A year or two ago, Fandom Entertainment put out this video in which they attempted to prove if Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988) is a Christmas movie or not. They counted the Christmas trees and found the movie has 11 unique Christmas trees in 19 different shots. Similarly, it also features 7 Christmas carols and 14 uses of the word “Christmas.” This is more shots of Christmas trees and uses of the word “Christmas” than in Home Alone (Columbus, 1990). Fandom also found that internet attention on Die Hard spikes in November and December. Finally, they find that it meets the criteria for “Christmas spirit” published in a full-on academic journal.
They made what, to my interpretation, is an airtight argument. Die Hard is not only as Christmas-y as most other indisputable Christmas movies, it very often exceeds the marks of these other films. In my opinion, there is no debate: Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
However, the fact that this remains a debate is a lot more interesting to me than the debate itself. For example, recently a large non-film account I follow did some polls on Christmas movies and at the time I saw the poll (I have no way to know exactly how many respondents it had then) roughly 30% of respondents still said Die Hard wasn’t a Christmas movie. This made me wonder: what do we really mean by “Christmas movie?” similarly, why does the debate rage so vigorously?
I’ll try to answer these questions as best I can or, at least, put them out there for you to think about.
What is a Christmas Movie?
My preferred definition of a Christmas movie is a movie that takes place at or around Christmas where if you changed the setting to non-Christmas (like the month of May for example) something about it wouldn’t work. This includes all the classics but leaves plenty of space of Christmas horror movies and other “not festive” options. I like using this definition because it doesn’t reduce Christmas movies to only simple, feel-good fare. It has space for the simple joy of Elf (Favreau, 2003) but also the wandering winter malaise of Metropolitan (Stillman, 1990) or the severe depression found in the third episode of Kieslowski’s Dekalog series (this series sits uncomfortably on the border between being a television program and being a collection of short films). I do enjoy good cheer at this time of year, but I also wish to temper this with the harsh feelings of winter; my definition allows for both options.
However, I think many people operate on a different and less thoughtful definition of a Christmas movie. This I would summarize as the ABC Family (now Freeform) Definition.
Basically, if it airs, or could air, on ABC Family/Freeform during their long-running countdown to Christmas series, then it’s a Christmas movie.
Hallmark/Lifetime/etc movies fit within this category as they could certainly fit in that window if they were on a different network.
I find this to be an incredibly boring understanding of Christmas movies, one that takes a niche genre already starved for variety and compresses it further into a rigid cookie-cutter mold. It has no space for violence, seasonal depression, or feelings of ill-will of any kind (Home Alone’s violence is the exception for reasons that are truly beyond me). Moreover, it also doesn’t allow for anything that isn’t really American, as the majority of Christmas movies I’ve seen from other countries tend to deal in less glossy, simple realities.
One must acknowledge here the role of nostalgia in dictating people’s perceptions of what is a Christmas movie. I struggle to think of any movies that have really broken into the top tier of the Christmas Canon in almost the last 20 years, despite there being plenty of worthy contenders (such as Netflix’s Klaus (Pablos, 2019)). I can’t come up with a good explanation for that other than the simple idea that I think a lot of people have a dozen or so movies that, to them, equal “Christmas movie,” and then that’s it.
Why Do We Care?
But here’s the second question: why do we care? This is different from asking why the topic matters. I believe strongly that our notions of canon matter a lot. If we don’t take careful steps to disrupt our biases, we continually recreate and reinforce a canon with a lot of issues. (Case in point, Love Actually (Curtis, 2003) remains firmly in the Christmas Canon despite many people even coming around to admitting its problematic. Why is this?). A narrow view of what constitutes a Christmas movie also means a narrow view of the things around Christmas movies, such as conceptions of family or what emotions are appropriate at this time of year. It’s a big deal that we’ve finally gotten some queer holiday movies and a few slightly less cheery ones. I still celebrate Christmas, but as a grown queer person with a bit of seasonal depression and a complicated relationship with religion, most of the go-to Christmas movies make me more depressed than filled with Christmas spirit. Our conception of appropriate Christmas movies matters because it reflects our conception of appropriate ways to be human in December.
So it matters, but why do we care? Genre debates, like if Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) or The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) should be classified as horror or thriller, rarely rage as hot as the debate around Die Hard. I believe this is, once again, because of the entirely too sacred place that Christmas holds in many people’s lives. Christmas is fine, but it is often uncritically connected to nostalgia and the cis-het “normal” American family. The non-existent “war on Christmas” still resurfaces as a joke every year because, in many ways, Christmas is one of the last battlegrounds for this harmful image of an American family.
Still Die Hard is a strange way to fight this war, as it is a patriotic action movie centering on a likable everyman protecting his family and his country. The fact that it doesn’t “count” as a Christmas movie in the eyes of some people the way Home Alone or Elf does makes it clear to me just how deeply rooted the mythology of a simple “normal” American Christmas is.
And it makes it all the more imperative that we disrupt such an idea as often as possible.
