I am no George Bailey, but I have had a wonderful life because of Jesus Christ

Somebody queried answers.yahoo.com whether the old Frank Capra holiday classic "It's a Wonderful Life" was a Mormon movie.

The users wrote back that the answer is obvious. The movie features smoking and drinking. Given that Latter-day Saints don't drink or smoke, the movie obviously isn't a "Mormon" movie.

All of this is true — there are no Latter-day Saint ties to the movie, unless you include the fact that years later Jimmy Stewart, the movie's lead actor, did the warm-hearted "Mr. Krueger's Christmas" for the church.

Still, I respond as most Latter-day Saints do to the message of this great movie. Values like faithfulness, work, service and community are at the heart of what it means to live the life of a Latter-day Saint and are central to movie's immortal message.

So, why not? It is a "Mormon" movie to me.

What makes it an LDS movie even more than the values of the movie, is the paradox at its soul.

Every Latter-day Saint — or Christian for that matter — sometimes wanders to the bridge overlooking the river, wondering why they haven't done more, wondering of the mistakes or challenges of their lives.

While most don't think about jumping in, sometimes we fall in, and there are icy clangs tumbling across the river, moments when failure and ashes and waves seem the main result of the years.

George Bailey sees a vision of what life would have been like without him and realizes that he had a wonderful life in spite of it all because of how he changed people. His little town would have been darker, and the snow would have never fallen.

Here's the thing. I am no George Bailey.

It's hard to imagine that if I or someone like me had never been born, that bars and pool halls would now line Main Street in Rexburg, Idaho, and that greedy capitalists would suddenly have taken advantage of hundreds of poor citizens, creating a shantytown over by the Teton River.

Imagine if we had never been born. Politicians might be corrupt — oh, wait — we were born, and they are corrupt sometimes anyway.

Christmas comes always tinged with sorrow for me.

Decades ago, when I was 10, the day after Christmas, my father returned from work early, went to bed and was soon headed to the hospital and, then, very late that night, lay dead.