Xmas – The Big DumpTruck

Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?

Posted on December 23, 2021December 23, 2021 by The Jody

I’ve decided to finally wade into the whole “is die hard to Christmas movie” thing. I had never seen the entire movie, so friends and family arranged for a viewing party. I can now have an opinion on this topic.

Before getting to my hot take, let me state I understand these things can be subjective. Your experiences shape your perception, and a huge number of people consider it a “Christmas movie” based on those experiences. To me, the key is differentiating between a “Christmas movie” and a “Christmas tradition.”

A Christmas movie should be about Christmas. The primary plot or plot-drivers are Christmas-based, whether it’s about the traditional nativity story, Santa, celebrating the holiday(s) or the more difficult to pin down “Spirit of Christmas”.

Leonard Maltin said cannot just be set at Christmas, it has to be about the Spirit of Christmas. Others say they should be movies the whole family can watch together, which clearly this one isn’t, but we’ll leave that aside for this discussion.

Die Hard is a movie set on Christmas Eve, with all the holiday decor and music. There is a big holiday office party (which would never ever ever happen on Christmas Eve but that’s for another essay) but it’s not about Christmas. They could have set it in June and you would only need to change the reason for the office party and why John was traveling to CA. There are all kinds of Christmas visuals and references, such as the name Hans Gruber being painfully close to the name of Silent Night composer Franz Gruber. They are great, but don’t make the move about Christmas. It’s about robbery, violent killings and the need to NEVER TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES!

Now, everything I just said does not negate the fact that the movie is a beloved Christmas tradition for tens of thousands of Americans. And those folks insist it is a Christmas movie. However, just because something is one of your holiday traditions doesn’t make it a Christmas movie. Countless Americans watched The Sound of Music with their families every December, thanks to the network that owned the rights. Plenty of folks still consider it a Christmas movie because of that, but obviously it’s not.

I watch Little Women every Christmas season. Because of that I think of it as a Christmas movie, but really it’s not. While a few scenes are set at Christmas, the primary plot isn’t Christmas-specific.

When we were young, my sister considered Neil Diamond’s 12 Greatest Hits a Christmas record because we would pull it out and listen to it in December. That timing imprinted on her, and one time she referred to it as a Christmas album. Clearly it’s not, but decades later we refer to it as a Christmas album to tease her. (She’ll be pleased I included this anecdote, but it’s important to illustrate my point.) While you can call anything a Christmas [thing] if that’s how you think of it, it doesn’t make it objectively true.

In conclusion, Die Hard is a Christmas tradition, but it isn’t a Christmas Movie. If it’s yours, by all means seek it out and watch it every December. Keep (or make) your holiday traditions as best you can, and watch anything that makes you happy, whenever and wherever you’d like.

Yippee-ki-yay to all, and to all a good night!

TV, video

Merry December 25th

Posted on December 25, 2018December 25, 2018 by The Jody

It’s been a full year, eh? If you still have a burning need to keep watching Christmas programs and you have Prime, I suggest two of the shows I watched today.

Tudor Monastery Farm at Christmas – I love documentaries, especially those explaining what normal life was like for our ancestors. Or other people’s ancestors. The part of the show that makes this a more atypical holiday show is the amount of time spent covering butchering a pig and cleaning and pickling the head.
Winter Wonderland Train Ride – The “story” is that your train has to deliver ham, wine, bread and toys to some location, maybe on a mountain? In a snowy place. This is a 4 hour video (!) of the view from the point of view of the engineer. Nondescript Christmas carols play along for the full, nearly-endless 4 hours of endless video following track wending through the snow-covered countryside.

I could lie and say we watched all four hours of the train video, but fast-forwarding was our friend, and the 15-20 we did watch was just enough. Also, we’re entirely unsure why they needed the ham/wine/bread/toys backstory as not once did you ever “drop it off”. We did pick up passengers with suitcases. Unsure if the suitcases contained hams.

humor, Real Life

Existential Sweater Crisis

Posted on December 12, 2013December 20, 2015 by The Jody

Yesterday the people in my work group were invited to participate in an ugly Christmas sweater contest with a group sitting in our section of the building. Normally we have very little to do with these people, which is what happens in company with 40,000 employees. But clearly we have been identified as movers and shakers and people who enjoy embarrassing ourselves, so they reached out.

There’s a dress code policy in the office and one of the rewards we are given as a motivator is the ability to wear jeans on certain days. (I’d like to point out that while we are allowed to wear jeans, at no point are we ever allowed to wear sneakers. Some of us have worked around that ruled by finding brands of sneakers that don’t look like sneakers. I have become a person who went from wearing sneakers to work every day to not even wearing sneakers on weekends. Maybe that’s a sign of maturity. Maybe it’s a sign of laziness, because most of my shoes don’t require me to tie them.)

