Turn on the leg lamp, be sure to drink your Ovaltine and try not to shoot your eye out while spending Christmas at the house from “A Christmas Story.”
The iconic home where Ralphie and the Parker family lived in the 1983 movie -- with yellow siding, green trim and a leg lamp glowing in the middle of the front room window -- offers year-round overnight stays and currently is available on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
For fans who want to spend the upcoming holiday in the house as badly as Ralphie wanted a Red Ryder BB Gun, the two-night minimum stay for Christmas costs $3,995 per night. The house, located in Cleveland, Ohio, but set in Indiana for the movie, has single-night rates the remainder of the year starting as low as $495 per night and can be booked at www.achristmasstoryhouse.com.
“What better way to spend your Christmas than to relive your favorite Christmas movie?” said Brian Jones, the homeowner and lifelong “A Christmas Story” fan. “If you love the movie, you’re going to love the house. Being a fan myself, I worked to make it how it is from a fan’s perspective.”
The house provides overnight guests with a third-floor loft featuring a living room, bedroom and full bathroom and a second-floor eat-in kitchen, all of which is inaccessible to those taking daily public tours of the house. Overnight guests get full access to the public portions of the house from a half-hour after tours end until a half-hour before tours resume the following day. Six guests are permitted to stay overnight, and they can even sleep in Ralphie and Randy’s bedroom.
Or cook a meatloaf dinner, put on a snowsuit where you can’t put your arms down or decode a message from Little Orphan Annie in the bathroom.
“When you see the house and step inside, it feels like going home since you’ve seen it so many times in the movie,” Jones said. “It’s nostalgic.”
Entertainment News
Recreating “A Christmas Story” house
Refurbishing the house went much smoother than the Old Man trying to glue together his broken leg lamp.
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It was the leg lamp, along with the Navy and eBay, that played a role in the house ultimately being restored to its cinematic self in 2006.
Years earlier, Jones attended the Naval Academy in hope of becoming a jet pilot. Those dreams were dashed when he failed a vision test and was reassigned to be an intelligence officer.
“It was alright, but I was still bummed,” Jones said. “So, my parents made and sent me a leg lamp as kind of a gag gift to cheer me up because it was a major award in the movie. I asked “Where’d you get this thing? This is cool.’ They said, ‘We didn’t get it. We had to make it. Nobody sells those.’”
So, Jones decided to. He started his own business, making the career transition from Naval officer to entrepreneur leg lamp manufacturer.
“I had an exit interview with my captain, he was like, ‘You’re gonna do what?’” Jones said. “He didn’t get it. I was like, ‘I’m going to sell leg lamps, sir.’ He was like, ‘Well, good luck with that.’”
Jones produced them in his San Diego condo and sold approximately 500 leg lamps in his first year of operation.
When his wife Beverly, also in the Navy and heading to the Middle East at the time, e-mailed Jones an eBay listing showing the house from “A Christmas Story” listed with a starting price of $99,990, suddenly the ideal storefront to sell leg lamps presented itself.
“I went right over to MapQuest to see where Cleveland, Ohio was,” Jones said. “It took me maybe about 15 seconds to realize, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna buy that.’”
Jones, who was 28 at the time, offered the homeowners $150,000 for the house if they were to stop the bidding. They accepted. Jones acquired a large piece of Hollywood memorabilia on 0.12 acres at 3159 11th Street – known in the movie as Cleveland Street.
“When I wrote my wife an email saying I bought it, she wrote me back one line saying, ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,’” Jones said. “I just basically spent all the money we had – that was going to be for a house for us in California – on a beat down rental property.”
Jones, in the pre-Airbnb era, initially considered turning the house into a bed and breakfast. When he visited for the first time and instantly felt the movie magic, he was convinced to recreate the house inside and out.
Two years and $240,000 in renovations later, he did just that, giving the now 80,000 fans who tour the house each year the opportunity to write their own Christmas story.
Expanding “The Christmas Story” campus and experience
The Bumpus hounds won’t disturb your stay or ruin your turkey dinner.
But the Bumpus house, next door to the Parker house, most certainly stands and offers additional lodging. Acquired in 2018, the house was transformed into a pair of suites that sleep up to 14 people. It’s one of the multiple neighboring houses Jones purchased to expand the “A Christmas Story” campus.
“It creates a whole ‘Christmas Story’ house experience,” Jones said.
That includes the gift shop, which is located across the street and offers everything from leg lamps in “Fragile” crates to Red Ryder BB Guns; and the museum, which is also across the street and includes artifacts from the movie like character-worn wardrobes, the blackboard from Miss Shield’s classroom, and one of the six BB guns used by Ralphie in the movie that Jones called the “holy grail” or the museum’s collection.
‘It’s like seeing the house you grew up in’
But the main draw is Ralphie’s house, where roughly 15 percent of the movie was filmed, including exterior scenes and some interior. That includes classic scenes like Ralphie’s backyard shootout with Black Bart (the original shed from which still stands), the leg lamp crate delivery, and Mom and Dad admiring the snowstorm through the living room window (the snow actually was instant potato flakes).
“It’s kind of funny to see people get so emotional because they love the movie so much,” said Jones, now 45 and a Florida resident. “It’s like seeing a long-lost relative or the house you grew up in because the movie was on all the time when they were a kid.”
Inside, guests can put on a pink bunny suit from Aunt Clara, curse out the furnace, or unwrap an official Red Ryder carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.
Then go to the backyard and practice shooting in the very spot where Ralphie once did.
“Hey, that’s up to you,” Jones said. “If you stay at the house and want to shoot a BB gun, go for it. Just be careful. You’ll shoot your eye out.”
