In recent years, there has arisen a new Christmas tradition between Karen and me. She'll set the TV to TNT, where they show 24 hours of A Christmas Story; I will (inevitably, after that many viewings) begin to notice continuity errors, and she will grumble at me for daring to say anything "bad" about the Sacred Movie.

Stuff like Ralph's friend Schwartz coming out of the house two doors down from Ralph's, but Adult Narrator Ralph later saying that Schwartz lives three blocks away. Or Miss Shields being able to erase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and write "What I want for Christmas" in under four seconds, without the noise of chalk on chalkboard. Or the line of children waiting to see Santa mysteriously disappearing when Ralph is in Santa's lap, but then reappearing after he's been sent down the chute.

It's not that I look for such things, they just kind of jump out at me.

Well, some things I do consciously look for. For example, the Little Orphan Annie "secret code" — I've always been interested in codes and ciphers, so when "Pierre Andre" said to set the decoder pin to B-2, I took a good look at the close-ups of the decoder pin. The letters and numbers both ran sequentially, making it an easy substitution cipher. So if the first two numbers are 12 and 11, there's no way the message could be "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine", because the first two numbers translated to the letters "L" and "K", respectively.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great movie. The whole cast, but especially Peter Billingsley, did a fantastic job, and I don't really mind watching it over and over again once a year (though I do rag on Karen about it, since she rags on me for watching a DVD and then immediately playing it again with the commentary audio track.