Oh my God, there’s a blog post! I think I might faint. Oh, wait, I can’t. I’m the one making the post.

Here’s the thing: I have no Christmas spirit this year, at all. I can’t blame it on COVID, either. It’s definitely a holiday that has provided diminishing returns the last five years. I keep waiting for the season to feel “normal” again, or for there to be a return of my previous exuberant Christmas enthusiasm, but it doesn’t happen, and I’m not sure how to get it back. (Or, honestly, if I want it back, but that’s a question for a different time and place.)

But here’s my concession this year, and only because the idea popped into my head awhile back and it won’t leave, and I should be writing daily anyway – The Twelve Days of a Holmes Christmas, or Holmes-mas, if you will. I do not guarantee bright and cheerful Christmas content. Charlotte, perhaps not surprisingly, shares my current view of the holiday.

A few bits of bookkeeping:

• We’re going with the traditional definition of the “Twelve days of Christmas”, meaning they start with Christmas Day and count forward.
• I’ll be using what is, according to the internet, the version of the lyrics published in 1882, because it most closely fits the timeframe of the pre-book Holmes, which is what I’m going with here (because, despite there being a couple Christmases past in my books’ version of the canon, they are chockful of spoilers at this point, and if these books ever see the light of day, spoilers would be a bad thing!)
• These are probably going to be more vignettes than stories, that might possibly connect into something overarching by the end (but I guarantee nothing!) because I’m giving myself a word count limit and not letting my brain/fingers run wild. I just tucked away 90k words worth of nonsense for my 2020 NaNoWriMo project (80,032 of it in November) so obviously I need a leash currently.
• I didn’t go back to make sure I hadn’t visited Christmas in this universe already, so on the off chance this violates my own canon…uhhh, oops? Apologies. But, really, it would be on brand, since Doyle didn’t manage to remember his own canon or timeline either, so…..

All that said, here is Day One of The Twelve Days of a Holmes-mas.

Bah humbug.

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