Although, they took advantage of the building being mostly empty because of Christmas, and John McClain was only in town because of Christmas. If you take out Christmas, then you have a full building and no John McClain, and therefore no Die Hard.
Trading Spaces on the other hand has no reliance on Christmas.
Technically the “Wolfenstein 3D” games that you are referring to are reboots, not the original games from the early 1980s. The original games still involved Nazis, but were more subtle and plausible, as they were early stealth games (you were a POW and had to escape and couldn’t take on the guards directly but could kill one stealthily to get a uniform and gun to aid you). The second, “Beyond Castle Wolfenstein” allowed you to attempt to assassinate Hitler but again you had to infiltrate his bunker without detection.
Pussycat insists on TLOTR and the Harry Potter saga every xmas.
I tried to add the Shane Black movies this year just for fun. She made me turn off Lethal Weapon, so I decided she probably wouldn’t like The Last Boy Scout either and skipped to The Long Kiss Goodnight - which was a smash hit.
“Mommy, are we going to die?”
“Oh no, sweetie, we’re not going to die. They are.”
Would you say that the Sniper Elite games are the spiritual successors to the original Wolfenstein games then?
What a coincidence, we were planning on watching the whole thing (LoTR) next week as well. For a couple of years after the last one came out we would watch it every winter, but haven’t done so in well over 10 years.
This makes me wonder how the script for Die Hard was worked out. I mean, the basic plot of a terrorist takeover of a office tower and a guy thwarting it is already exciting action movie material. I’d like to know how the specifics like narrowing it down to Christmas and the FBI playbook stuff that really pull those threads into a neat package came together.
I’ve never seen any of the Lord of the Rings films but I just finished another viewing of my perennial favorite, Silent Night, Deadly Night.
It’s from the original novel:
I think that was a beginning of the holiday season movie. In my area, it used to always air on TV at Thanksgiving. We would watch it while having our meal at the kid’s table.
After spending most of the day with extended family at grandmom’s house, Dorothy’s final line in the film took on a new meaning. We used to say it along with her as kids. As teens we’d listen and mutter, “She’s not wrong” to each other. 
Are you aware of the fan cuts? There are several that make the Hobbit an enjoyable experience.
I’m good, thanks.
Interestingly the Die Hard movies were film adaptations of unrelated novels by different authors.
A second run theater in my neighborhood always does (did, in the before times) a LOTR marathon during winter break, so it’s definitely a Winter Break series to me as well. The marathon was fun to watch with the kids when they were younger, who doesn’t want a day sitting in the dark strung out on popcorn and soda with three kids?
Are you by chance, Italian like me?
Just asking 
In some ways Trading Places is essentially a reverse-Scrooge character arc, at least for Eddie Murphy’s character.
A destitute man is given control of a fortune and a luxurious house. His first instinct is to share this newfound bounty with similarly disadvantaged people, but then he quickly becomes convinced that those poor people are social parasites undeserving of his help and support.
By the end of the movie he is an unapologetic capitalist exploiting inside information to manipulate the stock market for personal gain, eventually celebrating his new fortunes with a luxurious island getaway with his similarly privileged new business partner.
Came for this, left satisfied 
Am also going to vote for Shazam! (the new one with Zachary Levi) as a Christmas movie. The ending sequence takes place in a Christmas Fair, so there.
There is another one?
There was the cheesy TV series that aired with a mess of other Saturday morning cartoons; I had thought there was a movie with Shaquille O’Neal, but that was ‘Kazaam!’
eta: It was Sinbad and the movie was about a genie named Shazaam. Same smell different taste.
Ah. I was wondering if you meant the Captain Marvel movie since she is somehow a related character in the tangled history of comic book intellectual properties.
Arguably the first movie departs most from the book by cutting out Tom Bombadil and, much more importantly in my opinion, the barrow-wights.
