Is Die Hard A Christmas Movie?

We were fortunate enough to receive the following letter from a reader.

Dear editor,

I am 8 years old.  When my uncle says that Die Hard is a Christmas movie and all his friends on X (formerly Twitter) agree.  Papa says, “If you see it in That Park Place it’s so.”.  Please tell me the truth; is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard (1988), 20th Century Fox

VIRGINIA, your uncle and his friends are wrong.  They have been affected by the glibness of a glib age.  For the sake of comedic contrarianism, they’ve latched on to a meme and made it their identity for a few weeks of the year.

No, VIRGINIA, Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. It is not as certainly as neither Love Actually nor It’s A Wonderful Life are Christmas movies.  Alas! All the love that fans of these movies have cannot make it so, any more than you can will your brussels sprouts to transmute into sugar plums. But what a simple and dreary world this would be if movies were defined simply by the time of year in which they take place.

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard (1988), 20th Century Fox

Believe that Die Hard is a Christmas movie!  You might as well believe that Iron-Man 3 is a Christmas movie. You might watch every movie and catalogue all those that take place near a holiday and declare that All Dogs Go To Heaven is a Mardi Gras movie or Back to the Future is a Halloween movie.

You might examine, reexamine, deconstruct, and reconstruct a work, but there is a veil separating Christmas movies from those mere plot contrivances which cause a movie to work. Die Hard takes place at Christmas because the plot required that a ballroom full of coworkers be stuck together during an attack on an otherwise empty high-rise.

Reginald VelJohnson as Sgt. Al Powell takes in the view of Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard (1988), 20th Century Fox

For that matter you might call Die Hard a divorce movie because John’s physical isolation when the attack happens is the result of the emotional separation in his marriage, yet we are not subject to comparisons between Die Hard and Kramer vs Kramer.

A Christmas movie must be about those things which are distinct to the celebration of Christmas and perhaps even more particularly as it is celebrated in America. It is faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, and the special goodwill towards all men that allow us to push aside the curtain and see the supernatural beauty of Christmas.

Die Hard a Christmas movie! Heavens no!  I’m glad it exists and may it exist forever, but a thousand years from now Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now it will still be a movie set during Christmas, not a Christmas Movie.

NEXT: HO HO HO! (Or Should We Say Yippee-Ki-Yay?) ‘Die Hard’ Returns To Theaters For The Holidays!