For the first time in my life, I have watched It’s A Wonderful Life. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it’s pretty good. I’m not a big Christmas person, and I always had a vague sense that it was a Christmas movie, so I never looked into it. But this year it occurred to me that everything I had ever picked up about it from popular culture (“When a bell rings an angel gets its wings”, “It’s in your house and his house”, and other things that have been on the Simpsons, mostly) had nothing to do with Christmas. I started wondering if it was a Christmas movie at all.

It is. I don’t think Jesus ever comes up or anything, and the depiction of angels is less in line with the teachings of Christianity than the pop-culture idea that people can become angels after death (which works in the movie’s favour, honestly). If I cared enough to make criteria for what qualifies as a Christmas movie (I do not, I’ll stick to Halloween for that) this would probably squeak by, but only barely so. You could probably remake this with the Christmas-set scenes being New Years Eve or George’s birthday, but I don’t feel strong enough to argue that, so sure, this is a Christmas movie. But, thankfully, it isn’t a movie about how the protagonist has to learn to love Christmas.

I’ve argued that the point of A Christmas Carol isn’t that Ebeneezer Scrooge learns to love Christmas, it’s that he learns to treat people better, which is something that should hopefully apply year-round. Here, George Bailey doesn’t even learn that much, he already believed it from the beginning. George is instead driven to despair by trying to live that way under the constant pressures of capitalism, and almost kills himself. I guess the message here is “don’t kill yourself because the masses might come together to help you” which is potentially less realistic than the angel coming to rescue him from suicide, but whatever. Everyone coming together selflessly to pitch in and help is literally my favourite ending to stories, so I’m on board.

I will say, it coulda been about half an hour shorter. I say that about ANY movie that exceeds two hours, and I don’t know what you could’ve cut (if I watch it again I’ll keep the snips in mind). But I wouldn’t cut the part where we learn what all the men in town do during the WWTwo. All movies should be required to have a montage of the cast going to war. I know a movie with the theme that “everything will turn out okay” is maybe not the place for it, but if they had killed off a character during that bit, it would have greatly appealed to me.