It's a Wonderful Loop

Dear Bailey Building and Loan:

The one great thing about the holidays is the comfort of repetition. My favorite example of this used to be The Yule Log, a televised image of a burning fireplace that would run on an endless loop for a couple of hours on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day while songs of the season meeped away in the background. And Jimmy Stewart used to be the human Yule Log.

One of the old holiday traditions around my house was the serial viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, a.k.a. Mr. Smith Goes to Hell With Donna Reed. Once, long about this time every year, all around the old rudimentary cable box, this movie was playing on somewhere between 25 and 300 stations at roughly the same time. If a person were really gifted with the remote, and not gifted with anything remotely resembling an actual life, he could pop back and forth swiftly from one showing to another, and use the minuscule lag between the broadcasts to turn Mr. Potter into a old-school rap star:

"H-hh-happy (Hap-hap-happy) Nnnnew-new-new Year t–t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-o yy-oouuu. In-in-innnnnn j-j-j-jaill-ail-ail-ail-ail.”

If one were just a little slower, Potter sounded less like Kurtis Blow and more like Gary Cooper, echoing away there at the end of The Pride of the Yankees.

Anyway, a few years back, NBC bought the rights to the movie and now it presents it only a couple of times a year. I can still see you, old Building and Loan pal, any time on DVD, but the spontaneity is gone. The only thing I’ve got left now is The Yule Log, softly burning, on a station my cable package probably doesn’t carry anymore.