It's the holiday season, and with it comes all of its attendant traditions. Keeping tradition is a useful and important part of life, as it reminds all of us who we are and how far we've come while reorienting us for the future. It allows for reflection, too, letting us re-examine and take stock of our institutions and traditions themselves, seeing how much value they retain while adjusting them if necessary. For many, 1988's "Die Hard" has become a staple holiday season viewing. Yet watching the film is a tradition that has begat a new tradition of its own: debating on social media whether "Die Hard" actually is a Christmas movie or not. For those of us eager to enjoy our annual viewing of director John McTiernan's action classic unadorned, this debate is a tradition we'd rather do away with, but it's sadly one that keeps returning every year.

How to end this debate is a matter of some difficulty. Both sides have presented their case with equal passion: the true believers insist that the film is suffused with a holiday theme, the doubters insist that Christmas is incidental to the plot and characters, while the agnostics try to balance the two by distinguishing between a Christmas movie and a movie with Christmas in it. This last point is the trickiest because the definition of "a Christmas movie" means different things to different people. For any film to be declared a Christmas movie, we must agree that such a thing can and does exist, and that, at the very least, a Christmas movie must contain both the visual trappings as well as some of the spirit (positive or negative) surrounding the holiday.

Using that definition as our baseline, we must then find authoritative proof as to why "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie. Unlike the lawyer Fred Gailey from "Miracle on 34th Street," I can't simply rely on people's officially published opinions or sentiments. So why not use the movie itself? That's right; decades before this question became a meme on its own, "Die Hard" introduced the debate into the body of the film itself, anticipating such a reaction while using the same moment to further the movie's character and theme.