NATSLETTER | HARPY HOLIDAYS

“HOR HOR HOR!” Your ears perk up. It’s been so long since you let yourself believe in the magic of the Season, but still your heart skips a beat. Could it be? Is it... he?

You hurry out the door, dart to the driveway and look up. 

What’s that you spy tamp-tamp-tamping around on your roof? Why, there’s an overweight man up there! He’s dressed head to toe in red and his fat feet are damaging your roof tiles. He’s also got some assorted wild animals strapped to one another with jingly jangly reigns and they’re doing their business in your snow.

And, if you’ve lucky and if you’ve been a good kid, he’s about to saunter up to your chimney and drop a gift down in there for you.

And that gift is this newsletter. And that unsavory chubby weirdo on your roof is me, Nat Topping. Please don’t call the police! I only want to bring you a little bit of joy! I’ll be gone in no time, no cookies required!

Hark! The Herald has some letters from the front for your perusal as well as a little last minute gifting advice. But first let us settle an age-old question…

THE DEBATE THAT WILL NOT DIE(HARD):

I saw a webcomic a few weeks ago but I forgot to bookmark it - I'm becoming an older and older man by the day; honestly, it feels like I can’t be expected to remember anything anymore; on an unrelated note, have you seen my phone? - so I’m left with the indignity of describing to you what I vaguely remember happening in the comic.

It’s a group of people. They’re talking about their favorite Christmas movies. And then, this douchebag - a tech-bro Elon-type - who’s out of frame for the first panel inserts himself into the conversation to make the “controversial statement” that he favors Die Hard.

As I reviewed the comic on my palm-sized outrage machine, I confess that I let out a grunt of mild amusement, for indeed we all know a jack-ass of similar caliber who vomits out this sort of milquetoast comment and expects to blow minds with it.

And yet, as I read the comments I found it shocking to find that there are still people who seem to be not only confused but also angry about this. In fact, there’s this whole article from the Guardian about a survey of British people who mostly don’t consider Die Hard to be a Christmas movie.

Evidently, this is still a thing people argue about.

Now remember: we are arguing in the year of our lerd 2025 - no amount of fact or reason can convince anyone of anything. We all know this.

But for those of you still fighting the good fight out here, I thought I might arm you with the opinion of an honest-to-God film industry professional. 

For indeed, I am an honest-to-God film industry professional.

An indie professional? Sure. One who still tapes over the holes in the bottom of his shoes? Fine. But as a development person, my job is to read a ton of scripts and evaluate them, and we are always looking for Christmas content because buyers are always looking for Christmas content. I am paid (god help us) to have an opinion about these things that affects in some small way what makes it to screen. 

Of course, I could give you the real answer - life is short, hold your loved ones close and don't argue with strangers on the internet over things that are immaterial - but that's not the fun or informative answer.

And so I share with you my own personal two main criteria for a Christmas movie:

1. The film must be about “family”, meaning it features a character or characters coming to realize the value of their relatives, lovers, friends, neighbors and/or loved ones (and ideally the error in their ways for taking advantage). 
2. There must be Christmas Shit in there, meaning a satisfactory amount of Christmas ephemera.

There are different sub-genres with different genre components (a Hallmark Christmas movie is different from a Studio Christmas Comedy is different from a Christmas Drama, etc.) but in my opinion, those are the two baseline criteria that must be met in order to qualify writ large.

A lot of the arguments I’ve seen center around point number the two - how much of Die Hard involves Christmas, and how much ‘Christmas’ does it involve? The whole thing takes place on Christmas Eve, but there's no Santa, etc. etc. To me, the second point is the less interesting of the two points.

Because point number one is the part that gives us, the audience, that warm fuzzy feeling required of a proper Christmas movie. It's that inner smile of contentment that comes from watching someone become a better person. Any movie can fill out a bingo card of Christmas tropes, but can it make you feel something?

Plenty of movies will give you that inner smile - Planes, Trains and Automobiles comes to mind - but this is not a Christmas movie. This is a Thanksgiving movie - and it's freaking great - but there's no Christmas Shit so it does not qualify.

While I’ve been back in the ancestral homelands for the holidays, I had the opportunity to catch a 2020 thriller with the family called Fatman. In it, Mel Gibson (!!) plays a depressed Chris Cringle, a “gritty” Santa Claus who has a contract taken out on his life by a shitty kid who received coal one year as his gift. After killing the assassin charged with taking him out, Chris finds the kid and threatens his life. And then the movie ends.

Does it check a bunch of boxes for criterion number two? Sure. You have a literal Santa Claus. He employs freaky, grown-person-sized elves. Did I feel that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you see a Christmas movie? No. I mostly felt nothing, with a little bit of confusion.

