I’m going to confess something here.

One would think that I would gorge myself on spooky movies and books and music during the month of October.

But I don’t- I do a lot of writing and I actually get into my photography more and I do decorate but for the most part I indulge in ghost stories in all the formats that the modern world offers and my writing even takes on a darker edge during the Christmas Season.

It may have something to do with the fact that when my family gets together we used to end up telling ghost stories, or weird stories about the human oddities we all seemed to run into during the Spring and Summer.

I heard my first stories about demonic possession at a Christmas Party when I was about 8 years old and when I got back to school after Christmas break I went straight to the school library and got my hands on every single book that featured ghosts or anything scary.

And after I ran through those I started to write my own.

So in my world the Christmas Season- joyful as it is- is full of shadows and basements and attics and graveyards covered with snow and it’s haunted by people who will never come home again.

See what I mean?

So here are three of my favorite Holiday Movies that do a lot to put me in the Christmas – spirit:

One of the best Ghost Stories ever-  I think it’s a great movie to watch at Halloween to-

Dicken’s ” Scrooge ”

When I was a child and first saw that graveyard scene I nearly ran screaming for the safety of my room. It was the first and only time a movie ever terrified me. Needless to say, I was charmed by it.

So this movie has a place in my heart- and nightmares forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97PwRDfHBlg

This is a recent favorite- it’s all about family and the train wreck that can happen when we fail to navigate our way through the world together. Plus it has Vampires and Werewolves so it’s awesome:

” What  We Do In The Shadows.”

On Christmas Eve I like to read ” The Raven ” Sometimes I even try to recite it from memory- which amuses my cats and dog to no end because they are my audience.

If I could have done it like this I’d perform it at every single holiday function I go to. As it is, I just pull up the clip and watch the Simpsons telling of  ” The Raven ”

It’s a classic.

It may be odd, it might not make a lot of sense and I’m sure there is something not quite normal about it, but when I watch my movies and I sit back and turn them over in my mind- and if it’s cold or dark or it’s snowing –

it feels like Christmas to me-I can feel it in my bones.

Photo A.M. Moscoso

Christmas Special (2017) Writing Prompt #4 – It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas