Opinion: What's the true meaning of Christmas? Hint: It's not "Die Hard"

Matthew Albright is The News Journal's engagement editor. Contact him at malbright@delawareonline.com, on Twitter @TNJ_malbright or at (302) 324-2428. 

I am the sort of person who tries to find big, meaningful answers to small, dumb questions. 

For example: "Is 'Die Hard' a Christmas movie?" 

My opinion on this is well known — and frequently jeered — in the newsroom. I love me some Bruce Willis, but I do not think "Die Hard" is a Christmas movie. 

Why? Because it does not address the true meaning of Christmas.

It is at this point that you probably think I am going to humorlessly say that "Jesus is the reason for the season." I believe that as a Christian, but I don't like how the phrase is often used.

Too often, a certain sort of Christian says "the true meaning of Christmas is Jesus" as an assertion of dominance, a claim of ownership. It is just another weapon in our endless culture war, said in a way that insinuates "this is my holiday, and it's about my faith, and all these other expressions of Christmas are an insult to me." 

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I don't think that at all. But I do think the prophet Isaiah gave the best description of the true meaning of Christmas: "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light."

You don't have to look to the Bible for this message. Dr. Seuss understood the meaning of Christmas when he wrote "every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, was singing! Without any presents at all!" And he knew it when he wrote that even the spiteful, Christmas-hating Grinch's "small heart grew three sizes that day!" 

The true meaning of Christmas is knowing that Ebenezer Scrooge can be transformed from a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" to "as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew."

The true meaning of Christmas is Charlie Brown and his friends turning a sickly little stick into a "pretty good little tree." It is George Bailey going from a man about to commit suicide to "the richest man in town."

The common theme across all these stories: people walking in darkness seeing a great light.

This is a message I think many people desperately need to hear, whether it's in a religious or secular context. After all, doesn't it sometimes seem like we are a people walking in darkness?

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Suicides and drug overdoses are rising mercilessly. No matter what your politics, most would agree our civic lives are increasingly angry, confrontational and dysfunctional.

And of course these national narratives don't begin to cover personal tragedies. How many of us are struggling with dead or dying family members, financial woes, medical problems, divorce or other personal suffering?

So it seems to me the true meaning of Christmas — of hope and redemption — is something we need to hear now as urgently as ever. 

I worry that our culture is increasingly reducing Christmas to an aesthetic — pretty lights, red and green, jingle bells. What should be a time for profound hope and joy is becoming just another nice time to take a day or two off. 

Part of this is surely is a result of plunging church attendance and an overall decline in religiosity. But more generally, it is a symptom of our growing preference for the ironic and the cynical above the earnest and the hopeful. 

As a newspaper writer wrote to an eight-year-old girl 121 years ago: "VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see."

If your family has a Christmas tradition of watching "Die Hard," I hope it brings you great happiness. But I also hope this Christmas that, whatever personal darkness you may be walking in, you will somehow see a great light. 

Merry Christmas.