There’s a line in the “Miracle on 34th Street” where lawyer Fred Gailey, who’s sharing an apartment with Kris Kringle, tells Santa he’s been dying to know the answer to a question that has puzzled people since the beginning of time: Does Santa sleep with his whiskers outside the blanket or in?
“Outside,” Kris responds. “Cold air makes them grow.”
While that great question is answered, there’s another one that has lingered out there for some time.
Is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie?
I think there are all kinds of arguments for the positive. It’s set with John McClane going to see his family for Christmas. The action even occurs during a Christmas Eve party. Perhaps most importantly, it also includes the redemption of the main character and a reunion with his wife as they realize again how much they love each other. There’s even redemption of the secondary Reginald VelJohnson’s Al the cop character, who has been bothered by his prior shooting incident. Now he shoots again, this time to save the life of McClane. Redemption, appropriately, is a central theme of Christmas movies.
However, the Mayor of Garland, Texas, Scott LeMay, took it to another level in order to make the point. He did a video that was posted on the town’s YouTube and Facebook accounts that’s gone viral where he imitated McClane’s classic scene in the ventilation shaft. The town insisted on the Facebook account that it was a Christmas movie. LeMay pulls it off pretty well, and he even has a great imitation of Bruce Willis’ voice. This is pretty awesome.
“Come down to City Hall,” he said as he crawled through the “shaft” (actually, Home Depot boxes attached together) with his lighter on. “We’ll get together. It’ll be fun.”
“Are you in there?” a staffer inquires.
“No?” he says.
She then scolds him, “Remember when we said, ‘No Die Hard?'”
“But it’s a Christmas movie, Courtney,” LeMay responds. “I’m telling ya.”
“No Die Hard!” Courtney insists. “Just do it normal!”
“Go away!” he chastises her.
“From all of us here at the city of Garland, we want to wish you happy holidays, and an awesome 2025. And yippee ki yay…” That’s where he cut it off because he didn’t want to say the word that comes next from the movie.
Then it cuts to a “Happy Holidays” from the City of Garland and the Christmas song, “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!” Now that’s pretty funny. He sounds like a rocking mayor, and his meetings must be fun. He definitely has Bruce Willis’s voice and attitude just nailed there. The most popular X post with the clip had almost 2 million views. You can see he has the look pretty dead on:
It would figure that even though they run elections for mayor as non-partisan affairs, he is a Republican. The only deficit to it all was he should have said “Merry Christmas,” since that’s sort of his point. The town did post “Merry Christmas” on their X account.
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