It's Meant to Be the Happy Time of Year

In It’s A Wonderful Life, a man loses everything and very nearly decides not to live anymore— everybody knows about suicide rates and Christmas—crushed in the jaws of money and expectation in a world in which rich people get richer and their wealth runs on the fuel of everybody else’s ground-up desperate little lives. To experience the love his community can offer him, he has to reach the lowest point of his life, so that he can be lifted back upward by a collective grace. That grace is made out of the love he has generated amongst his neighbors over the course of his life in Bedford Falls, but it’s also made out of money, because that’s the language available. Even in this story about hope, the rules of the world’s cruelty do not ease. The evil rich man isn’t defeated, he’s just momentarily annoyed. The goodwill at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life is impossibly moving because it is a tiny gesture of warmth against an overwhelming and immutable cold, out beyond the warm windows.

Christmas is an incredibly depressing holiday, one about desperation and loss, about what we don’t have measured against what we are supposed to have, about how expectation always leads to disappointment, about how everything is money and there is never enough of it, about puny little human celebrations of light and warmth thrown up against the massive and enveloping cruelty and darkness and cold. We try to fight a brutal and uncaring world with small and stupid and useless weapons, presents and songs and lights and decorations, tiny hands joined together, dancing as fast as we can.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

"My, how foolish I am!" my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. "You know what I've always thought?" she asks in a tone of discovery and not smiling at me but a point beyond. "I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when he came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are"—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—"just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes."