Barefoot

There's something gloriously absurd about British Christmas culture… a beautiful collision of the sacred and the silly, where one sets fire to pudding soaked in brandy and wears paper crowns while the monarch delivers sober reflections on virtue. From festive jumpers to Christmas pudding, pantomime shows and more, the British have fashioned a Christmas that doesn't apologise for its contradictions. We greet strangers more warmly than normal, pull crackers that explode with terrible jokes, and consume Brussels sprouts as an act of cultural solidarity rather than culinary pleasure.

The essentials of a UK Christmas tell us something profound about the hunger for ritual in a post-ritual age. Most families have a Christmas tree in their house, and the decorating of the tree is usually a family occasion: not because anyone truly believes an evergreen will save them, but because we need physical anchors for invisible longings. The turkey. The King's speech at 3pm. The absurd tradition of cramming mince pies, which contain no meat. down one's throat while pretending they're delicious. These are the liturgies of a secular age, desperate gestures toward transcendence performed by people who've forgotten why they're reaching upward at all.

But here's the grace: the reaching matters more than the theology. God doesn't require we understand the incarnation before we light a candle for it.

What makes Christmas movies stick?

Christmas movies operate on a frequency just below conscious thought. They whisper to something older than our sophisticated cynicism, older even than our childhood memories. The formula is predictable because it's archetypal: Nearly every great Christmas movie allows the audience to be kids again, coating every scene with familiar touchstones for audiences to grab onto. Redemption stories. Lost souls finding home. The impossible made inevitable through the alchemy of snow and sentiment.

The holiday season is a season of hope, and audiences watch these holiday movies over and over because we can all use a little more hope in our lives. But it's more than hope, isn't it? It's permission…. permission to believe, for at least two hours, that grace might actually break through our armour, that transformation doesn't require years of therapy and a detailed five-year plan, that love might actually show up when we've given up looking for it.

The elements are predictable: snow-covered streets, unlikely connections, the redemption of the cynic, the healing of the wound we all carry but never name. From Buddy the Elf to the Grinch, unforgettable characters reflect the joy and challenges of the holiday season, making these larger-than-life characters relatable. And nostalgia… always nostalgia, that ache for an innocence we may never have possessed but somehow still manage to lose.

Here's the scandal: Christmas movies traffic in the very grace the church is supposed to peddle, but too often hoards like a miser. They say: you're enough. You're beloved. Come home. Even if home is a mess.

Especially if home is a mess.

And the ‘Die Hard’ movie-heresy….

Which brings us to John McClane, barefoot and bleeding in a Los Angeles skyscraper on Christmas Eve, 1988. The debate over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie has become its own secular catechism, an annual ritual of argument that reveals more about our hunger for meaning than our ability to define genres. The arguments around the "Christmassiness" of the 1988 movie revolve around three themes: creative, commercial and cultural. Director John McTiernan and writer Steven E. de Souza both confirm it's a Christmas movie. Bruce Willis, with characteristic swagger, declares it's "a goddamn Bruce Willis movie."

Both are right. Both are wrong. Both miss the point.

Christmas is the reason for literally everything in Die Hard. John flies to LA to see his wife because it's Christmas. The heist happens during a Christmas party. Holly is the woman McClane is trying to recover life with. The whole structure is built on festival-night-turned-upside-down, on chaos erupting in the midst of forced cheer, on violence shattering the veneer of holiday harmony.

The Christmas story itself is a mess of blood and violence… a tyrant massacring children, a refugee family fleeing for their lives, a kingdom born in animal filth rather than royal comfort. We've sanitised it with angels and carols, but the first Christmas was Die Hard with fewer explosions and more profound implications.

Here's what I learned watching Die Hard this year, all those years after it was released: Christmas isn't about being ready. It's about showing up anyway.

John McClane isn't prepared. He's wearing the wrong shoes (actually, no shoes). He's outnumbered, outgunned, terrified. His marriage is falling apart. He's separated from his children. He's completely, utterly inadequate for the task before him. And yet, and yet, he keeps moving forward, keeps improvising, keeps choosing the next right thing even when there are no good options.

And the Jesus of Christmas comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace. McClane stumbles through Nakatomi Plaza the way most of us stumble through life: scared, scarred, uncertain, and somehow still standing.

The movie doesn't lie about the cost. By the end, McClane is brutalised, traumatised, covered in blood and glass and the debris of his own limitations. But he's also somehow become more himself, more human, more honest about what matters. He's stripped down to essentials: love, courage, showing up when it counts.

That's Christmas. Not the Hallmark version, but the raw, beautiful, terrible truth of it.

The lie and the truth

Nostalgia is both gift and poison. It's the thing that makes us return to these films year after year, seeking the feeling we had when we first encountered them: that sense of wonder, that belief that the world was larger and more magical than we yet understood. A Christmas movie can be whatever makes you feel cozy in the winter time, anything that makes you feel nostalgic for when you first watched as a kid.

But nostalgia is also a liar. It tells us the past was better, simpler, purer. It whispers that we've lost something essential, that we're fallen from a golden age that never actually existed. It makes us ache for an innocence we can't reclaim because we never possessed it in the first place.

Here's where Die Hard becomes sacramental: it refuses nostalgia's seduction. There's no golden past for John McClane to return to. His marriage was troubled before the movie started. His relationship with his wife was already fractured. The Christmas party isn't a warm gathering: it's awkward, tense, a performance of holiday cheer masking corporate emptiness.

What Die Hard offers instead of nostalgia is presence. McClane can't go back. He can only go through. And in going through: through fear, through pain, through the fire, he discovers who he actually is rather than who he pretends to be.

One of my favourite writers captures this: "To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means." Die Hard is a movie about admitting the shadow side. About facing what's actually true rather than what we wish were true. About discovering that grace doesn't preserve us from the fire but meets us in the middle of it.

The nostalgia at the heart of Christmas isn't really about the past at all. It's about the future… about our longing for a world redeemed, for relationships restored, for home finally feeling like home. We watch these movies not to return to childhood but to remember that transformation is possible, that love can actually break through, that even broken things can be made beautiful.

Here's the scandal: John McClane is more honest about his limitations than most church-goers are about their sins. And honesty, not perfection, is the doorway to grace.

British Christmas culture understood something profound: ritual matters even when, especially when: we don't understand it. Light the candles. Pull the crackers. Eat the pudding. Show up for the liturgy of connection even when the doctrine eludes you.

Eugene Peterson wrote this: "The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust… not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering." Even gratitude for Hans Gruber. For the antagonist who forces us to discover what we're actually made of.

Christmas movies are parables for people who've forgotten how to hear parables. They sneak past our defences with snow and sentiment and remind us: You're not alone. You're not beyond reach. Love is still searching for you, even in your hiding place.

Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together. He comes for John McClane. For you. For me. For everyone at the office Christmas party, pretending their lives aren't falling apart. He comes not in the middle of our triumph but in the middle of our ordinary everydays, bringing presence where we expected presents, offering companionship where we hoped for rescue.

The gift of showing up…

In the end, Die Hard works as a Christmas movie for the same reason the Christmas story works as gospel: it's about someone choosing to show up when it would be easier to walk away. To stay present in the crisis. To love imperfectly but insistently. To bleed and curse and keep moving forward anyway.

The gospel of grace nullifies our false praise of heroes. It proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. Even Die Hard. Even Christmas crackers and Brussels sprouts. Even the frayed relationships, hurtful dissonances, awkward silences and desperate attempts to feel something, anything, that resembles the peace we're supposed to experience.

The gift isn't perfection. It's permission…permission to be honest about the blood on our feet, the fear in our hearts, the marriages that aren’t fixed, the people we've disappointed, the faith that feels more like hoping-against-hope than confident belief.

The debate concerning whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie will likely never end, and perhaps that's the point… the debate itself offers another opportunity to share together, about what counts, about whether there's room for the barefoot and the bleeding.

So yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. So says my father-in-law. And so is your life: messy, beautiful, sacred and shot through with grace you didn't earn and can't explain. Welcome to the party, pal. Yippee-ki-yay…

Come, thou long-expected action hero. Come and find us where we are: broken, beloved, and somehow still believing that love might actually win. Even in a skyscraper. Even in that undesirable situation. Even now.

‘Grace is sufficient even though we huff and puff with all our might to try and find something or someone that it cannot cover. Grace is enough.’