A machine gun and the greatest Christmas movie ever. Ho Ho Ho.

After a movie marathon that includes titles like “The Holiday,” “While You Were Sleeping,” “Four Christmases” and “Love, Actually” you’re probably asking yourself, “When did Christmas become a holiday for chicks?” and “How do I forget I saw Hugh Grant dancing?”

There’s alcohol, of course, with all kinds of winter ales available for just such an emergency, but try not to drink so much that you forget there are also some solid Christmas movie choices for guys.

Truth be told, most men already have a favorite Christmas film and will rave about their choice with or without the help of those holiday beers. But really, only one movie combines the scruffy slapstick of “Bad Santa” and “Trapped in Paradise,” the memorable catchphrases of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Scrooged” and the go-for-broke gunplay of “The Ref” and “The Ice Harvest.”

That film is “Die Hard.”

On the surface it’s an unusual choice for greatest Christmas movie ever made. It takes place almost exclusively in an L.A. skyscraper so there’s no snow, the only Christmas Carol featured is Run DMC’s “Christmas In Hollis” and every inch of gift wrap is used to conceal a gun between Bruce Willis’ shoulder blades. Some people have even suggested that “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” might be a better choice.

Those people are wrong.

Because if you dig a little deeper you realize that most of your Christmas references are based on that first “Die Hard” movie. Think about it, when you borrow your buddy’s boots to shovel the walk you say he has feet smaller than your sister, while reading ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas to your nieces you can’t help throwing in “four a-holes coming in the rear in standard two-by-two cover formation” and there’s no way you haven’t drunkenly told the Christmas turkey you’re gonna f-in' cook it, and f-in’ eat it.

Still not convinced it’s the ultimate Christmas classic? Consider this:

As the film is drawing to a close and Reginald VelJohnson’s cop (the Tiny Tim in this modern-day “A Christmas Carol”) shakes off his psychological limp, draws his gun and fires a round into Alexander Godunov’s Karl, saving our hero and Christmas in the process, there’s only one thing to say, the phrase that best sums up the holidays and the words that Dickens would have written himself if he had only used a gun instead of a fountain pen:

Yippee-ki-yay us, everyone.