Blog How To Write Funny Festive Tales
By Sibéal Pounder | Guest blog
Reimagine A Character
Think of a festive character or Christmas object, or even food, and then bring it to life and make it something we wouldn’t expect. It could be a Santa who’s turned evil, or a little Christmas cracker with big dreams.
In Tinsel, my first festive book, we meet Eggnog, a giant enchanted Christmas tree, and in Sprouts we have Tinselcat, a cat with tinsel fur.
You can also take your favourite creature and add a Christmassy element, combining them to create an animal that is entirely unique to your story. A rat with holly ears, a dog that poos mince pies. Maybe there’s even a backstory as to how that character came to look or be that way? Maybe they’re magic? Do they have a festive name? Is there more than one of them? Let your imagination run wild!
The world is full of wild and wonderful Christmas traditions, with many countries celebrating in different ways.
In Italy, there is an awesome Christmas witch called Befana, who delivers presents much like Santa Claus (only she uses a broom rather than a sleigh – who needs reindeer when you’re magic!)
Then there’s the tradition of the Krampus, an evil beast who comes to steal away naughty children. He’s got horns and hooves and in some European countries they dress up as him and have Krampus parades through the streets for fun!
There’s Gryla, the Scandinavian hag who takes naughty kids and boils them in a stew. And in Catalonia there is the wonderful Tio de Nadal, a log with a cheery face who poops presents for children!
You can have so much
fun researching different traditions and using them to inspire and enrich your
festive story.
The Santa tradition in particular relies on a lot going right – from the toy request letter travelling safely up the chimney to Santa getting down it at the end to deliver the present. In between you have toy workshops and elves, a sleigh and many reindeer, weather, naughty children, etc, etc.
Plot the Christmas journey and make something go wrong! There is a
lot of comedy to be found in things going awry. Write out the journey as a
timeline of events as they should happen, then write lots of things that go
wrong along the way. Does it resolve in the end or is it a Christmas disaster?!
Imagine A Different Time
In Tinsel we travel back to the Victorian era, when commercial Santa as we know him today was first discovered.
In Sprouts, we travel to a Christmas future – the year 4024 – where Christmas is everything, it is everywhere, and it is EVERY DAY. Everyone travels by flying sleigh and all food is served as flavoured candy canes.
Pick a point in time and write all the features of that era – maybe it’s imagining how dinosaurs celebrated in the Jurassic period, or dreaming up a futuristic world – what do they eat? How do they travel? What Christmas songs do they sing? You can have so much fun world-building an alternative Christmas world, past or present and within it, finding potential characters and ideas for stories.
