EDITOR’S NOTE: I am so sorry. This was on the site on December 15, 2017.

In 1978, we had no idea when we’d see a new Star Wars. We didn’t have them every single year, like we’re all celebrating right now. No, we had our comics and toys, but no other new media. So it was with great excitement that my three-year-old brother and my six-year-old self gathered in front of the TV on November 17, 1978 to get a whole new adventure.

It’s Life Day — the Christmas of the Star Wars universe. Chewbacca just wants to get home, but the Empire is on his tail.

Meanwhile, on his home planet of Kashyyk, Chewie’s family hopes for him to be there. His wife, Mallatobuck, scans for starships and calls Luke Skywalker and R2D2. Yes, everyone from Star Wars is in this, even noted crank Harrison Ford.

She also gets in touch with Saun Dann (Art Carney from The Honeymooners? Yes. Don’t freak out just yet.) and tells him to look for Chewbacca and Han. Meanwhile, Chef Gormaanda (Harvey Korman from The Carol Burnett Show) teaches her how to cook via a hologram.

Saun brings Life Day gifts for everyone, including virtual reality porn featuring Diahann Carroll as an alien for Attichitcuk, Chewbecca’s dad. This sequence will bend your mind and make you humble. Keep the Force strong and your fast forward button handy, as the song in this scene, “This Minute Now” invites the wookiee to have a fantasy and experience the alien woman.

Let me reiterate what just happened: kids tuned in for Star Wars and got to see Chewbacca’s dad polish Vader’s helmet. He was shooting womprats in Beggar’s Canyon. Releasing the Special Edition. Dare I say, jumping to de-light speed. Communicating with Red Leader One. You know what I’m saying. And I think you do.

Han and Chewie land on the planet, but the Imperial army is looking for them. They get distracted by food and Jefferson Starship singing a song called “Light the Sky on Fire” — again, yes, I am not shitting you — while Chewbacca’s son Lumpawarrump goes to watch a cartoon.

Ths cartoon — produced by Canada’s Nelvana — is the best part of the show. This is the first appearance of Boba Fett, who acts as if he is a hero. It’s short and sweet, with stylized artwork and plenty of action. It’s the best part of the show, which isn’t much of a feat. It’s said that the animation was based on the artwork of Jean “Mœbius” Geraud at the request of George Lucas. Mœbius was part of the crew that Alejandro Jodorowsky had assembled to create his version of Dune, along with Dan O’Bannon, who helped create the effects for Star Wars. Interestingly, many believe that Lucas stole Jabba the Hutt’s design from Jodorowksy’s idea of what Baron Harkonnen should look like.

Harvey Korman shows up again, then the Empire shuts down the planet Tatooine. We return to one of the best parts of Star Wars, the Mos Eisley Cantina, where we meet the owner, Ackmena (Bea Arthur from The Golden Girls. Yep. Bea Arthur.) and Harvey Korman shows up again! And Richard Pryor is there, too!

Then, in defiance of the Empire’s curfew, Ackmena sings “Good Night, but not Goodbye” with Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, the cantina band. If you can make it through this part of the special, you must have a high midichlorian count. Of note, Greedo is in the bar showing no ill effects of being shot at first, as well as one of the rats from The Food of the Gods.

Chewbacca’s son runs from the Imperial troopers but is saved by his father and Han. Then, everyone goes to the festival at the Tree of Life. Everyone appears and a song about Life Day, which somehow has the same theme as the Star Wars theme, is sung by Princess Leia (Fisher demanded that she be allowed to sing in this special). We sit through b-roll of the original film and then see the wookiees eat dinner.

This has never been broadcast again or sold, as George Lucas sees it as a major source of embarrassment. Then again, he created the prequels, too.

If you’re wondering why the wookiees speak only in their native language and it’s never translated, thank Lucas. He fought for this against the wishes of writer Bruce Vilanch. Yes, that Bruce Vilanch. This means that for minutes at a time, all you hear are yells and grunts instead of English.

But this wasn’t the last Star Wars Christmas project. In 1980, Meco Monardo, who recorded the amazing combination of disco and science fiction entitled Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, created Christmas in the Stars, an album that found C-3PO and R2-D2 travel to a droid factory that makes toys for S. Claus. It’s also the first audio appearance of Jon Bon Jovi, singing on the song “R2-D2, We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

If you truly love Star Wars and the holidays, you have so many other ways to spend your time. Don’t give in to the forbidden fruit that is the Star Wars Holiday Special. My brother and I had no idea of the horrifying monstrosity we’d face back in 1978. Imagine the feeling Grand Moff Tarkin had watching the Death Star explode, except our pain went on for two hours. Two hours is a long time when you’re three and six.

It hasn’t gotten any better with age. In fact, it’s all curdled with time, like a glass of Thala-Siren milk that’s been left out overnight.

This Jean Shepherd story isn’t about a holiday but is about summer vacations. But first, work. Ralphie (Jerry O’Connell), Flick (Cameron Johann) and Schwartz (Ross Eldridge) are working a horrific first career at Scott’s Used Furniture Palace — run by a character played by Shepherd — while dreaming of having a few days off. Before that, the family dog Fuzzhead (Shepherd’s real life dog Daphne) goes missing and ends up living in a mansion.

The trip to get to the trailer park of the title is described in the words of Shepherd as a journey “beset on all sides by strange creatures, the lost mariner searches and searches, in the Sargasso sea of life.”

