Enter the Martini castle

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

It may have been 29 Thanksgivings ago that I first saw this, but I think it was 30 years, and that establishes a lot more elegant narrative, that I've been watching this for almost exactly half of my life, so let's go with that.

Thanksgiving 1983 (or maybe '84, but let's say '83) was a different world, so I was channel surfing on the cable and came upon the Charleston contest/swimming pool scene and stayed with it until a commercial, then surfed on. Maybe a half-hour later, I surfed onto the same scene on a different channel, and this time I believe I stayed with it.

In any case, though I got a late start, it has been part of my holiday-season idiom ever since; this was doubtless my twenty-somethingth screening, and it continues to reward me every time. Somehow, "Capra" remains for some a shorthand for simple-minded feel-good films. Whose mind is simple, then?

Oh, by the way, this year's title invokes the allusion of the title of my son-in-law's Xmas music sampler, which is mostly wonderful.