Creepmas Day 10: Creepmas Kids' Books!

So this year I'm celebrating Creepmas! 

From the 13 Days of Creepmas website: 

"A reaction to the continuing incursion of Christmas into Autumn and Halloween, CREEPMAS is a good-natured chance for Halloween lovers to exact revenge by bringing some spooky good cheer into the holidays or, more appropriately, the Hallowdays..." Read more about the inspirations behind this 13 day celebration HERE. 

So you thought Creepmas was only for adults... huh? Well, as yesterday's post proves, there's a definite market for chocolate-in-your-peanut-butter marketing for the frightful and the festive for kiddies this time of year! With that in mind, today's post is all for the youngest fans of Creepmas! I'm highlighting 7 books that fall under the category (IMO) of "Creepmas books for kids".

Norman Bridwell is most famous for his Clifford, the Big Red Dog series. He created many other books during his career as a childrens' book author/illustrator. Including a series of about 5 books about a witch. The Witch Next Door, The Witch Grows Up, The Witch on Vacation, the Witch Goes to School, and this one: The Witch's Christmas. The witch is a friendly practitioner of the dark arts, and lives next door to some children who appreciate her talents. She also seems to simultaneously serve the Dark Lord while celebrating the birth of the Savior.

We get a look at the black snow that falls on the witch's property. And the animate snowman who attacks all who threaten his mistress. 

Her Christmas traditions are similar but appropriately Creepmas-y. The tree is decked out in skulls and bats and spiders and the like. Her caroling group is a horror show that terrorizes the neighborhood.  All-in-all this is a cute book that my kids do enjoy. The witch has an adventure where she saves both Santa Claus and a pair of astronauts from a frosty death in the vacuum of space. Check it out! 

Next up, from the author of Bunnicula, we have The Fright Before Christmas which also stars Harold, Chester, and Howie, from the Bunnicula books (Bunnicula himself makes a cameo but is, disappointingly, NOT the focus of the tale). 

The animals are worried about such horrors as fat men with sacks sliding down chimneys and ghosts of Christmas (like the ones in a Christmas Carol) showing up to do who-knows-what to their family. So Harold and Chester set out to stop this holiday horror-show from happening.

Hijinks ensue and absolutely no one is  slaughtered by a vampiric leporid. So there's a nice build-up but not much payoff. And a totally wasted of a blood-drinking bunny.

Next up we have A Pirate's Twelve Days of Christmas. Now, you may or may not know from this blog, but we at the Goodwill Geek's house have made pirates a pretty standard part of our Halloween celebrations. So mixing them up in our Christmas celebration SCREAMS Creepmas!

Most of the 12 gifts are pretty tame, including a Parrot in a Palm tree, a pair of cutlasses, 9 Mermaids singin', and some monkeys. But the 3 black cats and the 6 Jolly Rogers? Pure Halloween gold dear readers. And when you get Halloween gifts for Christmas you get CREEPMAS!!!

Finish it all off with a shot of a sleepy Pirate being watched over by a winking Jolly Roger and a Piratical Santa... and you've got a Creepmas classic on your hands.

So I've already discussed the Ghosts of Christmas as a different part of my 13 Days of Creepmas, I am aware. But now I'm going to focus for a moment on the book version they put out of the tale.

Marley shows up, as do the other 3 spirits, and for the most part, the only disappointment of the whole thing is the fact that we lose the door-knocker scene that kicks things off.

We still get all of the classic scenes starring the spirits and Scrooge before redemption finally sinks in. This is a great adaptation of the classic TV special and it makes for a nice shivery Creepmas kids' tale for the Christmas season!

Next up we have this pair of books by horror novelist Dean Koontz. He wrote two books detailing the harrowing Hallowdays adventures of Charlotte and Emily. The girls have to contend with not one but two strange, sinister doppelgangers of Old Saint Nick.

 In the first book, Santa's Twin we meet Bob, the off-kilter, mischief-and-mayhem making evil twin of Santa Claus. Deep down Bob is mainly misunderstood and out to get attention, but for the first 75% of the book we get no sense of this whatsoever as Bob wreck's people's homes, swaps out good gifts for horrific ones like the one pictured above, and threatens to eat the families of the reindeer to gain their complicity in assisting him in his crimes.

In the sequel, Robot Santa Bob has begun assisting Santa in his yearly duties, and builds a robotic Santa to help deliver gifts. Things go awry and the (more than a little creepy) robot starts creating Christmas Chaos of its own. Instead of eating cookies, he eats the plate (and some of the furniture) they sit on. Instead of leaving gifts from his sack, he fills the sack with gifts from the houses he visits. And he's got a trained gorilla helping him out that kidnaps the girls' dog. But as with last year, the girls persevere and prevail and set things to right.

Saving the best for last, we have quite possibly the book that DEFINES the concept of Creepmas in its own Merrilyy-Terrifying way. The Nightmare Before Christmas written and illustrated by Tim Burton! This is the book that the stop-motion animated Disney movie directed by Henry Selick was based on.

The entire book is a fun blend of both Halloween and Christmas imagery. If you're at all familiar with the film, then the themes of the book will be no surprise to you. Although there are no romantic story threads or villainous Boogie-Men trying to eat Santa. Those subplots are missed but traded out for a sense of focus that a book for children needs.

The imagery is festive and spooky and beautiful for it.

All the elements are there: the red and green and black and white and orange. The snow and the pumpkins. The Creepy and the Christmas. The Creepmas!!!

That's it for tonight! So tuck your kiddies into bed and crack the spine on one of these delightful, frightful feasts for the imagination!

Happy 13 days of Creepmas! I'll be back tomorrow with another entry in the countdown, which may or may not involve a Goodwill Goody! Until then, Happy Hunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 23: More Bangor Finds!

So yet another trip out to the Bangor Goodwill turned up yet more fun and funky Halloween items! (We've been out to Bangor a LOT in the past few weeks because my wife has been doing some Color Runs out there and some other stuff). So let us see what the latest trip out to one of my favorite Goodwills turned up!

First up, I found this wolfman mask that I found to be extremely charming. Its made of some sort of rubbery, cheap foam that really wants to curl n on itself, which made getting a good photograph of the thing difficult. I love this thing though. The color shading, the snout and fangs and ruby red lips... it looks a little more Michael J. Fox's Teen-Wolf than Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolfman... but that is neither here nor there. As you can see there is a little bit of damage on it, but I don't feel this takes away from the sincerity.

Next up we have this Halloween kitty figure that I bought mainly because I thought my wife would like it, but also because I love Halloween black cat stuff. And this guy is pretty fun.

This candle holder holds one of those MASSIVE three-wick candles and has a  metal spider hanging off the side. How could I pass that up?

In the Halloween section I also found this book-on-tape that I thought would make a nice edition to my flourishing cassette collection. It's called "Creepe Hall" and is a story that sees a normal young man living in a houseful of monstrous family members. As soon as I have something I can actually play my cassette tapes on... I'm giving this thing a listen.

Here's a shot of the cassette tapes inside because I don't know why.

While technically not a Halloween book, I am including Dinosaur Comes to Town in our yearly Halloween reading pile from now on. The animal inhabitants of a small wooded area near a town are all terrified and on the run because a "meat-eating dinosaur" is on its way.

I love the aesthetics of the book, and the design of the dinosaur, which is almost more dragon than anything.

The story is weird and has a surprising ending, which I found funny and I'm sure my kids will like it too.

Apparently Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch saga has 7 books in it, and starts right here with Witch's Sister. You can't have Halloween without witches can you? Actually really looking forward to reading this one. I vaguely remember the book cover from grade school.

Probably my absolute FAVORITE find from this trip is this young-readers novelization of Gremlins. love Love LOVE finding novelizations of awesome 80's flicks for any aged readers.

Spook by Jane Little is a cute little chapter book. Something to read to the kiddos when they get a little older than they are now. It's a book about a dog who belongs to an evil witch, who would much rather own a cat... and his quest to find a home with a little boy who loves him.

And finishing off the Halloween items is this little craft book Homemade Halloween. This is a nice one again for someone who has kids and wants to do some spooky crafts with them. Which I do... and I do.

Drifting on away from Halloweentown, we have a couple of cassettes to add to my collection that are NOT Halloween related. Here we have:

"The Simpsons Sing the Blues" which was a CD I owned as a teen and because it had "The Bartman" and more importantly "Deep Deep Trouble" and MOST importantly, "Look at All Those Idiots!" which is a song I would like to have playing on the P.A. system at my place of employment on a loop.

And next we have Bruce Willis's "The Return of Bruno" which has the song "Respect Yourself" included. If you can see the picture of Bruce Willis on the right side of the liner card there... you basically know everything you need to know about this cassette and why I bought it. I swore I wouldn't buy anything ironically for this collection of cassettes. Only things I genuinely love. I can't say I genuinely love the songs on this cassette... but I can say that I genuinely love that it exists. Look at that man. Just look at him. He's so ridiculously happy.

And finally, I found myself a copy of the novelization for War Games! This was a pretty genuinely exciting find to make. As heavily as this film is referenced in Ernest Cline's book, Ready Player One, it can't help but have bloomed anew in my heart with all new levels of nostalgic love.

So there you have it folks! I'll be back soon with more Goosebumpy Goodwill Goodies. So until then, Happy Hunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 16: Old Devil Wind

So for today's post I will be focusing once more on a Halloween children's book that I've found at Goodwill. This time the honor goes to Old Devil Wind by Bill Martin Jr. and Robert J. Lee. 

This is a rather small book, and I almost didn't see it at first... but the name on the spine jumped out at me, and I realized I was dealing with something quite special. The book was originally produced back in 1970, although my copy is a much later reprint.

The artwork is going to be my main focus in this post, as the story itself is a pretty basic House-that-Jack-Built-style story with a lot of repetition. Usually this sort of thing annoys me when it comes to any kind of read-aloud... but this one gets a pass.

Similar to the Scary Stories to Read in the Dark series, the text is quite tame but all the magic happens in the illustrations. Lee's paintings hover just on the edge of disturbing here, as he paints images of ghosts, witches, rats, ravens, and other Halloween trappings.

Quite often the focus of the text has nothing to do with the focus in the illustration. This page, which features a candle speaking, has a host of gray, ghostly rats in the foreground. 

You kind of have to hunt for some of the characters in the images, which may be intentional, or may just be Lee's disinterest in illustrating a character like a window when he could be illustrating an amazing looking raven instead.

Some of the pictures feel like homages to other sources, such as Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" or Disney's Haunted Mansion. 

The book does a wonderful job of expanding the ideas of who or what can be included in a Halloween story. Of course most of the characters make up the contents of a haunted house... but still, hearing from a stool, or a candle, or a window are all new twists.

 The witch above is one of my favorite images in the book. Her face is strangely divided to make it asymmetrical and off-putting. Her eyes and simple set of her face make her seem that much more serenely menacing. 

I can't even begin to tell you what this illustration is supposed to be of.

But the book ends with the wind blowing EVERYONE away "...and they didn't come back 'til (H)alloween Night..." Which I find to be a perfectly fitting bow to tie everything up with. I haven't read this one to my kids yet, but I'm curious to see their reactions to it. I have a feeling this one will become a part of our yearly rotation.

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back tomorrow with more Gristly Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!