Barefoot
The question comes every December like a liturgy: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? We argue about it the way the early church argued about the nature of Christ… passionately, sometimes absurdly, as if getting the answer right might save us from something we can't name!
The scandal of setting
Christmas movies are supposed to happen in small towns dusted with snow, where everyone knows your name and the greatest crisis is whether the town square tree will get lit on time. They're Norman Rockwell paintings come to life, sanitised and safe, celebrations of an America that never quite existed except in our collective imagining.
Die Hard happens in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, in a corporate tower called Nakatomi Plaza …a monument to capitalism, globalisation, and the grinding machinery of modern life. Peak 1988. John McClane, our reluctant hero, isn't there for a holiday miracle. He's there because his marriage is falling apart. His wife, Holly has taken their children and moved across the country for a career opportunity, reclaiming her maiden name in the process. John flies to LA not to celebrate but to salvage, to see if there's anything left worth saving.
This is the scandal: Christmas doesn't arrive when we're ready for it, wrapped in sentiment and certainty. It comes in our brokenness, in the middle of our failures, when we're barefoot and bleeding on broken glass.
The incarnation, God becoming flesh, was scandalous too. Not born in a palace but a feeding trough. Not announced to kings but to shepherds, the working poor who smelled like sheep. Christmas has always shown up in the wrong places, among the wrong people, at the wrong time.
Barefoot on broken glass
There's a moment in the film that's become iconic: McClane, shoeless, walking across shattered glass, his feet torn and bleeding, trying to survive. It's visceral and uncomfortable. We wince watching it.
And this is it. Our forever good news is for the bedraggled, beat-up, and burnt-out. It's for people who've tried to make it work and failed, who've given up pretending they have it all together. McClane embodies this. He's not a superhero. He's a cop from New York who's afraid of flying, who jokes when he's terrified, who makes mistakes and bleeds and keeps going because stopping means dying.
The broken glass is what separates Die Hard from the sanitised Christmas we're usually sold. Real life isn't soft-focus and sepia-toned. It cuts. Marriages fail. Pride destroys relationships. Reconciliation requires blood, sweat, and humility. The path to resurrection always goes through crucifixion.
The stopping of the year-end patterns can invite us into a review about how we spend so much energy constructing false selves, these imposter versions of who we think we should be. McClane's false self was the tough guy who didn't need anyone, who couldn't bend, who let pride keep him from flying across the country months earlier to work things out. Christmas Eve in Nakatomi Plaza strips all that away. By the end, he's not the invincible action hero. He's a man who's been broken open, who admits he was wrong, who understands that needing someone isn't weakness… it's the truest thing about being human.
The villains we deserve
Hans Gruber is a magnificent villain, sophisticated and intelligent, quoting Plutarch while orchestrating a heist disguised as terrorism. He's not interested in ideology. He wants money, lots of it, and he's willing to kill for it. He represents a kind of evil that's particularly modern… rational, calculating, dressed in expensive suits, speaking multiple languages. He's the dark side of globalisation, the man who sees everything and everyone as a transaction.
What makes Gruber compelling is that he understands the world better than McClane does. He's planned everything, anticipated every move, knows how systems work and how to manipulate them. He's the epitome of control.
And control is what we're all grasping for, isn't it? Especially at Christmas. We want to control the narrative, the emotions and the outcomes. We want our families to be this way or that, our gifts to be ideal, our feelings to align with the Hallmark outline. We want Christmas to be what we've been promised it should be.
But grace doesn't work that way. Eugene Peterson spent his career paraphrasing the wildness of Scripture into language ordinary people could hear. He insisted that the Bible isn't a rulebook or a self-help manual… It's a story about God pursuing people who keep running away, showing up in their messes, speaking through burning bushes and donkeys and tax collectors.
The Christmas story features an unmarried pregnant teenager, a confused fiancé, suspicious neighbours, a paranoid king, and refugees fleeing for their lives. It's messy and dangerous and nothing like the crèche scenes we set on our sideboards or Christmas Cards.
Die Hard doesn't sanitise its Christmas Eve. People die. The systems we trust fail. The FBI arrives and makes everything worse. The media vultures circle for ratings. And somewhere in all that chaos, a man and woman who've hurt each other find their way back to something like love.
Nostalgia’s sweet seduction
Here's where we need to be careful. Nostalgia is the drug of choice for the disillusioned. We long for Christmas past because the present disappoints and the future terrifies. We watch old movies, listen to old songs, and try to recreate feelings we remember having or wish we'd had.
Die Hard has become part of our nostalgic Christmas canon now, which is ironic. We watch it often, quote the lines, and debate whether it belongs in the genre. We've domesticated it, turned its edges into something comfortable. But 1988 wasn't better than now. The world has always been broken. Evil has always existed. Marriages have always struggled. The difference is that nostalgia lets us forget the pain, remember only the glow.
Addiction is all around in every season, but never more vividly in the season of tinsel and trees. We can use anything to avoid feeling what we're actually feeling. Nostalgia can be an addiction, a way of refusing to be present to the life we're actually living, the people we're actually with, the God who's actually here. The question isn't whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The question is why we need to keep asking. What are we avoiding by debating categories instead of engaging with what the film actually says about alienation, pride, reconciliation, and sacrifice?
