The Twelve Terrors of Christmas Literary Elements

Humor/Christmas Fiction

America in the late 20th century.

The narrative is from the point-of-view a person deeply into middle-age who often directly addresses the reader with rhetorical questions.

The tone is light-hearted with a mocking sense of sardonic outrage. The mood is an ironic sense of nostalgia.

Protagonist: the narrator. Antagonist: the whole Christmas season.

The conflict in the novel is never directly addressed, but rather implied allusively. That conflict is the one between joyous reputation of the holiday season and the darker aspects of reality.

The book comes to a climax with the grumpy narrator comparing the Christmas season to a temporary Hell that seems to last longer by starting earlier as time goes on.

n/a

The rhetorical question in the chapter on Christmas TV programming ends with one of those recurring rhetorical questions. “Isn’t there something else on, like wrestling or Easter Parade?” specifically references a 1948 Hollywood musical taking place during Easter. It is also an understated way of suggesting Easter is a preferable holiday for celebration because it doesn’t stimulate the same anxieties as Christmas that are addressed in the book.

Various chapters throughout the book contain allusions to Pennywise the clown, the poetic license afforded to the poem “'Twas the night before Christmas”, the declining popularity of electric train sets, A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas animated TV specials, and the Christmas musicals Holiday Inn and White Christmas.

The imagery “Three dull neckties and a pair of flannel gloves” is used to suggest that the gifts one receives are an accurate barometer indicating how one is perceived by the gift-givers.

"There is a point where altruism becomes sick” paradoxically suggests that devotion to putting the interests of others ahead of self-interest can eventually become a mental illness.

The chapter titled “Fear of Not Giving Enough” leads to a parallel construction united by the theme of holiday shopping ailments: “Leads to dizziness in shopping malls, foot fractures on speed-up escaltors, thumb and wrist spring in the course of package manipulation, eye and facial injuries in carton-crowded buses.”

“Have our hearts grown so terribly heavy?” is a metonym in which “hearts” stands for the gamut of emotions produced by hearing Christmas carols.

“At night, you can hear it rustling and slurping water out of the bucket” personifies the Christmas tree.