Christmas Movie Time

Here it is two days before Christmas and I’ve already eaten so many cookies that I feel like a drunk in the middle of a four-day bender.  Well, there’s no avoiding the excesses.  Camera Girl is fiendish in her strategies to kill me with food.  She should hide these evil foods somewhere far away.  Instead, she lays them out all over the kitchen where even a man with a will of iron must succumb.  I’ve kept up my exercise regimen as best I can but exercise deals in hundreds of calories while pastries are measured in the thousands.  The pain, the pain.

Yesterday I watched, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in its entirety.  That’s something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years.  Many years ago, I overdosed on it.  I watched it too many times and it became played out.  But yesterday I found it fresh and enjoyable.  Of course, every scene in the movie was extremely familiar down to the slightest word and even gesture of the actors.  But I was able to appreciate just how fine the acting and directing was.  And as highly emotional as the ending of the movie obviously is I wasn’t put off at all by it.  Maybe this American Christmas Carol is fitting for the time and place we live in.  Maybe people are ready to hope for miracles again.  It’s certainly true that we need a few of them.  I’m not going to claim that heaven interceded and put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Kamala Harris.  At best maybe a divine force kept him from intersecting with that bullet that grazed his ear.  I’m afraid that heaven is not going to let us off the hook for the situation we find ourselves in.  But maybe we are being given a chance to straighten things out on our own.  The headaches that will entail are already beginning to emerge.  Well, we’ll leave the future to next year for now.

Today it was time to begin my annual “Christmas Carol” viewing experience.  I chose the George C Scott version.  And it did not disappoint.  Marley’s ghost, the Cratchit Christmas dinner and the final scene in Scrooge’s office provide all the correct notes to ensure my approval.  And as always Tiny Tim is pathetically frail and impossibly uncomplaining.  I noted to Camera Girl at the appropriate moment that Mrs. Cratchit’s railing against Scrooge during the toast moment was pitch perfect.  I could imagine and probably have heard equivalent protest from Camera Girl when some acquaintance of ours overstepped the bounds of propriety according to Camera Girl’s standards.  She does have a highly developed sense of outrage, especially when she decides that I will have to be the one to enforce it.  Women have that propensity.  Bless them.

Well, time is running out.  I’ll have to fit in the Alistair Sim and Reginald Owen versions in tomorrow.  That should be doable but I don’t think I’ll be able to get through “The Holly and Ivy” tomorrow.  Well, that can wait till Christmas Eve morning.  Christmas Eve and Christmas will be full days and I am not sure what my posting will be like.  The quotes and the photos are all pre-scheduled but my patented rants are a daily chore so I’ll have to do the best I can to put together something fitting.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  But Christmas week is here and away we go.