prompt: kind, title: YIPPIE-KAI-YAI-YAY, YOU OLD BUILDING-AND-LOAN in misc. flash fiction

While most can find a few traditions they enjoy associated with the American secular winterish holidays, the truth of it is that even the holliest or jolliest of us also have a few Yuletide customs that make us kind of want to throw the goddamn elf on the goddamn shelf right out the goddamn window. November First, for example, just as the pharmacies are beginning to put the Valentines candies out, many despise how local radio stations start going all-Christmas-schlock all-the-time and we all once again need evade Mariah Carey’s return from her dreamlessly deathless slumber beyond the stars and also the treacly Early-Eighties white-girl pseudo-hip-hop drivel Christmas Wrapping. Wham’s beyond-execrable Last Christmas has an entire drinking game focused upon avoiding it long as you can, for Christ’s sake, pun retroactively intended.

But the Saturnaliesque institution that annoys me the most personally is the annual repetition of The Die-Hard Bad-Faith Argument. You know that dance, when the un-original twee contrarian hipster douche-bags all start claiming Die-Hard is their favourite Christmas movie. Wow Steve, you’re so edgy! You don’t like holiday film, unlike us basic-bitches, huh? You have to choose a manly action flick that happens to occur in December. How don’t you have gashes all over your obnoxious little fingies with all that edge? You’re so unique, aren’t you, just like everyone else, blasting all social media with it for a solid two months. Get outta here with that pretense.

So, I’ve been working on a counter to that tired meme, a riposte to cut it down once and for all. Answer back telling them how It’s A Wonderful Life is actually your favorite Die-Hard movie.

They’re both heist flicks built around a ruse by the villain. Gruber’s not really a terrorist, he just wants those bearer bonds. Potter didn’t steal that money from the awful uncle because he needed it, he took it to bankrupt his competition. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE IS A DIE-HARD MOVIE.

The untraceability of the bearer bonds? The untraceability of the unmarked cash lost by the uncle who should’ve been lured into the woods with the promise of ice cream and left to die? The same conceit! IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE IS A DIE-HARD MOVIE.

They’re both about one man’s insecurities about his relationship with his betrothed! They’re both meditations on how our corporate culture has turned all upper-class men into hardened criminals! What is really the difference between running a gauntlet of murder and death through a high-rise to get back to your family and running a gauntlet of shame and regret through the multiverse of paths-untaken to return to your family? NOTHING.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE IS A DIE-HARD MOVIE.

So, now you can shoot that down. You’re welcome. Also, if someone yells at you “DON’T SAY HAPPY HOLIDAYS SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS!” because they watched too much Fox News, you can just ask “Wait…you don’t celebrate New Years?” to shut them down as well. That’s just a bonus. My holiday gift to you.