Dear Father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if you're up there and you can hear me... show me the way, show me the way.

I know it's a month past Christmas, but that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of It's a Wonderful Life. My family doesn't celebrate Christmas, so I suppose I have an excuse for the fact that I hadn't ever watched the film before.

I'm glad I watched it now, however late, because I look forward to revisiting the film at at the end of this year, and the next, and so on. It's one of those rare films that balances romance, friendship, humor, and hardship without overwhelming viewers. Capra handles each segment with marvelous ease, transitioning so easily from emotion to emotion that you don't ever realize as you're watching the film just how thorough and careful a job it must have been.

It's a Wonderful Life has become part of western pop culture: the bumbling, friendly angel, the what-would-happen-if-you'd-never-been-born segment, and the boy lassoing the moon for a girl are all things I was familiar with long before I watched the film, and it was delightful to trace them back to their original source.

Remarkably, It's a Wonderful Life never feels saccharine or calculated in its optimism. It just feels wonderfully honest in a way very few films are.

George Bailey reminded me inexorably of my own father. (My dad even looks something like James Stewart. Huh.) George's story touched all the same points as my father's: big dreams always giving way to familial responsibilities, a constant lack of financial security, and pent up anger at the way life turned out.

I had tears in my eyes when George was at the end of his tether and smashed and threw things in front of his children, because I've seen that play out in real life once before. And I sniffled when George asks God for help. "I'm not a praying man, but..." My dad is nonpracticing, and I wonder if that's because he too, asked God for help and received a metaphorical sock on the face in return.

James Stewart is excellent as George Bailey. I've watched several of his films before, but never before did his performance affect me the way this one did. There was nothing stage-y about it, nothing to age it in any way whatsoever.

So, despite my non-white, non-Christian background, I was able to relate personally to It's a Wonderful Life. I laughed and cried and smiled all the way through, and I enjoyed every minute of the film.

It's a wonderful life, indeed. Thank God this film exists in order to remind us of that every once in a while.