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?

The truth about Colonel von Trapp

You know the guy I'm talking about. Fervent anti-Nazi who escaped Nazi occupied Austria by the skin of his teeth, and went on to be immortalized in the film classic, The Sound of Music.

The first time I heard the story about von Trapp's connection to my clan was back in the sixties, on a family trip to visit an elderly Auntie in Sandusky. She spoke ruefully about a drive the family had taken to Vermont to visit the famous von Trapp cousins.

This was a couple of years after the film had made the von Trapps famous, and suddenly they went from being the von Trapp singers to being the von Trapp cousins.

Apparently things didn't go that well once they got to Vermont. Legend has it that they had a brief encounter with a couple of the von Trapp children, who were by then middle aged grouches, and instead of being offered cake and coffee as they might expect from any reunion with long lost relations, were strongly encouraged to go back to Ohio and call ahead before undertaking another visit.

So where did Tante Alvina get the idea that the famous Colonel was family? Family lore has it that the history books have got the paternity of Georg Trapp right. But little Georg was the result of August's tryst with a local gal whilst he was on a secondment to Berlin.

That local gal who treated the visiting officer from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a leg-spread was the sister of my great grampa.

And by the way, apparently the families kept in touch, right up until the von Trapps moved to America and got famous.

And all that stuff about escaping over the hills by the skin of their teeth? Pure Hollywood hokum.