Contrast that with John McClane, a NYPD officer who travels across the country to try and convince his wife, Holly (Holly?! I mean, hello!) to set aside her career and move back with him. Everything’s going horribly wrong for him, and that’s even before the Christmas party they’re attending is overrun by random European thieves with a complicated plan to steal money from Holly’s employer. Over the course of the evening, John comes to realize he’s been taking his wife for granted and that the most important thing is not to control her life but to rescue her from Professor Snape. By the end of the movie, John is a changed man - for the better - all because of a renewed devotion to his family.

In my opinion, even though it has less jokey references to Christmas lore, Die Hard is more of a Christmas movie than this film whose protagonist is nominally Santa Claus. Film Industry Professional's Verdict: Die Hard is a Christmas movie. However, please don't pretend like this is a new, innovative thought - you will only come across as a jack-ass.

Anyway, those are my two cents. I’m a glutton for punishment, though, and would love to hear your opinions on this. 

Die Hard: Ho Ho Ho or Oh Hell no?

…

Was that last sentence clever or cringe? I don’t even know anymore. Being a parent scrambles your brain, man. Anyway, on to the next bit...

DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

I was a true believer once.

To this day, I still remember the feeling: a cheerful “Merry Christmas” met with a snide, condescending “Happy Holiday.” You could almost smell the sour stench of judgement on their breath as they stressed the “Hol” in Holiday, implying a certain holier-than-thou attitude - holier even though they themselves did not celebrate the birth of Christ at all.

It was enough to make you sick. It truly felt to me at the time like there was a War on Christmas. They told me I was under attack, that my very lifestyle and culture was besieged. Of course I enlisted.

How could I know? The terrors? The atrocities? 

It was supposed to be a quick war. And yet here I sit, over a decade later, writing this missive addressed to whom? Nobody? My conscience? A confession to Santa perhaps, as though I owe him an apology for belonging on the naughty list?

Because I’ve seen too many blown to tinsel. Far too many trampled by runaway, enraged reindeer or berserk abominable snowmen. And I've passed through the ruins of too many towns and villages and hamlets that were ransacked by elves, the menorahs and kinaras crushed under bell-slippered foot. 

We’ve forced closed every Chinese restaurant and Halal cart west of the Mississippi, and yet the lust for yuletide domination rages unabated.

This morning, my unit, the 110th Leaping Lords, joined the siege of San Diego. Apparently some news service released a list of “Grinchiest Cities” in the United States back in 2023 and General Von Frankenmuth, always on the lookout for more targets, has been knocking them off one-by-one ever since. 

As my men were getting staged for deployment, we were treated to another speech, televised of course, by the General herself. Once upon a time, in the very beginning, Santa Claus himself delivered these homicidal homilies. This was, of course, before Saint Nick resigned his commission and disappeared from public, leaving it to less-than-savory careerists to step into the power vacuum.

“Now is not the time,” shouted the General into the camera, her eyes burning with zeal, “to grow weak. For the villainous Holideers beyond the walls await our apathy and complacency to stage their counterattack. They must be struck down now, extinguished like a string of malfunctioning twinkle-lights before they have the opportunity to spark and accidentally light the tree on fire. Final victory is in sight, and for the glory of Sweet Baby Jesus we march on until there are no more Holideers left.”

I’d become well accustomed to the propaganda - after all, the airwaves and television screens had become so saturated with holiday advertising that it was impossible to avoid the Spirit of the Season - and yet even I could not hold back a roll of the eye at the General’s words.

Unfortunately for me, a member of her war council must have seen me, because not thirty minutes later I had already been summoned to her tent.

“Have a seat, Colonel,” she said to me, gesturing to a red and green camp chair set up next to her travelling desk. I had to remove a couple of unstuffed stockings that hung across the chairback, but did as I was told.

She peered at me over her round spectacles, the sort you might once have seen slowly drifting down Saint Nick’s nose.

“Are you unhappy with the way I’m prosecuting this campaign?” she asked.

I knew better than to take the bait and replied with my usual “No m’am.” But she was unsatisfied with that answer. “Your little passive aggressive displays of disloyalty have not gone unnoticed, I’m afraid. You are a senior officer in the forces of Christmas. I cannot afford unenthusiasm or, Sweet Baby Jesus forbid, mutiny from you of all people. This is your opportunity to speak your mind. Speak it or I shall be forced to court-martial you.”

I must confessed I was tempted to stay quiet. The idea of spending the rest of the war imprisoned for disobedience, away from the endless yuletide violence, seemed attractive. Ultimately I knew for my own sake that I had to say something.

“When can we end this stupid war?” I said. I waited, watched her eyes to see - had I gone too far? She just nodded.

“Go on,” she said.

