For many years when I was a kid, I knew that Christmas was getting close because the Christmas specials started appearing on television. I even remember that the first one every year was usually Rudolph and it was shown soon after Thanksgiving. If I hadn't "turned in" a wish list yet by that time, I really needed to scurry!

It wasn't that I didn't have enough ideas for my list because I had the Christmas catalogs. They arrived a few days after the first day of school. When I went to school, that was always in the beginning of September. It was a race home from school those first few days to see if the Christmas catalogs had arrived. I needed to get to them before my sister did!

After Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer appeared on television it was never very long before the others started. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, and all the others were shown like clockwork year after year and I always wanted to watch most of them. I am amazed that a few of those classics are still being shown annually for a whole new generation of wide-eyed children who know that when the holiday specials begin, Christmas can't be very far off.

It wasn't until after I was an adult that a couple of my all-time favorite movies started appearing on television. They both happen to be Christmas movies and I still watch them every year and enjoy them just as much as always. One is It's a Wonderful Life and that truly has to be one of the most meaningful movies ever written and produced. Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed were perfect casts for the movie and it has become one of my all-time favorite movies, Christmas or otherwise.

No matter how many times I see it, it always ends the same for me. I can get through many parts of it without tears . . . sometimes even until the very end, but when Auld Lang Syne starts playing, I'm a blubbering mess. I think it should be required viewing for everyone in the country at least once and the way to do that most effectively would probably be from within a schoolroom setting. Most of us had to read Romeo and Juliet, why couldn't this be part of required reading/viewing? The message that each life is meaningful and touches other lives and causes good things to happen all throughout one's life is one that should be heard a lot more often than it is currently heard.

The other holiday movie I really enjoy is Miracle on 34th Street. I'm sure the remakes are great in their own way and I know many people enjoy remakes of movies, but for me it's the original all the way. There's no Santa Claus but Edmund Gwenn and no little girl but Natalie Wood for this movie as far as this viewer is concerned. Many years after I first saw it, I was with a realtor looking at a house that would end up being mine. He mentioned that it reminded him of the Miracle on 34th Street house they found at the end, and so it did. And yes, the first thing I did when walking in was to check for a cane in the corner.