Write Around the Holidays

by Alexia Gordon

Thanksgiving 2019 is in the books and the holiday season has officially started. (I know some of you started way back in October but, to me, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade marks the season’s beginning.) From now until New Year’s, we’ll be inundated with holiday-themed everything. Fashion, home dec, music, movies, books, you name it. If it can be remotely connected to Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or New Year’s, we’ll be able to buy, rent, watch, wear, listen to, or read it.

Before you accuse me of pathological grinchiness, I’m not knocking the holiday theme. I’ve got a few Christmas playlists queued on Spotify. I’m not going within ten feet of an ugly Christmas sweater but I do own a few pieces of Christmas-themed jewelry. I also own (and use) Lenox Christmas china. (Don’t judge.) I’ve added a few holiday films to my streaming watchlists and I’ve dragged the holiday movie DVDs out of the cabinet. I’m also looking for some Christmas-themed reads.

If I asked most people (perhaps, not you, as you’re reading a crime fiction blog) to recommend a Christmas-themed read, they’d probably recommend a story filled with heart-warming and peppermint-scented sweetness. But I’m in search of something less sentimental. After all, Christmas occurs during the darkest, coldest time of the year. Why shouldn’t seasonal fiction skew dark and cold? Why shouldn’t our holiday reads explore our fears as well as our hopes? One way of taming our fears is to confront them in a safe format. Books are safe. Thought-provoking, challenging, mind-expanding, maddening, yes, but safe, compared to the complicated, complex reality we navigate every day. If what we’re reading gets to be too much, we can turn the page or shut the book or set it aside until we’re ready to deal with the world depicted within.

But, you say, escapism tops your holiday wish-list. All you want for Christmas are candy canes, hot cocoa, and warm hugs. There’s nothing wrong with escapism. We turn to it to restore the feelings of safety, security, and certainty that real life too often denies us. Bring on the sentiment. (Sentiment sells, is the mantra of several streaming services eager to oblige your emotional sweet tooth with over 100 holiday rom-coms for your escapist enjoyment.) You want your holiday reads to be the warm blanket you hide under to escape the dark and cold.

Give darkness a chance. Escapism and fear are not mutually exclusive. What better way to calm your anxiety than through the vicarious pleasure of experiencing your fears being conquered on the page? Maybe you can’t slay the boogeyman rampaging through your actual life. You can imagine yourself as the protagonist who beats the bad guys in 250 pages or less. Maybe justice is harder to find in real life than Santa’s workshop. You can escape into a book where good wins and nice guys finish first.

Christmas mysteries and Christmas ghost stories are two types of fiction that fit the non-sentimental seasonal niche. Once upon a time, Christmas (or Yule to the pagans who thought of it first)—the darkest time of the year—was believed to be a time when the worlds of the living and the dead came closest, even closer than at Halloween. Ghost stories were standard fare. (Smithsonian Magazine has a good article explaining the history of the Christmas ghost story. It contains links to other articles on the tradition, as well as the names of some authors who penned spooky Christmas tales. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-ghost-stories-go-christmas-180961547/) It wasn’t until the puritanical Cromwell killed everyone’s buzz that these stories, along with the holiday itself, fell out of fashion. Charles Dickens revived the tradition. (“A Christmas Carol.” Ghosts. Think about it.) Others, such as M.R. James, often heralded as the master of the modern ghost story, carried it on.

Authors of crime fiction may not have consciously carried on the ancient tradition of honoring the time when the realms of the living and dead came closest, but they certainly appreciated the tension created by juxtaposing murder against all that cheer and goodwill. With happy, happy, joy, joy as a backdrop, the crime of taking a life seems all the more heinous. Thus, it feels all the more satisfying when the sleuth unmasks the killer, ensuring justice for the wronged. A Google search for “Christmas Mysteries” returned 59,500,000 results in 0.80 seconds. Agatha Christie is one of the best known. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas wasn’t very merry but it was fun to read/watch. Martha Grimes gave us Jerusalem Inn. Thanks to Martin Edwards and the British Library, we’ve rediscovered believed-lost classics like, J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White. Both Crime Reads (https://crimereads.com/christmas-mysteries-a-tradition-revived/) and Book Bub (https://www.bookbub.com/blog/christmas-mystery-books) offer further suggestions for your Yuletide reading, as do The Strand magazine (https://strandmag.com/top-ten-holiday-mysteries/), Dead Good Books (https://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/classic-christmas-crime/), and about 59 million others.

I’ve focused on Christmas because that’s the holiday I celebrate. Suggest some favorite, non-sentimental reads focused on Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s. Thanksgiving, Advent, and Epiphany, too. (Hint: Death in D Minor, my second Gethsemane Brown novel, is set during the run-up to Epiphany.) Or name drop some of your favorite reads that flirt with the dark side of Christmas.

 

Comments

[Cathy M]

My favorite Christmas centric novel is "Rest You Merry" by Charlotte MacLeod. Although a murder takes place, it's the humor that makes this my favorite. There's not really any hardcore darkness, but some lovely sly digs at academia and excessive Christmas displays.

[IDN Poker]

is that fiction?

[Cathy M]

yes