“We’ve effectively won the war already. We won it a long time ago. If we’re being honest, there was never really much of a struggle. Anyone with a television or internet access could tell you, just based on the advertising - Christmas has never seriously been in doubt. These people - these Holideers, as you call them - only ever wanted to be left alone.

"What are we thinking? It’s like a mania descended on us all one day and we’ve been tearing ourselves apart ever since. Over what? If I knew we were going to hurt so many people in this bloody damned Culture War,” but I trailed off; I couldn't finish the thought. How could I say it? How could I tell her that, had I known, I might never have enlisted in the first place?

I expected fury and wrath from the General, but she gave me a look I did not recognize from her - one that I thought might mean empathy, thought it could have also been heartburn.

“You’re not the only one who’s tired, Colonel. Many of us, in some dark and private moment, have wavered in our dedication to the Christmas Crusade. I’ve seen it from even the most zealous. It’s understandable. Some of us have lost friends and family. But we must remember: it is Christmastime. And Christmastime is no time to show mercy.”

“I think it is, though,” I said, “Isn't that exactly what Christmastime is supposed to be about.”

“If we still lived in Dickens-times then maybe I’d agree with you. But never forget that our people are under threat, no matter how 'peaceful' the Holideers make themselves out to be. You can see it on display, from the halls of Twitter to the gutters of X, the hatred of our way of life. We’re all tired, and yet we cannot rest until the Holideers have been stamped out of existence. We both know they will not be happy, not until we’ve been mildly inconvenienced into uttering their accursed greeting. Respecting other people’s traditions! Can you imagine? Perish the thought!

“But luckily I’ve got a plan. Go back to your Leaping Lords, Colonel. Tell them to fill their bellies with rumcake and eggnog. Because tonight you join the 7th Swans and the Fighting French Hens storming the barricades. You’ll have... a special kind of backup tonight,” she said, her lips curling into a weird sort of sinister sneer.

At that, I saluted and turned to leave the tent.

“Oh, and Colonel,” continued the General as she looked down through some papers on her desk. “There may come a time when the war is over and the purge begins, when those who understand the true Reason for the Season are separated from the fake believers, like seed pulled from the chaff. Rolling your eyes at the General’s address? That’s chaff behavior. You’ll want to make sure you’re a seed, if you know what’s good for you.”

I returned to my unit and prepared them for an assault. As the sun set over the ocean, I could feel the men grow more and more tense, their fists clenching their candy cane carbines and their figgy pudding grenades. When you’ve stormed as many trenches as we have, the routine before the battle becomes a moment of precious calm.

As we made our final preparations, Von Frankenmuth’s “secret weapons” rolled up to the line - massive war machines covered with tarps. With a signal from high command, the tarps were removed.

They were gigantic speakers on wheels.

“What’s this about?” asked my first lieutenant, but I silenced him with a hand gesture. An elf, dead-eyed and sallow - likely from an addiction to the performance enhancing jingle jangle fed to them - climbed into the machine’s cab and flipped some switches.

That’s when I heard it. The deep thump followed by the high synthesizer reverberating through the evening sky. The notes slowly climbed the scales like terror scaling my esophagus. I knew it right away.

“No,” I muttered.

Then the jingle bells joined in, the synthesizer punching notes like a knife breaking skin.

“No,” I insisted. “This was banned. By the North Pole Convention, this was banned! For the love of Sweet Baby Jesus, NO!”

When Paul McCartney’s voice rang out over the speakers, the first wails of despair cried out from beyond the earthworks of San Diego.

Psychological warfare. Banned for being cruel and unusual, a crime to humanity.

Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime.

I cast my eyes around, looking for any superior officer. “This is inhumane! We'll burn in hell for this!" I gasped. "We should at least have headphones for our own protection!”

An elf stared at me, his eyes as cold as the arctic glacier water, “The General was on a Signal chat with the Secretary of War and he said this is okay. Besides, if you were a True Believer then you'd like this song.”

And Sweet Baby Jesus help me, I led my men over the battlements. And on the other side, I found not soldiers but people - human beings - clutching their ears, writhing on the ground. I heard a mother cry out, “Why won’t you just leave us alone? We don’t want anything from you.” And I saw a Krampus shove a gingerbread man into her mouth before she was dragged away to a Christmas rehabilitation camp.

That night, we performed the pantomime we all knew so well - we slapped one another on the back and told ourselves that we had done our duty. Maybe some of us managed to be convinced for another night.

But I knew in that moment that I would go AWOL. Maybe I’d find Santa, sitting on the beach in some far away place, hiding from the monsters we’d created. 

But no matter what, one thing was sure: I was chaff. I’d lost my faith.

