A Very Festive Darkest Day Staircase
As you may or may not expect, it isn’t traditional in my tribe of monsters (specifically haunters of basements and attics) to celebrate Christmas. Yes. Yes. I know it might seem shocking, but monsters can be like that.
It does turn out that we have a holiday very near Christmas that we call Darkest Day. There are even traditional songs to go with Darkest Day. Such as Oh Darkest Day, I’ll be Haunting You, and Crawling up from the Depths. The second song, I’ll be Haunting You, is traditionally screamed, as opposed to anything resembling singing. The other two require quite a bit of moaning and bumping about. Crawling up is singular in that it requires the performer to slam a door at the very end. Ah! It makes me nostalgic talking about such things.
Darkest Day commemorates a special day that happened thousands of years ago in a great monster civilization that has since disappeared. It seems that a team of astronomers had noticed that the sun seemed to be going away. The days had grown shorter and shorter. It was on this day that they noticed that the sun had seemed to stop, and they excitedly announced that it would never come back. Monsters all over the world would gain hours of creeping and haunting time, and our monster GDP would skyrocket. Little did they know that they had unwittingly marked the very day that the sun started coming back. I can only imagine that this was very embarassing.
We monsters don’t generally give gifts around Darkest Day. There are a few traditional things that we do to mark it, however. For example, monsters with hair will get a haircut. It happens that some monsters who do not have hair (or for whom a haircut would be painful, like a Medusa), can get wigs. The wigs are generally black and have very very long hair so that the wearer can have a real cutting experience. (Haha. Get it?) Of course, this is one of those items where richer monsters can show up the neighbors with more expensive wigs. Some very wealthy monsters even hire ghosts to haunt their wigs.
A traditional item we share with humans around this time is the giving of cards. Of course, we do it very differently. We give cards that are made of black paper and put in black envelopes. We do not mail them or even scrawl addresses on them. A proper Darkest Day card is delivered by sneaking up the the recipient’s domicile and sliding it under a door or in a window in such a way that the receiver will be unaware that they even got a card. Unfortunately, such cards are hard to see in the dark. I’m a big fan of paper, though, so I like getting cards and leave them all over my floor to step on during the coming year.
One last tradition that monsters share on this holiday is climbing up stairways in towers. It’s best to have a very long stairway hidden away in a haunted castle or deserted lighthouse, but a good staircase in a derelict hotel or even an apartment building will do. When done properly, a lot of moaning, clanking, and bumping around in the dark creates an especially harrowing tone, and a monster should properly imagine climbing these dark stairs all the way up into the sky, even if their staircase only goes up a few floors.
So there you have it. I hope everyone has a very happy holiday.
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I hope you had a wonderful time on Darkest Day and that you were able to find lots of long, scary stairways to climb throughout the day!
Thanks! I had a really fabulous one. Besides climbing my favorite deserted staircase, I got an awesome print by Jaime Zollars and an Edward Gorey book. Hope your holiday was good too.