Living in the present moment can be difficult, and our busy lives make it even more so, especially during the Christmas season. The season can weigh heavily, pulling us in a hundred directions. Our minds drift to memories of past Christmases that seem warmer, then quickly project into the future: Will Mom or Dad still be here? Will the children be alright when they leave?
Christmas stokes unease even as its rituals, such as midnight mass, carols, candles, and familiar prayers, wash over us. The season seems to demand presence; yet we often fall short, and it passes in a blur.
Losing gratitude for the present moment lies at the heart of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), the greatest Christmas film ever made. Jimmy Stewart, in his finest performance, portrays George Bailey, a family man who is forced to reconsider his life on a cold Christmas Eve. His life is shaped as much by what he’s missed as by what he has. He longs to leave Bedford Falls, to travel, to design magnificent buildings, to get from under Mr. Potter’s thumb. George’s unfulfilled dreams magnify his uneasiness and obscure the goodness around him.
Although the film has a veneer of sentimentality, beneath it Capra advances a subtle current of anxiety and postwar malaise. The film begins not with holiday cheer, but with desperate invocations.
Bedford Falls is quiet, with snow falling on empty streets as the worried voices of George’s friends and family begin praying: “I owe everything to George Bailey.” “Give him a break, God.” “I love him, dear Lord. Watch over him tonight.” Then the voices of his daughters, Janie and Zuzu, cried out, “Please bring Daddy back.”
The film darkens further at the end, just before the beautiful dawn. George, crushed beneath disgrace, financial ruin, and the threat of prison after Uncle Billy accidentally loses the Bailey Building and Loan’s $8,000 deposit, stands on a bridge with a life-insurance policy in his coat pocket. Suicide seems like the only way left to provide for his family and spare them the consequences of his failure.
Capra delivers George’s crisis of faith with restraint, avoiding cheap melodrama. George does not argue or protest. He simply jumps. The present is too overwhelming.
George is saved by Clarence Odbody, an ‘Angel Second Class’ and former clockmaker, who pulls him from the icy water and grants his fatal wish: To see the world as if he had never been born. As Clarence guides George, it becomes clear that Bedford Falls without him is bleaker, crueler, and stripped of its moral heart. George finally sees that his life’s value is measured not by his abandoned dreams but by the effects he has had on others. With this realization, he embraces life in the moment.
And what a moment it is, all captured on the silver screen. A portrait of a man’s full embrace of the heroic present. That is why we weep openly in front of our families every Christmas. In his bliss, George accepts everything, including that old knob that kept coming off his banister, and even the warrant for his arrest. “Isn’t it wonderful?” George says to the bank examiner. “I’m going to jail!”
But the people of Bedford Falls come, the money Uncle Billy lost is returned, and Janie strikes a chord on the piano and begins “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” They all join in. Harry arrives in his naval uniform and declares, “To my big brother, George. The richest man in town!” A bell rings, Clarence gets his wings, and all is right with the world.
Long before Capra put George Bailey on that bridge, St. Francis de Sales warned that distraction pulls us from the present. In Introduction to the Devout Life, he describes those who greedily dwell on meals before and after eating as “fit only to be scullions.” De Sales is not condemning the joys of food; he highlights how selfish impulses destroy the present by exposing how obsessions with the past and future erode gratitude, wasting our time on worry and wistfulness.
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American literature is crowded with similar casualties. Jay Gatsby cannot let go of the past and is consumed by it in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, men cling to pipe dreams because the present, stripped of illusion, is unbearable. Even Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find hides behind nostalgia until she is forced, at gunpoint, into a single, terrifyingly present moment of grace.
The Gospel of Luke describes the Nativity in these same terms, not cozy Christmas comfort, but fear met by awareness. When the angel appears to the shepherds, they are afraid. “Fear not,” the angel says, “For behold, I bring you good news of great joy.” The shepherds are called not out of their lives, but into the moment. Christmas does not remove their fear; it reorients it toward what really matters. That is why we love It’s a Wonderful Life. It does not offer a utopian Christmas, but it reminds us to be grateful for the quiet miracles we’ve already been given.
Pete Connolly is a writer and teacher based in West Chester, Pennsylvania.