Have you ever themed a book or a story around a holiday or a specific time of year? What do you think about writing something aimed at a certain holiday or event? Are you limiting your audience or taking advantage of the season like a singer releasing a Christmas album or a TV show doing a Halloween themed episode?
I’ve never set out to write a story centered around a holiday, though seasons often work their way into my fiction—not as backdrop, but as metaphor.
Autumn isn’t just orange leaves and crisp air. It’s decline. It’s beauty giving way to death. Winter, too, is a mood: a kind of silence, a stripping-away. Spring carries the weight of rebirth, whether we want it or not. These associations are ancient, even archetypal. Pagan ritual, the liturgical calendar, folklore—they all whisper through how we experience time. A single image, like a bare twig with a bird chirping in the cold, can echo through literature for centuries.
So no, I don’t write holiday stories in the traditional sense. But I’m not against them either. Writing to a season or event can be an opportunity, not just a chance to “cash in” (though there’s no shame in a little seasonally timed success). The cultural weight of a moment can act as emotional shorthand. If a writer says “Thanksgiving,” readers bring a whole web of expectations—food, family, gratitude, tension—before the story even starts. That’s powerful.
Still, what matters most isn’t the calendar but the emotional truth beneath it. You don’t need to know the specifics of a holiday to feel what it evokes: celebration, longing, loss. The right details can make the abstract accessible. That’s the work, after all—to take something broad and make it matter to a single reader in a particular moment.
For me, the real theme across my writing, even the crime fiction, is friendship. That’s the heart of it. Who stands by you in the dark. Who helps you find your way out of the wilderness. Every era has its flavor of noir, but the stakes stay the same: how to survive and stay human.
If that happens to take place at Christmas or under a blood moon in October, so be it.
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