Friday, December 26, 2025

Friday, December 26, 2025

Tonight's picture was taken in December of 2002. It was Mattie's first Christmas with us and it was a special time in our lives, as Mattie filled our world with adventure, challenges, and much joy. I will never forget his reindeer pajama and the charm and innocence that this photo captured.

Quote of the day: Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he? ~ It's a Wonderful Life

I started the day out slowly because I am thoroughly exhausted. But by 8am, I dragged myself out of bed because unless I get it moving, nothing can get accomplished in my household. Like yesterday, today was another crime scene. This time it took place in the shower. My dad had a massive bowel movement, and he used his shower wand to spread it around the entire shower. It looked like a horrific crime scene. There are many issues with this behavior but the beauty of my dad's dementia is that seconds later he has NO KNOWLEDGE that he created this mess. I mean his mind is a complete blank! I have a whole strategy of what he can do in the shower if he needs to go the bathroom (because he can't move quickly and safely enough from the shower to the toilet), but unless verbally cued step by step, he can't sequentially think through problems himself. Needless to say, I had another very large clean up job this morning. 

While I was getting dressed this morning, I was listening to the radio. Have you been following the controversy of the removal of 22 minutes from the classic, It's a Wonderful Life? I attached an article so you could read more about it, but due to copyrighting issues, some companies are now streaming this abridged version. Here are the key facts, as they appear in the article:

• In 1974, the distributor failed to renew the movie’s copyright, sending “It’s a Wonderful Life” into the public domain. For nearly two decades, television stations freely aired the film — especially during the holidays — without paying royalties.
• While the film itself had fallen into the public domain, the rights to two underlying elements had been properly maintained: the original short story “The Greatest Gift,” by Philip Van Doren Stern, and the musical score by Dimitri Timokin.
• Republic Pictures, later acquired by Paramount, used those copyrights to effectively reclaim control over the movie’s distribution, arguing that any exhibition of the film required licensing the copyrighted story and music.
• The “Pottersville” sequence is the portion most directly adapted from Stern’s story.
• Legal experts say the abridged version appears to be a workaround — by removing that specific sequence, distributors may have believed they could avoid infringing on the short story’s copyright while still offering a version of the film.

If you are an It's a Wonderful Life fan like myself, I can't imagine gutting this classic and more importantly removing the whole sequence that helps us understand George Bailey's thought process and emotions of wanting to commit suicide to the transformation of realizing he really lived a wonderful life. It is vital to see the scenes between himself and his Angel Clarence, where Clarence enables George to experience how his mom's, wife's, brother's and countless Saving and Loan customers lives would have been negatively impacted if it weren't for his beautiful life. This movie is timeless because no matter the generation, we can all relate to George's feelings of dismay, feeling worthless, a failure, and letting people down. Sometimes we have to pause, take a step back and reflect on things in our lives in order to re-evaluate and appreciate our reality in a more comprehensive and balanced manner. Not being able to see and absorb George's transformation does a massive disservice to anyone watching this movie. After all, it is NOT realistic to go from being suicidal to happy go lucky from one scene to the next, without some sort of spark, glimmer, or work! It sounds to me that the abridged version removes the humanity from the film and for new viewers to this movie, I am sure they are left wondering.... now why was his life so wonderful? The full featured movie and the abridged movie are floating around the internet! So note to self.... find the original version, because the powerful realization that 'no man is a failure who has friends' is not just a trite statement but it is transformative for George. It is also transformative for us because George's journey is a human journey.