Favorite Holiday Movie

It's been about a few months since we gave up cable for our dvd collections, netflix, NPR, *gasp* books, projects.  It seems a bit quaint to read books or engage in needle crafts while listening to the radio. 

I admit, I don't miss the commercials or the mind numbing, lowest-common denominator aspect to television.  Movies and series come out on dvd so fast and our Netflix queues are so huge there isn't time to miss cable.

It will be the first holiday season in, hmmm, let's see, our entire lives, without  commercial television, very special holiday episodes of very special tv series and, of course, the holiday movies.  As a kid, my family watched the Rankin Bass-taculars.  You know the ones:  Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

My favorite holiday movie or special is the Frank Capra classic: It's a Wonderful Life.  While not my favorite Capra, it's pretty terrific.  How could it not be?  Jimmy Stewart in an alternate dimension?  Wacky drunken angel? 
Ultimately optimistic, but only after a grim turn of events that nearly breaks our hero, a standard theme in Capra movies.  It's got that good, old fashioned, mid-twentieth century, middle American charm.

A box office flop in it's time.  The show business fat cats said Capra was washed up.  Sixty-three years later and you can't escape the movie that people wouldn't pay to see in 1946.  What would Mr. Capra make of that?