Many years ago, my wife bought a painted wooden Advent calendar, a bit of folk art. The colors are warm and inviting; the calendar itself is square, about the size of a Monopoly board. Each of the twenty-five miniature doors is decorated with a painting of a familiar, mostly nonreligious Christmas scene: there are Christmas trees and wreaths, Teddy Bears, Santa, Noah’s Ark, rocking horses, and many culinary items. It gets hung on the wall in the living room when the time comes, and we delight in lifting up our grandchildren as they retrieve a Hersey’s Kiss or other sweet for each day of the season. It’s their anticipation and delight that make the practice such a treat.
I enjoy that ritual so much that last year I asked my Secret Santa for another Advent calendar. One can never have too many. As it turns out, my Secret Santa was our eldest daughter, who has a mischievous sense of humor. On Christmas Day I was presented with an Advent calendar of spectacular kitsch. More than a foot tall, it is a replica of the Nakatomi Plaza skyscraper from the popular 1988 action thriller Die Hard. Each day of Advent is marked on a different floor of the building, starting at the top. As Advent proceeds, you move a miniature figure of Hans Gruber, the movie’s diabolical villain, down the outside of the building. In other words, over the course of the season, Gruber falls to earth and his death, as he does in the movie’s absurd climax.
Yes, this was a gag gift meant to tease, and it continues to make me and my wife laugh with its harmless blasphemy and entrepreneurial cunning. Only $11.99 at Walmart! Die Hard, you see, is now regarded as a holiday classic, since its action takes place at the Nakatomi Corporation’s party on Christmas Eve. A New York City detective named John McClane (Bruce Willis) has come to Los Angeles to visit his estranged wife and their children, who have moved to LA so that his wife can take a prestigious job with the Japanese corporation. Their fraught reunion is interrupted when a group of nattily dressed thieves, led by the gleeful nihilist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), takes the partygoers hostage and demands that the corporation hand over the $640 million in bearer bonds in the building’s vault. McClane miraculously escapes and proceeds to thwart the well-armed and expertly trained villains. In doing so, he wins back his wife’s devotion and vindicates her need for male protection. There’s lots of shooting and big explosions, or what the movie industry calls “whammies.” McClane is the classic hero from movie Westerns. He even pays homage to his hero, the movie and TV cowboy Roy Rogers, before his final encounter with Gruber (“Yippee ki yay, motherfucker”). In short, real Advent fare.
The film helped make Willis a star, spawned four sequels, and became a pop-culture touchstone. It is also, along with the Crusades, a cultural touchstone for Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. “Our elites are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza,” Hegseth writes in his book, The War on Warriors (2024). “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane.” The military, he writes, needs “patriotic, strong, manly men,” “normal dudes,” not the “Pentagon pussies” that now fill the ranks of generals and admirals. Like John McClane, Hegseth thinks women should stay behind the lines as nurses or at home minding the kids. Hegseth’s manly men would disregard the rules of war, as the veteran Hegseth instructed his own troops to do during his time in Iraq. “Aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?” Hegseth writes. He has urged Trump to protect U.S. troops charged with war crimes.
Hegseth has been accused of sexual misconduct and of having a drinking problem. He has acknowledged cheating on his first two wives, but has since undergone a religious conversion. He and his third wife are active in their conservative Evangelical church. The words “Deus Vult,” a Crusader battle cry and a right-wing motto, are tattooed on his arm, a Jerusalem Cross across his chest. “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords,” he has written, “and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” As far as Hegseth is concerned, it is domestic, not foreign, enemies who are the greater danger to the nation. Evidently, he longs for a showdown with some sort of Hans Gruber, where he can outman the smooth-talking villain and shout Deus Vult as he comes to the rescue of all the women distressed by the shortage of “normal dudes.”
In light of the political ascendancy of “manly men” like Hegseth, I have been taking even more solace in the small rituals of Advent. In an Advent homily, the Melkite Catholic priest and University of Notre Dame professor Khaled Anatolios puts our abiding predicament accurately. “Our whole human race…is bent over, stooped down, bound by the power of Satan, and unable to stand upright,” he says. “The empirical and physical evidence of the crippled conditions of our whole human race is all around us; the imminent destruction of the whole planet because of our heedless consumption; our collective inability to act in unison in order to eradicate a deadly pandemic; the steadfastness of injustice; the glorification of cruelty and hatred; the rampant disdain for God and contempt for godliness.”
What we await this Advent is, as always, the promise that our salvation has already been won. At the same time, as we open each new door to Trump’s second term as president, it is good to be reminded that despair is a sin.
