Holidays Aren’t Just Holy Days: Or, DIE HARD is the Best Christmas Movie

This was originally written in December 2013, when the internet was debating this topic. For some reason, the internet is still debating this topic… Too many people are getting caught up in the traditional trappings of consumerist Christmas, without recognizing the inherent malleability of the hegemonic holiday.

Sick of hearing from colleagues and friends that DIE HARD is their favorite Christmas movie — an opinion derided as both smug and a technicality — Matt Lewis disregards the premise outright. He presents his readers two criteria for whether a film is a “Christmas” film: a) Christmas is central to the story; b) the movie was released explicitly as a Christmas film. On the first point, Lewis says that the movie fails because it “[uses] the trappings of Christmas merely as a backdrop or a prop.” On the second, Lewis notes the movie was released in July and never marketed as a Christmas (or holiday) movie. Concluding, Lewis states that “it isn’t asking too much to suggest that a Christmas movie must really be a Christmas movie in order to be called a Christmas movie.”

I disagree on all points.

In his earnest attempt to reconcile the semantic authority of “Christmas” in the phrase “Christmas movie,” Lewis is in fact falling into a trap. “Christmas” isn’t about the birth of Jesus. Here’s the thing: holidays — especially Christmas, the most powerful single event in the calendar — are not just religious events. They are also commercial events, communal events, even political events. There’s “Christmas” — the day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus — and then there’s “Christmas” — the over-arching calendar season that merges every level of culture (familial, commercial, entertainment, political, and any other level you can think of) into one coherent and hegemonic force.

The second Christmas, the hegemonic Christmas, engulfs everything around it — including overpowering other holidays (Hannukah) and creating its own subservient holidays (Black Friday/Cyber Monday). The cultural Christmas has taken on its own rituals and has its own characters and narratives and symbols. In fact, I’d be very surprised if the icon of cultural Christmas — the red and white Santa — is less recognizable than the icon of religious Christmas — the baby Jesus. Christmas certainly has a very strong religious element and history, and if you want to make the case that it should be strictly religious, that’s totally fair. However, it has to be acknowledged that Christmas isn’t strictly religious — and hasn’t been for a very long time.

Leigh Eric Schmidt, in his book Consumer Rites, has an excellent essay demonstrating how medieval “holy days” were never strictly “holy” and the supposed separation between church and commerce was never more than a rhetorical divide. In actuality, merchants thrived on holy days — including Sundays — as they took advantage of loopholes and congregated masses. Take one look at popular culture today — or any time since the Victorian Era — and you will not find a truly religious or spiritual Christmas; you will find a hybridized commercial and political event built upon the power of the Christian rhetoric. The religious is the base for the commercial, but the commercial has become the more important partner in that relationship, especially as the commercial iconography has been cemented in popular culture over the last century.

(Side note: if you want to go down the road of “our true religion is capitalism, and Christmas is the ultimate expression of that faith system” I’m willing to go there with you…)

So, when a movie makes countless references to the holiday’s icons and imagery, is set during the holiday season, and actively deals with the themes of the holiday, not only is it correct to consider it a holiday-specific movie, but it arguably engages the holiday in more meaningful and universal ways than would a strictly religious film or a film directly dealing with the events of December 25th.

Many people experience Christmas as a religious event. Many more people experience Christmas as a cultural event, complete with red and white Santa hats, drunken Christmas parties, and awkward family reunions. So, sure, the plot of DIE HARD doesn’t deal with the themes of religious Christmas. But it certainly deals with the themes of cultural Christmas. When Lewis states that “[Christmas] isn’t a vital part of the story” he’s only looking at the one specific sliver of the event called “Christmas” and not seeing an alignment. What he’s missing is the cultural context that we all share through the hegemonic popularity of Christmas itself. Greed, commercialism, feeling out of place, overcoming obstacles, dealing with estranged family, even traveling cross-country — these are all thematic references to the cultural Christmas that we all experience removed from the underlying religious dogma.

Finally, the fact that DIE HARD was released in July does not discredit its attachment to the movie; it might actually help reinforce the connection. As Jack Santino noted in New Old-Fashioned Ways, “seasonal schizophrenia” is a marker of the power Christmas has in culture. When a movie — or song, or television show, or comic book or any popular culture text — decides to skip more immediate holidays (say, Independence Day) in favor of tying itself to Christmas, it reinforces for the audience that Christmas is the king of holidays — not just in terms of religious power, but economic and political, too.

So, to conclude, not only is DIE HARD my favorite Christmas movie, it’s one of the most important Christmas movies of all time exactly because it doesn’t directly deal with the holiday, but uses the imagery and themes of the holiday to explore the role of the holiday in popular culture. Christmas is so ubiquitous, so ever-present in popular culture, that it can simultaneously be the background and the foreground of the season, the text and the context. DIE HARD demonstrates that duality, one dramatic quip at a time.

But that’s just my opinion. Let me know what you think and/or tell me why I’m wrong.

Happy trails, Hans.