My three favorite Christmas tales are any incarnation of “A Christmas Carol,” “White Christmas,” and “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
All three books/movies/whatevers have a similar component that runs through them: salvation of some sort. Ebenezer Scrooge is saved by four ghosts (not all with the personality of Casper, either). The old, jaded general from World War II gets a boost from two of his former soldiers who have made it big in Hollywood, and who — in turn — learn a little bit about the other side of life from two sisters who just want to make it themselves. And George Bailey realizes, through an angelic apparition, what a difference he’s made in people’s lives just at the moment he’s considering suicide because of business problems.
Though I prefer “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol” to the real dramas, I’ll take the George C. Scott version when it comes to real people. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen that views Scrooge as a victim of his own single-minded quest for money, and not just some irascible old coot who’d rather see poor people starve in prisons.
The point of all of the aforementioned, though, is that through some pretty bleak periods in our lives optimism shines. The ghosts do their jobs. Scrooge emerges whole. A little giddy perhaps (well, a lot giddy, really) but intact. The soldiers put on a big show for the general, Der Bingel and Rosemary Clooney kiss and make up, and it snows. Not only that, tears are streaming down your cheeks when the general realizes he’s being honored by his former platoon. And ditto when George looks up at the ringing bell on the Christmas tree at the end of the movie and says, “Atta boy, Clarence.”
This is what we need. Optimism. Things couldn’t be worse for some people. They’ve lost jobs. They’ve lost cherished loved ones. They can’t see beloved family members. Can’t go anywhere … do anything. It just doesn’t even seem like Christmas, even though there are probably more lit houses this year than I’ve ever seen. People seem to understand that — at least where the lights are concerned — we’re responsible for creating our own happiness sometimes.
This isn’t Hollywood, nor is it Dickensian London. This is the real world, and the most serious and pervasive health crisis in any of our lifetimes has stuck its miserable, rotten nose into our midst and sucked all the air out of it. This reminds me of the Bedford Falls portrayed when Clarence the angel was showing George Bailey what the place would have been like if he’d never been born — mean, heartless and tawdry. George had kept it from getting that way.
So what do we need now? I’d say some combination of all three movies. We definitely need to be reminded, whether it’s through the astral plane of evil or goodness, that things are never as hopeless as they may seem sometimes. And then we need to turn around and do something nice … something noble. Wallace and Davis saw how a great general was severely down on his luck and moved mountains to give the man his dignity back. There was really nothing in it for them. They were already stars of the brightest magnitude. But they saw a chance to lift someone’s spirits and set out to do it.
Can we do that? Are we able to remove ourselves from our own cocoons of misery and self-pity over the many ways COVID has tortured us and, as they say, pay it forward? I’m thinking that the best Christmas present may be the one we give ourselves: the inner glow of knowing that you made someone whose life has been exceptionally difficult or tragic in this horribly wretched year just a little more bearable at just the right time of the year.
So hee haw and Merry Christmas. And — as the child said — “God bless us, every one!”
