These two movies will tell you everything you need to know about the human condition

The Farm Manager has been bingeing on seasonal movies.

It's a wonderful life. The sound of music. Fly away home.

I didn't even realize that those latter two had made the Christmas canon, but apparently they have.

The Farm Manager claims that the common thread is that all these Christmas shows are about love.

Ya, maybe, but then again, she says that about everything.

Here's my take on movies.

There are essentially two, and only two narratives in contemporary story-telling.

The happy ending.

The other ending.

You can summarize the entire post-enlightenment history of story-telling with two movies; The Sound of Music, and Das Boot. I won't insult the intelligence of the reader by spelling out which is which.

Oddly enough, both stories involve relatives of mine.

I've mentioned before the provenance of Colonel von Trapp.

And I've heard that a cousin on my mother's side was a crewman on the U-96.

And how is it that the good Colonel from the happy movie was also involved with submarine warfare?