And “Friends” was a rip-off of “Down the Shore.” No original ideas anymore.

The beauty of “A Christmas Story” is it’s jaundiced view of Christmas. The movie is a hodgepodge of a number of stories that Jean Shepherd wrote for Playboy back in the ‘60s, and collected in a wonderfully snide book called “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.” Shepherd was a nasty curmudgeon, hated mankind in…