December 25 in Fiction

Movie It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

12/25

On Christmas Eve, George Bailey — facing bank fraud charges for a missing $8,000 and the ruin of everything he has sacrificed his dreams to protect — stands on a bridge in the snow contemplating suicide, only to be rescued by his bumbling guardian angel Clarence. Shown what Bedford Falls would have become without him, George rushes home on Christmas morning to find his neighbors have pooled their savings to bail him out.

Literature Lolita (1955)

12/25/1952  · Vladimir Nabokov

The fictional editor's foreword to Humbert Humbert's memoir reveals that Dolores Haze — the girl called Lolita — died on Christmas Day 1952 in the remote settlement of Gray Star in the Pacific Northwest, giving birth to a stillborn daughter. She was seventeen. Nabokov places this revelation before the narrative begins, so readers carry the knowledge of her death through every page of Humbert's self-serving account.