Die Hard is a Christmas movie. At this point, the heist at Nakatomi Plaza is as established in the Christmas canon as A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or It’s a Wonderful Life. The holidays aren’t just a time for movies, however.
Die Hard didn’t just become a Christmas movie because of its setting, but because it's so rewatchable that it instantly became tradition, despite being far from traditional. However, Die Hard came out in 1988. It’s long past due that the Christmas classics induct another unexpected addition; it’s time to admit that Skyrim is a Christmas game.
Making a Christmas Classic
There are a few obvious ways that Skyrim appeals to the holiday spirit. Not only did The Elder Scrolls 5 release on November 11, 2011, just in time for the holidays, but Skyrim literally takes place between the snow-capped mountains of a land magical land filled with bearded men and elves.
However, there are plenty of games like Skyrim which take place in cold climates or within the fantasy genre that just wouldn’t be able to hack it as a Christmas classic. There are some good reasons that Skyrim in particular has a far more unique opportunity than most games to establish itself as part of the festive tradition.
Christmas movies and songs come round once a year–they help bring people back to good memories from previous years, and the ritual of watching or listening to them helps establish a sense of community around reliving those moments. The memory of past positive memories helps to create more positive memories, and the next year remembering those moments helps the cycle of nostalgia continue.
The reason people often talk about Christmas songs or movies and not Christmas video games or even TV shows is because songs and movies are shorter and easier to repeat. It would take far longer to replay a game like The Witcher 3 every holiday season than it would be to watch a movie like Die Hard, not to mention likely increasingly tedious. This is where Skyrim’s true potential as a Christmas game reveals itself. Skyrim isn’t a perfect game by any means, but it has incredible replay value. Even some of the often-criticized aspects of The Elder Scrolls’ formula can help in this regard: when players enter Skyrim’s open world, they are free to go anywhere and make their own story.
Unlike most other games, it’s easy to return to Skyrim year after year without the game feeling repetitive. If the player wants to experience a new story, they can simply head off in a random direction and see what they find. It even makes sense in the context of the game’s opening, as a prisoner who escaped execution by a matter of seconds wouldn’t want to hang around.
Skyrim’s pine forests, snowy mountains, and fantastical creatures make the game’s great outdoors feel like a winter wonderland, albeit one with dragons, civil war, assassins, vampires, werewolves, political intrigue, and the living dead. The interiors and player houses have that cozy Christmas feeling. Inns have big log fires and bards to sing by them while travelers escape the cold, while players can decorate their own houses to their hearts content, especially with the Hearthfire DLC.
Mods and Nostalgia
Players who have explored every cave and crevasse that Skyrim has to offer in its retail release can still return to the game every holiday season to get something new. There are Skyrim survival mods to make the game world's harsh landscape seem larger and more intimating than before. There are dialog mods that restore a huge amount of cut dialog from the game, including ones that restore content cut from the game’s original introduction.
Players can use mods like JK’s Skyrim or Holds the City Overhaul to turn the game’s towns and cities – a little lackluster by the standards of 2020 – into denser, more believable hubs. Players can use mods to fine tune the game such that it feels as fresh as it did when it first came out of the box back in 2011, while still undeniably being Skyrim.
The Elder Scrolls 5 may be a single-player game, but the Skyrim community is what truly makes it a Christmas game. Die Hard may have drawn attention to itself as a Christmas movie because it took place during the holidays, but it has remained a classic because people return to it year after year to re-experience it.
For 9 years, the modding community that built up around Skyrim has stayed remarkably strong, allowing fans to return to the game every year and experience something totally new or remastered but familiar. Modders might not be Santa’s elves, but Santa’s elves can’t deliver the the essential mods for an immersive Skyrim playthrough on both PC and Xbox down a chimney, and they certainly don’t work to upgrade old presents every year.
Christmas has so much to do with nostalgia, and repeating and creating traditions helps tap into that nostalgia directly. Even the yearly argument over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie at all has become a tradition in some sense. For those who don't like looking to the past, if nothing else Skyrim remains a great game to play when it’s cold and dark out. It has left a long-lasting impression on a huge amount of gamers, with Skyrim selling 20 million copies between its initial 2011 release and 2014. From there, the modding community has been able to find ways to stop the rose-tinted goggles from falling off, allowing players to update, improve, and remaster the experience every time they come back to it, be it the holidays or otherwise.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Switch.