Regardless, Merry Christmas

You realize that it's not a proper Christmas season unless the realist killjoys among us start whining about It's a Wonderful Life."

This year, we have two contenders for top curmudgeon.

The saga of small-town hero George Bailey saving Bedford Falls from the despicable Henry Potter "grievously misrepresents the truth," writes George Michelsen Foy in Psychology Today. "In the real world, I would argue, Potter is winning . . . In the richest country that has ever existed . . . the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owns 32 percent of all the wealth, while the bottom 90 percent own 30 percent."

And Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown used the movie as some sort of white-supremacy allegory in a case about whether it violates the First Amendment to compel a Web designer to create a same-sex wedding site. "I want to do video depictions of It's a Wonderful Life' and knowing the movie very well I want to be authentic, so only White children and families can be customers for that particular product."

In the spirit of yuletide grouchiness, I could complain that nearly all Christmas movies are similarly flawed.

Miracle on 34th Street attempts to prove Santa exists by bringing to court sacks of mail addressed to him from the U.S. Postal Service - how believable is it that the Post Office is a beloved institution and the federal government a trusted source?

A Christmas Carol strains credibility by asking us to accept that a nasty old man with a lifetime of meanness can be transformed into a saint by one sleepless night of bad dreams.

And in A Christmas Story, of course, Ralphie's hunger for a Red Ryder BB gun illustrates the gross commercialization that has turned the holiday into a consumer-driven materialistic frenzy.

After that, I could go one of two ways in my holiday rant.

I could get personal.

Instead of wishing my brother in Texas and my sister in Indianapolis a happy holiday, I could berate them for abandoning me in Fort Wayne, creating a fractured family no one would ever make a Christmas movie about. I would rag my brother over the phone about his status as