When my family and I first watched the classic movie, “A Christmas Story,” we could not believe the similarities in the lives of the family created by author Jean Shepherd and our own experiences. I believe that few families would fail to find a character or incident that they can relate to in this delightful film.

We first watched it on TV nearly 20 years ago, and were struck by the coincidental events in our own lives in Lockport. It seemed that it was “our story” and that the author must have known us or lived with us.

The opening scene pictures a middle-class home on Cleveland Street in a small Indiana town in the 1940s. We live in a similar house on Cleveland Place in a small city in upstate New York.

The various parallel incidents and experiences in the film transcend several generations of our family’s own oft-told stories.

I identified with several characters in the film including Ralphie, a 9-year-old boy with a passion for a Red Ryder Daisy BB gun, obsessing over it as his main request from Santa. My identification is as much with his experience as with the period. I, too, coveted the famous Daisy air rifle and was constantly cautioned that one could “shoot your eye out” or indeed might inflict similar injury to another party with this dreaded weapon.

In one scene a child places his tongue on a frozen pole in a schoolyard. If you ever had that experience, then you know the pain of pulling your frozen tongue (and some skin) off the cold metal. I actually put my tongue on the cold metal end of a Flexible Flyer sled and walked home from our neighborhood sledding hill with my tongue frozen to the sled. My mother removed it with some warm water after I arrived home, humiliated and in great pain.

My children noted with glee the similarities between the father, played by the late Darren McGavin, and myself. We had a coal furnace, a device that caused high anxiety and frustration to me and to this day is recalled with great disdain. In the film McGavin, as did I, spent hours in the basement of our late 19th century home cursing the infernal object.

Most readers have no experience with a coal-fired heating system. Believe me, it was miserable — too hot in spring, often too cold in winter, uncontrollable most of the time and when you awoke on a January morning and saw your breath coming from beneath the blankets pulled over your head, you knew the worst had happened, the fire had gone out during the night.

In the film, McGavin’s voice is heard emanating from the basement uttering unprintable expletives because of the furnace. My wife and children experienced the same response by me when the cast iron behemoth failed to function properly. I actually believe I invented some new ways to curse because of “the monster in the basement.”

We have a son, John, who could have been Ralphie, glasses and all. He did get a Daisy air rifle one Christmas and actually shot out a neighbor’s window. Thankfully he never shot his eye out.

We now own the 20-year anniversary DVD version of the movie and watch it over and over, never tiring of the parallels between the characters in the story and our own lives.

If you have somehow managed to avoid seeing the film, I strongly urge you to watch it this season. One channel runs the show 24 hours non-stop on Christmas. Don’t miss it.