So when I heard that anyone participating in the ugly sweater contest would be allowed to wear jeans, I immediately started looking online for ugly Christmas sweaters. With only two weeks until Christmas, most of the “good” styles are sold out, or have had prices jacked up. Unfortunately given the time of year and the desperation someone like me feels, anything still available is priced at $40 or higher. I just can’t spend $40 on an ugly Christmas sweater. The prize would have to be cash of that amount or higher. I don’t think there’s a prize at all, just questionable bragging rights. You can get the following for sixty five dollars.

There are some fantastic ugly Christmas sweaters out there. There are also a lot of ugly Christmas sweaters that feature reindeer having sex. I didn’t know that this was a thing, but apparently it is. Three reindeer having sex, two reindeer having sex. I don’t know if any of the sweaters with a single reindeer having sex, I wasn’t looking that closely.

I decided spending $40 on an ugly Christmas sweater just so I could wear jeans on Tuesday is probably not a good use of my hard-earned cash. Last night I was going through my closet I found a sweater that some might consider a little ugly. The design on the sweater is very busy, and looks something like black and white snowflakes. I realized with horror that I could wear this sweater for ugly sweater day, and most people would agree that it was ugly.

Thus my existential sweater crisis. If I wear the sweater for Ugly Sweater Day, I can no longer wear that sweater for Not Ugly Sweater Day. On the other hand, if it fits in so nicely for ugly sweater day, it’s probably an ugly sweater. If I wear it a month from now, will people think, “wow that’s an ugly sweater.” More importantly, have I doomed it by even considering it for Tuesday?

I think the answer is clear. I need to wire that puppy up with blinking lights and appliqué snowmen and OWN Ugly Sweater Day. I’m going to do it for the children.

Uncategorized

My Xmas Music Recommendation for 2009

Posted on December 14, 2009December 20, 2015 by The Jody

I used to have a reputation of being a collector of Christmas Music. I think it was a lot easy to be such a thing when you had to buy entire albums, cassettes or CDs of Christmas music. It’s much too easy now to just buy one or two songs today.

I did buy an entire CD via MP3 Purchase on Amazon last week, and that is going to be my 2009 recommendation for you. If Trans-Siberian Orchestra toned it down about 2 notches and didn’t have any vocal tracks, you’d get the Arctic Express CD “A Christmas Rock Experience.”

Some of the reviewers called it the love child of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Mannheim Steamroller but I don’t want to turn people off because they dislike one or the other. It really is just rock and roll Christmas music. Listen to the samples, and if you’re like me, you’ll just pony up the $6 to download the CD. PLEASE NOTE: There are apparently two versions of this CD up on both Amazon and iTunes. On both sites, one is about half the price of the other. I have no idea why this is, other than that the album has a slightly different name and track ORDER, but the same tracks. I have linked to the cheaper version on Amazon. My gift to you. Disclosure: If you do buy it from Amazon and you use the link above, I think I get a dime or two. If you use the link above and buy other things, I get a few more dimes. I like dimes.

Uncategorized

Getting Ready for the Holidays

Posted on December 4, 2009December 20, 2015 by The Jody

Dear Santa,

I have been a good girl this year. I have put up with a lot of doo-doo and doo-doo heads and still get up in the morning and face the day. I haven’t let the crushing weight of reality grind me into the dirt. I maintain a gorgeous facade of “normal” like nobody’s business.

So, then, here are the things I think I deserve. I know you normally just accept letters from kids, but I figured you might have room for one or two things for me, as you will be handing out a stack of IOUs for those Zhu-Zhu Pets hamsters, seeing as they are out of stock all over the place. (I have 3 real gerbils so I’m good on that front. Although the dog might like a fake hamster it would probably destroy it in 5 minutes.)

This year (well, next year) I have some personal goals I’m setting, and I may need a little help with that. I think my big present from you could be some kind of exercise equipment. I don’t have any in the house, but I do have one of those body composition scales and I swear to God, it told me that aside from my bones I am completely made of butter. It was scary. And then I ate a donut.

So I need something easy to use and maybe something that will go and lift me off the couch and carry me to it and do half the work for me. Do you have something like that? I think if you don’t have that, an elliptical trainer would be a good second choice. I bought some really cute workout pants so all I need is a reason to wear them.

Maybe that’s a little heavy for your bag, even with all the empty space where the toy hamsters should have gone. Camera equipment (lenses, flash, etc.) don’t take up nearly as much room. Or a gift card to Amazon to buy lenses, flashes, etc. are a good bet. Or jewelry. Jewelry is small, right? You wouldn’t even have to put it in your bag, you could keep it in your pocket.

I’m really all about whatever makes this easiest for you, Santa. (See, that ought to take me off the naughty list for a long, long time!)

Love,

Jody

p.s. I won’t leave a fire burning this year. Again, I want to make this easy for you.