LAST MINUTE GIFT IDEAS FROM YOUR FRIEND AT NATTOPPING.COM

Okay listen: I thought it might be nice to provide some ideas for last minute gifts, since that’s a common problem that people seem to have all the time, and I’m nothing if not a helpful guy. 

But so, this was our first year flying with the baby, which means I didn’t exactly have a ton of time to think about this little listicle. Therefore, much like many other media outlets have started to do, I “delegated” it to Artificial Intelligence.

I know, I know - I promised that there would be no AI on this website.

But hear me out. I didn’t reckon with the combined effects of being both busy AND lazy. This is a powerful combination. Okay? 

So. Without further ado, let’s see how the algorithm daddy did:

AI OVERVIEW - “Last minute holiday gift giving” is a time honored tradition that involves the sharing of gifts, presents or items with Last Minute, who must be a friend or loved one of yours. 

Context: The giving of gifts focuses on the finding, buying, wrapping and presenting of nouns based upon a set of criteria (like “want, need, wear, read, weed and rare”) that allow you to discover the exact right item to elicit love and affection from Last Minute. You may take into consideration Last Minute’s stated needs or interests, such as likes and dislikes, and personalize the item selection based on Last Minute’s personality, which is very personal to their individualities like a snowflake.

History: Giving gifts has a historical history stemming from the Romans. Usually everything traces back to the Romans. Prior to the Roman Empire there basically is no such thing as history, unless you want to count the pyramids, which were delivered as a gift by the Aliens.

Based on your personal shopping history, consider gifting the following four items:

* NEW CAMERA - You purchased a Canon EOS R100 camera for yourself about three months ago - perhaps you would like to buy it again for your friend, but at a better price than was available before? The algorithm loves to anticipate your needs by offering you no less than seven targeted ads for things that you have already just purchased.

* LABUBU - this is the "hotness", meaning a thing that people seem to really love right now but may not love, or possibly even resent, within a matter of a few months. However, since this is a recent trend, buying Last Minute a Labubu will show that they are with it, hip and cool in a six-seven way. 

* ALKA-SELTZER - records indicate that you have bought several large packages of Alka-Seltzer lately, possibly due to your diet, stress levels or rapidly advancing age. Given your love of Alka-Seltzer, it may be the sort of thing you would like to share with Last Minute.

* A TURNING POINTS USA MEMBERSHIP - this excellent, reputable organization is wisely paying for a bump in their advertising. We have a selection of exciting Youtube videos to help suck viewers down a rabbit hole to extremism. What do you say? Might Last Minute fancy a sharp right turn in their politics?

If you found this article helpful, sign up for our AI Buyer service - you can completely abdicate any responsibility for your personal relationships by letting the algorithm buy everything for you!

Okay, well. Probably would have gotten better advice (and writing) from a high school sophomore dropout. But this was pretty cheap, so.

A HOLIDAY MESSAGE FROM MY SON:

Finally, my fifteen-month old child wanted to share a message of holiday greetings and yuletide cheer with you. Unfortunately, he’s fifteen months old. His fingers and his brain aren’t yet on the same page. 

Still, he insisted on bashing his tiny little palm on my keyboard to type out these simple few characters for your amusement. I hope you can take this message to heart as we all head into the uncertainty, but also the endless possibilities, of a brand new year:

“4t cdfejjjuccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvsssssssssDDDCZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZvc vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv gvfch fc vfgt4sdfffffffffff bvddddddddddddddssssssssssssssvvvvjc nbycfr6ccccccccccccccccccvccccccccvmmnb ,,,,,,..........eat the rich...vsdfe”

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays / Jolly New Year!

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT 

THE GOSPEL OF TRAVIS - I’ve stopped talking about it and started posting it to the website, one chapter a week. Regular updates resume next week, but you catch up by heading (or refresh) over to the table of contents.

Check it out, my beautiful little snow critters!

If you liked this newsletter (is that a new sweater you're wearing? It looks fantastic!) and know someone who might like all or part of this, please forward it to them! I put this stuff out there in the hopes that people will enjoy it. The more the merrier (“Hor hor hor!!”).

If you would like to know when more posts like this hit the website and have not already become a subscriber, please consider becoming a subscriber! It’s free (unless you’d like to pay, you genius). The algorithm is a fickle beast and the Face Eaters prefer you look at their own AI generated content from their big cash daddies, so the best way to stay in the know is by joining the email list.

If you would like to support me without signing up for a monthly paid subscription, you can do that by sending me a small donation at the link. Money goes to site maintenance and then invariably to childcare and/or hot cocoa.

That’s it! Newsletter complete! Thank you so much for reading! The next newsletter will be sent FROM THE FUTURE - 2026!

Happy Holi... errr, what I mean to say is: I love you!