Are the usual Christmas movies so sugary-sweet they set your teeth on edge? All beautifully-decorated-homes that seem to clean themselves, and perfect family meals that appear out of decorating-magazine kitchens?
Then take a ‘stab’ at Christmas-themed murder mysteries, or the raft of holiday suspense and horror movies.
Sometimes I’m in the mood for Hallmark Christmas movies – they’re festive and feel-good and easy watching when you’re tired. But after a few hours of small towns with enough decorations for a large city, and the de rigeur scenes of snowball fights, cookie baking, Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, town dances in a big barn and the penultimate scene of a big relationship misunderstanding, I begin to feel subversive.
It was with great delight that I discovered the movie Krampus (2015) a few years ago. The family members merged around the holiday table bicker with the best of them, although they must overcome their differences to try and survive the arrival of a very nasty Krampus during a sudden and mysterious blizzard. Creepy and great fun to watch.
Of course there are many others, from Gremlins (1984) to the explicitly-named Carnage for Christmas (2024). Rotten Tomatoes has a great list of holiday horror movies for you should you need a dose of anti-Hallmark acidity.
As for novels, the Christmas season has gestated a lot of murder mysteries. It seems the holidays inspire writers to kill people off – well, haven’t we all felt that way sometimes?
Britain, the grande dame of mystery novels, is top of this chart, and its own grande dame of mystery writers, Agatha Christie, tossed her famed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, into a Christmas Eve murder in 1938, in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. In that story, Poirot is sent to investigate the death of Simeon Lee, a tyrannical British millionaire, on Christmas Eve. (It’s currently free to read on Kindle Unlimited.)
But she was actually beaten to the punch by a lesser-known author, Mavis Doriell Hay, in 1936. The Santa Klaus Murder features Sir Osmond Melbury, a wealthy patriarch, celebrating the holidays with his family when a guest dressed as Santa finds him shot dead on Christmas Day. The book has recently been reissued, along with another vintage Christmas murder mystery from the 1930s, Mystery in White. This collection of Golden Age mysteries is available again through the efforts of crime novelist Martin Edwards and the British Library to republish out-of-print Christmas murder mystery classics.
Crossing the Pond, prolific American mystery novelist Rex Stout subjected his fastidious but brilliant private investigator Nero Wolfe to the indignity of attending a Christmas party in costume, upon which the host is bumped off. A Christmas Party was a short story, and is best enjoyed as episode 9 in Season 1 of the wonderful A Nero Wolfe Mystery series produced by A&E in 2001.
There are so many engaging Christmas mysteries available that I can’t list them all here, but you can check them out on Amazon.ca (or other vendor sites – or, if you’re really lucky, find a hard copy somewhere and read of an evening with a nice cup of tea). There’s even a book that might inspire you, called 12 Ways to Kill Your Family at Christmas, but I don’t recommend getting ideas! Just read/watch/dream of knives and poison and all the myriad ways of dispatching someone, without trying it at home 😉