explained. "Some of the antigun sentiment that comes and goes in this country has something to do with it. And then, of course, there are so many other things for kids to do these days. "When I was a kid, we all had our airguns that we carried around. They were a part of us most of the time, and we would never think to do anything with them that would hurt another person. It's a different story these days. "Now there's an awful lot of kids sitting in front of the television with a joystick in their hands," Ford continued. "There are still a lot of youngsters getting involved in organized air rifle competitions. But there are more kids involved in other activities like baseball and soccer and football. From the time kids today turn seven-years-old, they are involved in [organized] activities that didn't exist when I was growing up. Subsequently, air rifle ownership and responsibly are not the same activities they used to be 50 or 60 years ago." When "A Christmas Story" went into production, Shepherd approached Daisy to recreate the airgun he owned as a child and later wrote about -- a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle with a compass and sundial in the stock. A search through Daisy's archives revealed the gun Shepherd described never actually existed. "The Red Ryder featured in 'A Christmas Story' was really a combination of two different guns the author must have remembered when he wrote his story," Ford explained. "There was the Buck Jones rifle, named after another cowboy movie hero. Red Ryder was named after a popular cowboy comic strip and movie hero, but the Red Ryder gun did not have a compass and sundial in the stock. The Buck Jones model did." Regardless of the historical inaccuracy, Daisy made six "faux Red Ryders" for the film. Daisy later commercially produced a line of Red Ryder airguns complete with compasses and sundials. Called the Christmas Dream Model, Daisy sold them throughout 1984. To raise money for the preservation of their archives, the Daisy museum made and sold 1,000 Christmas Dreams last year, commemorating "A Christmas Story's" 20th anniversary. "But when Shepherd wrote his memoir, he remembered the name 'Red Ryder' because that model was so popular and the name was so well-known," Ford continued. "An awful lot of kids went to see Saturday afternoon penny matinees featuring Red Ryder serials. "There's a lot of nostalgia for the name," Ford continued, "and for Daisy air rifles in general. So when people gather around the television to watch 'A Christmas Story' and grandpa tells his grandkids, 'that's the Red Ryder I had when I was kid,' it's kind of funny because 'A Christmas Story' is being nostalgic about a gun that never really existed." Shepherd used artistic license to describe his Red Ryder and make it "more desirable," Clavin explained. "Shepherd's voice was his fortune. He had a magnificent way of telling a story and a voice that locked in your attention. "As so many of his radio fans have written me over the years, we all thought Shep was at the other end of that radio talking 'only to me,'" Clavin continued. "It was as if he were sitting there next to me, relating a story of his childhood just as my grandfather or father would. This effect was amplified by the fact that he loved to tell stories and loved to make people laugh, and laugh at themselves." The further we get away from our kid years, "the better we seem to remember ourselves shooting our Red Ryder airguns with impossible precision," Ford added, with a laugh. "It's like a big fish story. A guppy caught in the morning turns into a bass when you're telling the story that night." At a time when the world seems to be moving at light speed, "we don't take the time to set back and reflect on the past" as Shepherd did, Clavin said. "We keep thinking of what went wrong today," Clavin continued. "Only when we are sitting in front of the television watching 'A Christmas Story' do we have some of those memories jogged loose and take the time to remember." Clavin launched his Web site as a hobby, using his interest in Shepherd's work as a theme. People who visit flicklives.com contribute pictures and information from their Shepherd collections. The website currently has hundreds of pages, including a database of over 2,000 broadcasts of Shepherd's radio shows. Shepherd's stories often went through a process of being told on the radio, written into short stories for magazines like Playboy, collected for books like "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" and used in PBS specials and films like "A Christmas Story," Clavin said. "Many of the characters he spoke of were real people in his real life," Clavin added. "The key to his success was telling the story in first person, which made his listeners really believe the stories were true." At the Daisy museum, an exhibit tracing the history of the Red Ryder airgun from the fall of 1940 to present day "gets the most ooh's and aah's as people come through," Ford said. "You'd be surprised how many collectors are interested in that kind of thing," Ford explained. "Several years ago, I had a guy who started talking about changes in the Red Ryder and he knew them right down to the different kinds of screws used at one time or another the forearm stock. "I thought, 'this is a whole lot more about the air rifle than I wanted to know,'" Ford added, with a chuckle. "There are folks who are very serious about their Red Ryders." As a father, grandfather and lifelong Daisy aficionado, Ford said it saddens him "that we are losing the innocence that having a Red Ryder during [the Depression] represented. "But that innocence is not limited to Red Ryder ownership," Ford continued. "I mean, everyone is going to be nostalgic about something. I'm going to think the good old days were the 1940s and '50s. College kids today are going to think the good old days were the 1980s and '90s. That's typical. "I can relate the loss of innocence to the gun I had as a kid -- other generations will relate the loss to something else they had as a kid. It's not exclusively about Red Ryders." Regardless of whatever "it" is, "there's undoubtedly a loss of something," Ford continued. "Maybe our kids are over-scheduled. They have everything mapped out for them. These days, when and where do they get to use their imaginations and daydream and create some of their own games and activities? "We have all their games and all their routines mapped out for them," Ford said. "We're creating what they're going to be nostalgic about, rather than letting them determine it on their own. "Perhaps that's the loss right there."