December 2025 has not exactly heralded a season of light, joy, and hope. Many of us have been riveted to the news, devastated by the steady stream of horrific headlines—from Brown University and MIT to Bondi Beach in Australia. We followed reports of senseless violent shootings as they unfolded, worried for our weary, wounded world.
As an educator, people often ask me some version of the same question in moments like this: How much is too much? How do we live in solidarity without becoming numb or overwrought? How do we make sense of it all? How do we help our students, our children?
Over the weekend, I spoke with a former student now at Brown. She described the lockdown—how grateful students were that people were sent home safely, and how hard it has been, even days later, to process what happened. The facts were still emerging, but the psychological impact was already clear. For students—and no doubt for faculty—the experience was destabilizing. What lingered was not only fear, but confusion: how to hold grief, anger, gratitude, and uncertainty at the same time.
There is no magic bullet. What we do know is that close social connections matter, and recent large-scale international research on human flourishing reinforces what we already know. We need each other more than ever—family, friends, community—and we also need wisdom traditions that help us stay grounded when the world feels unmoored. This is precisely the season that invites us to lean into those resources, not away from them.
So this weekend, I did something simple and intentional. I turned off the news and turned instead to a Christmas film I know well, but hadn’t watched undistractedly in years.
It’s a Wonderful Life
Frank Capra made the film in the aftermath of World War II, and it was pivotal for actor Jimmy Stewart, who returned to Hollywood after serving as a combat pilot. Stewart came back changed. When George Bailey unravels midway through the film—after realizing he has lost the $8,000 that could shut down the Bailey Building and Loan—the pressure finally boils over.
His young son pesters him with a question: “Dad, how do you spell frankincense?” George snaps, “What am I, a dictionary?” His daughter Janie sits at the piano, repeating the opening bars of Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and he turns on her too: “Janie, must you keep playing that tune?” His voice rises. He kicks the train set and knocks everything from his desk onto the floor.
The moment is painfully familiar. Many of us recognize the lights and shadows of the Christmas season in family life, how stress shortens tempers and old wounds surface unexpectedly. George Bailey’s breakdown never feels staged. They are not the tears of a man having a bad day; they’re the tears of someone who knows real suffering and is trying to make sense of his life after war.
What steadies the film is the moral world George has inherited. In his father’s office at the old Bailey Building and Loan, there’s a small sign on the wall: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.” It’s easy to miss. But it explains everything. The Building and Loan exists not to maximize profit, but to protect dignity, to make ordinary life possible for others. George’s despair comes, in part, from forgetting that this has been his work all along.
White Christmas
That film alone might have been enough. But the next night, I found myself watching White Christmas. Hilarious and absurd, this musical romantic comedy is full of satire—from Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby famously lip-syncing “Sisters” to “Doing Choreography.” I expected to enjoy the dancing. What I didn’t expect was how poignantly a familiar romantic trope would speak to me.
Bob Wallace, played by Bing Crosby, wants to honor his former commanding officer, now retired and running a struggling inn in Vermont. Wallace calls Ed Sullivan with a request: use the show to invite men from their old battalion and their families to come to Vermont for Christmas. No press. No publicity. No angle. Just a chance to surprise and salute an old friend.
But the inn’s housekeeper, Emma Allen, picks up an extension at exactly the wrong moment. She hears only Sullivan’s enthusiastic response—his talk of what a fabulous angle it is, “all that schmaltz,” and what a great opportunity it could be. She hangs up before hearing Wallace’s reply, where he shuts all of that down. From this fragment of information, Emma draws her conclusion: Wallace is exploiting the General for publicity and money.
She tells Betty Haynes, played by Rosemary Clooney. Betty doesn’t pause to seek clarification. She assumes Emma has the whole story. On the strength of that assumption, she condemns Wallace’s character and distances herself, leaving Vermont and Wallace for New York.
Wallace is left stunned, hurt and bewildered, unable to make sense of Betty’s sudden shift.
White Christmas reveals, almost casually, a hard truth: a little bit of information is a dangerous thing. We mistake fragments for facts, confidence for knowledge. As I often tell my students, there are three sides to every story—and then the truth. When we jump too quickly to conclusions, we don’t just obscure the truth; we erode the relationships that depend on it.
A Christmas Carol
By Sunday night, I turned to A Christmas Carol, the 1984 version with George C. Scott. If White Christmas exposes the hazards of misjudgment, this film names the deeper stakes. The ghost of Jacob Marley tells Scrooge that the chain he now wears was forged, link by link, through a life of self-interest and contempt for others. As the story unfolds, we learn that Scrooge’s hardness grew out of his own wounds—painful experiences that taught him to self-protect by shutting others out.
It’s bracingly real. A life lived as though others do not matter deforms the soul, not all at once, but gradually, through thousands of small decisions. And the opposite is also true, as the film so fittingly reveals. A life lived for others re-animates a person and those whose lives they touch.
If you haven’t seen these films—or haven’t watched them closely—they do end with hope. But that hope is hard-won through suffering and searching, through love and loss. The wisdom they offer doesn’t provide an answer. It provides orientation. That, in many ways, is what Aristotle meant by practical wisdom: that capacity to take the right action, at the right time, for the right reasons. Not theory. Not cleverness. But judgment shaped by noble purpose, generosity, and care, especially when the path forward is unclear.
This December has left many of us unsure how to respond, how to live well in a wounded world. These films didn’t tell me what to do. They reminded me of the practical wisdom and the hope of redemption we need right now to find our way forward.
Karen E. Bohlin is Director of Wisdom at Work: Revitalizing School Leadership at the Abigail Adams Institute. She is also author of Teaching Character Education Through Literature (Routledge, 2005), “The Power of Art to Shape our Ability to See: A Phenomenological Reflection on Rembrandt” in Toward an Ethics of the Imagination (Routledge, 2026 at press) and “Educating the Heart: Why Poetry Matters” in Educating Character Through the Arts (Routledge, 2023).