James Sikking, who plays The Old Man, is also in The Night God Screamed, which is pretty awesome casting. Mom is played by Dorothy Lyman, who depending on when you watched TV was a pretty big deal. For those who watched soaps in the afternoon, she was on a ton of soap operas, including A World Apart, The Edge of Night, as Gwen Parrish Frame on Another World, Rebecca Whitmore on Generations, Bonnie Roberts on The Bold and the Beautiful and most importantly, she was Opal Sue Gardner on All My Children. If you watched TV at night, you knew her as Naomi, the daughter-in-law on Mama’s Family.

Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss was co-producted by Disney, public TV’s American Playhouse and Boston public TV station WGBH. While funded by Disney, they had nothing to do with production. After airing on their channel, it moved to public television.

This was the last film Shepherd made for television. He wanted to turn his stories into a series, but by 1988, he was making from the reruns and home video sales from A Christmas Story and decided to make another movie. That would be 1994’s It Runs in the Family: My Summer Story or as it is better remembered today, A Summer Story.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Originally airing on February 11, 1985 on PBS’ American Playhouse, the fourth feature film of the Parker family starts in a movie theater as an older Ralphie (Jean Shepherd, who wrote these stories) relates that seeing a movie by a Polish director reminds him of Josephine Cosnowski (Katherine Kamhi), the neighbor who became his first serious love.

Barbara Bolton and Jay Ine return as mom and Randy, but young Ralphie is Pete Kowanko and The Old Man is played by George Coe, a castmember of season one of SNL. Sadly, James Broderick, who played the role in The Phantom of the Open Hearth and The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters died of thyroid cancer in 1982.

The Old Man always said, “There has to be a God if there’s beer. All that goodness just ain’t accidental.”

This made me think about my father, lost a week or so before Thanksgiving, and as Ralphie takes his little dog up the steps and he remembers, his old self weary through time, that there was no better holiday than before being an adult and when Thanksgiving really meant something, that it was something to look forward to and now, all of life is just appointments and time moves so fast as we march to our destiny. It made my eyes burn I cried so hard, my very own little dog next to me with no idea just how much I missed being a kid and knowing my father was one door away.

Directed by Richard Barlett and written by Jean Shepherd, who also wrote the original stories that these were based on. You will probably know A Christmas Story, but Ralphie Parker had several adventures before and after that film.

James Broderick returns as The Old Man, Barbara Bolton is back as mom and Shepherd again plays the older Ralphie, who starts the story visiting South of the Border and buying fireworks. In the actual movie, he’s played by Matt Dillon and Jay Ine is Randy.

Ralphie is high school aged here and excited to meet his friend’s attractive cousin named Pamela, a date he eventually botches. That said, the main part of the story is all about his father’s obsession with fireworks and his mother’s chain letter that keeps wash rags coming to their house.

If A Christmas Story has its holiday, so does this. The only downer is the repeated reference to fireworks as dago bombs, but I guess it was the 1940s and that’s how people referred to Italians. It was how my grandmother did until her death a year or so ago, despite my dad being, yes, Italian.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I saw someone whining that the new A Christmas Story Christmas recast the mother and was a sequel to a movie that didn’t need a sequel. Little did they know that it was the ninth — if you count the A Christmas Story Live! TV movie — story of the Parker family, a series of films that began seven years before its best-remembered installment.

All of these stories are based on the writing of Jean Shepherd, who often told stories of his childhood in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana (he grew up in Hammond) on the radio. After publishing those stories in Playboy, but he never intended to be a writer.

Hugh Hefner claimed that The Giving Tree author Shel Silverstein asked Shepherd to write down his radio stories, but he never saw himself being a writer. So Silverstein recorded the shows off the radio, transcribed them and worked with Shepherd to turn them into written works.

His first book, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, contains many of the stories of the Parker family, stories that despite having the names of real people and real places, are all from Shepherd’s imagination. These memories come in the form of Ralph, who has returned to his home town as an adult, telling these stories to his friend, Flick, who now runs the bar where their fathers used to drink.

Four of the stories in the book — “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,” “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message, or The Asp Strikes Again,” “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” and “Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil,” as well as “The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds” from Shepherd’s second book Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories make up A Christmas Story.

But before that, on December 23, 1976, The Phantom of the Open Hearth aired as an episode of PBS’s anthological television series Visions. It features Shepherd as the adult Ralphie and David Elliot as the teen version in a story of Ralphie trying to decide between taking Daphne Bigelow (Tobi Pilavin) or Wanda Hickey (Roberta Wallach) to the school dance, all while his father (James Broderick) anticipates winning a major award that this film explains is a leg lamp because the contest was sponsored by Ne-Hi Soda and that was their logo. While all thatis going on, Randy (Adam Goodman) annoys Ralphie and mom (Barbara Bolton) is obsessed with getting free fine china from the movie theater.

Directed by Fred Barzyk (Jean Shepherd’s America, The Lathe of Heaven) and David Loxton (Countdown to Looking Glass) from a script by Shepherd, this led to another PBS movie, The Great American Fourth Of July and was almost a TV series in 1978. The pilot was directed by John Rich and written by Shepherd and was also called The Phantom of the Open Hearth. That’s where the line “Oh, fudge (but I didn’t say fudge)!” comes from.

Its a little jarring to see the adult adventures of Ralphie while still interesting to get a different perspective.

You can watch this on YouTube.