My sister and I have a long-standing Christmas feud.

While it would be logical to assume it stems from the fact that she once trampled me on Christmas morning in order to get to the new dollhouse Santa had left for her, it in fact centers around the film "It's  a Wonderful Life."

See, I'm of the opinion that this is one of the premier Christmas movies ever made, and she thinks it's astoundingly depressing.

I'll admit there's some truth to her argument. When George Bailey finally comes home after losing the building-and-loan money and yells at his daughter to stop playing the piano, I cringe, even though I know it's coming. This movie is packed with fear and anger and sadness; there's even a suicide attempt. Sure, she admits, the payoff is good -- "My mouth's bleedin', Bert! My mouth's bleedin'!" -- it's just not worth the hours of depression it takes to get there.

And that's where we disagree. To my mind, that payoff is so fantastic -- and I tear up every time Jimmy Stewart opens the book and reads Clarence's inscription --  not in spite of all the hard stuff he had to endure to get there, but rather because of it.

Granted, this is just a movie we're talking about, but the concept is one I've been thinking about a lot lately in the context of real life.

I thought about it last night as I sat and watched fat snowflakes fall from the sky, making even my very prosaic view of rooftops, an alley and the Dan Ryan Expressway seem soft and festive. Of course, that beautiful snow also makes my commute cold and wet. It forces me to spend lots of time and energy digging my car out of the drifts the snow plows create on the side of the road, and it creates huge pools of muddy water between the sidewalk and crosswalk at every intersection downtown, making lunchtime errands an exercise in jumping, slipping and evading. Yet it also creates the very poetic moment of me watching it fall from the sky with only the light of a twinkling fiber-optic Christmas tree at my side.

I think about it every holiday season when I watch my roommate, a professional ballerina, prepare for the veritable death march that is "The Nutcracker." Her company trots out the same program every year, and every year she dreads it more. I have some idea what that show costs her and every other dancer in the company; it's relentless and exhausting -- and it's beautiful. I go see it every year and watch the children in the audience clap with delight and laugh with joy at the giant tree, the dancing dolls and the falling snow. And I know that, as exhausted as my friend is, it's those smiles that keep her going.

I think about it when shopping for gifts is frustrating and arranging holiday travel plans becomes a chore. I think about it when a relationship takes work, a project is difficult and preparations for the future become overwhelming. I really think about it when I listen to one of my favorite talks by Elder Holland, "Christmas Comfort," in which he teaches, among other things, that "you can't separate Bethlehem from Gethsemane."

To boil it all down to one very bare, ugly sentence, there's no such thing as cheap happiness, even at Christmas. Good things -- all good things -- have a price; they take time and effort, and sometimes frustration. But they're worth it.

At least that's what I think when I see George Bailey beam with joy that he's bleeding -- that he has a wife, children, debts and a warrant out for his arrest. And when the whole town piles into his drafty old house to offer financial and emotional support, and his all-out joy turns into the kind that brings tears to his eyes, the same thing happens to me because it's such an honest depiction of authentic happiness.

As nice as it is to imagine they should, problems don't go away at Christmas -- loneliness doesn't, money troubles don't, bad health doesn't. But my point isn't, to quote Henry David Thoreau, to "love your life, poor as it is," in spite of those things. It's to recognize the part all that poorness plays in the payoff and, especially at Christmas, why all that "bad" stuff can ultimately become so good.

As Elder Holland so eloquently put it, "Christmas is joyful not because it is a season … without pain or privation, but precisely because life does hold those moments for us. And that baby ... born away in a manger with no crib for his bed, makes all the difference in the world. All the difference in time and eternity. All the difference everywhere."