If we're paying attention, Die Hard reveals some uncomfortable truths:
Marriage is hard work, and good intentions aren't enough. John and Holly loved each other, but love without humility, communication and the willingness to sacrifice becomes just another transaction. Christmas doesn't fix broken relationships. It just puts them under fluorescent lights where we can't avoid seeing the cracks.
We're not as in control as we think. Hans Gruber believed he'd thought of everything. He hadn't counted on one variable: a cop who wouldn't quit, who kept showing up, who was too stubborn or too stupid or too desperate to follow the script. God works like that too… showing up where we've decided God can't be, using people we've dismissed, subverting our careful plans.
Heroes don't look like we expect. McClane isn't Captain America. He's scared, sarcastic, and frequently wrong. He survives as much by luck as by skill. He wins because he refuses to give up, not because he's particularly noble or pure. The people God uses in scripture are similar…liars, cowards, adulterers, deniers. The point isn't their perfection. It's their availability.
Community matters, even an imperfect community. McClane couldn't have survived alone. He needed Sergeant Al Powell on the radio, a voice in the darkness telling him he wasn't alone. He needed Argyle, the limo driver, to show up at exactly the right moment. The body of Christ is like this too: imperfect people showing up for each other, often failing, sometimes succeeding, held together not by competence but by grace.
The long defeat
Tolkien called it "the long defeat"…this sense that we're fighting battles we can't ultimately win through our own strength, that history bends toward entropy, that all our little victories are temporary. McClane defeats Hans Gruber, saves his wife, and survives the night. But in the sequels, we learn his marriage still failed. The happy ending didn't last.
This feels like betrayal at first, but maybe it's honesty. Christmas Eve isn't the end of the story. We wake up on December 26th with the same struggles, the same broken relationships, the same world that's beautiful and terrible in equal measure.
What Christmas offers isn't escape from that reality. It's the promise that we don't face it alone, that God enters into the mess with us, that incarnation means presence, not extraction. Jesus didn't come to transport us out of difficulty. He came to be with us in it.
December darkness
We watch Die Hard in late December when the darkness comes early and stays late, when the gap between what Christmas promises and what we're actually experiencing feels unbridgeable. We need stories that tell the truth about that gap.
The film ends with ‘Let It Snow’ playing over the credits, which is perfect in its absurdity. It doesn't snow in Los Angeles. The tower is destroyed. People are dead. John and Holly are reconciled, but bruised, bleeding and traumatised. And yet: it's Christmas. Despite everything, because of everything, in the middle of everything.
This is closer to the gospel than we usually get in Christmas entertainment. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… But the darkness is real, and the light doesn't make it disappear. Both exist together. We live in the tension.
And the gift of presence…
If Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and my father-in-law is convinced it is, then it's a Christmas movie for adults who've stopped believing in magic but haven't quite given up on grace. It's for people whose families are complicated, whose marriages require work, who understand that happy endings are rare and usually qualified.
The gift John gives Holly isn't perfect. Its presence. He shows up. He fights for her, bleeds for her, and admits he was wrong. He stops pretending to be someone he's not and lets her see the scared, broken, desperate man underneath the bravado.
That's the gift worth giving and receiving: not our perfected selves, not our accomplishments or explanations, but our actual presence, vulnerable and available and true.
Manning used to say that the greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. The same is true of Christmas. We talk about peace and joy and goodwill, then treat each other like obstacles to our perfect holiday vision.
Die Hard doesn't pretend. It shows us flawed people in an impossible situation, doing their best, making mistakes, occasionally choosing courage over comfort. It shows us that redemption doesn't mean escaping reality. It means entering it more fully, barefoot and bleeding if necessary.
Yippee-ki-yay!
That catchphrase: McClane's defiant, profane response to Hans Gruber… has become part of our cultural vocabulary. It's a cowboy's shout, translated through Brooklyn attitude, delivered in extremis. It means: I'm still here. You haven't beaten me. I'm going to keep fighting.
Maybe that's the most honest Christmas prayer we can offer: I'm still here. This is hard, and I'm tired, and I don't have it figured out, but I'm still here. The darkness is real, but I haven't given up. I'm going to keep showing up, keep trying, keep believing that presence matters more than perfection.
Christmas isn't about getting it right. It's about God getting it right for us, entering our wrong-ness, our broken-ness, our desperate need, and saying: I'm here. You're not alone. This matters. You matter.
So yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It's a movie about incarnation and sacrifice, and showing up when it would be easier to walk away. It's about love that costs something, about grace that appears in unexpected places, about hope that refuses to die even when all the evidence suggests it should.
And every December, when someone asks the question again, maybe what we're really asking is: Can Christmas meet us here, in our actual lives, with our actual real-life challenges? Can it survive in the contemporary world, in the permacrisis and complexity that make up our reality?
Die Hard answers: Yes. Not easily. Not cleanly. Not without cost. But yes.
Yippee-ki-yay indeed.