It's the Fear County Christmas Special!
Join me and Jingle Bones for a festive and nostalgic journey through the Christmas seasons of my youth and a look at how the cover of Season's Creepings was created!
HoHoHorror, y’all! Welcome to the 2024 Fear County Chronicle Christmas Special! This year we’ll help Ol’ Jingle Bones decorate the tree with some rather unusual Christmas ornaments, and we’d best leave a snack nearby — preferably something furry and warm-blooded — or else that sneaky snake-critter hiding the tree might become a bit unruly. I’d like to say that the Kelly family’s Christmas is brimming with comfort and joy this year, but something’s taken place to cast a shadow over our family, which I’ll touch a little later. But for now, let’s take a look at how Zach McCain’s cover artwork of my seasonal short story collection, Season’s Creepings: Tales of Holiday Horror came to be.
It Started with a Skeleton…
Around September of 2020, I decided to put together a collection of holiday short stories called Season’s Creepings. Half of the tales would be older seasonal stories from my small press days, while half would be original or previously unpublished. I wanted this collection to have a fun, spooky, nostalgic feel to it, so I knew the cover needed to reflect that. So, I contacted one of my regular cover artists, the incredible Zach McCain, and discussed some ideas I had for the artwork. Since I would be bringing back the character of Mister Glow-Bones (from my Halloween collection of the same title) as the newly christened Jingle Bones in the opening story, I wanted him to be the focal point of the cover art. After Zach agreed to do the cover, we began to brainstorm.
Zach made several rough sketches, to determine which angle Jingle Bones and the Christmas tree would be facing. We decided on the one in the upper righthand corner. I could picture Ol’ Bones gleefully hanging an eyeball on the branches, so Zach made that the scoundrel’s main objective. We debated on whether or not to give him a beard but decided that it would obscure his skull too much. After the initial sketch, Zach began to add more organ ornaments (ear, tongue, fingers, stomach, liver, etc.) to the tree and then added festive color. He colored Jingle Bones an eerie shade of green to mimic his glow-in-the-dark properties and gave the Christmas tree lights a soft glow. After that, he added a thin, framing border and the title in blood-splattered gold. And that was how the cover of Season’s Creepings came about.
O’ Christmas Tree, O’ Christmas Tree… How Aluminum are thy branches!
As the Kelly family prepared for Christmas this year, I couldn't help but think of those magical holiday seasons of my childhood. Those first impressionable years of my life -- 1959 thru 1968 mostly -- seemed to be the most memorable. The wonder of Christmas in all its glory was fresh and untainted back then... especially to a wide-eyed child of my generation.
Perhaps one of the most lasting memories I have of those Christmas seasons I spent with my mother, father, and little brother in our rental house in West Nashville back in the mid-60's was our incredible aluminum Christmas tree. While many families remained true to the traditional pine or blue spruce, we ventured forward into the future! I remember the day Daddy brought home that skinny white box and opened it up. Inside was a segmented silver-painted wooden pole, a silver tripod stand, and dozens upon dozens of brown paper tubes. Within those tubes were the sparkling silver branches which sprang forth, full and perfectly formed, when you pulled them from their paper sleeves. Once the branches were anchored securely into the angled slots of the tree trunk, it made for six feet of gleaming, glittering "space tree” that would have made the engineers at NASA proud!
There was one drawback to the aluminum Christmas tree, however. You could not string conventional Christmas lights on it. Due to the very real danger of using electric lights on the highly conductive aluminum branches, another avenue for tree-lighting had to be found. That problem was resolved via the rotating "color wheel" invented to illuminate the "Tree-of-the-Future". I remember my brother and I lying on the living room floor for what seemed to be hours, watching the color wheel revolve as it changed the aluminum tree from bright red, to yellow, to blue, to green, then back through the spectrum once again. Our attention spans must have been cast in concrete and steel back then, if such a simple spectacle entertained us for such a long period of time. Incidentally, I bought a cheap retro aluminum tree a few years back, with an equally cheap color wheel, believing that my children would be just as enthralled by its cascades of wonderous color as I had been as a child. They watched it for perhaps the first two go-arounds, then bored to tears, left that spindly little aluminum tree all to itself, to change color without witness. If mine and my brother's attention spans were ironclad, then those possessed by today's kids must consist of Play-Doh and Elmer's Glue.
There were a lot of tacky Christmas decorations back then. Tacky but immensely popular. Bubble lights. Cardboard chimneys. Glitter-painted glass balls. Those pointy-nosed pixies with their long legs tucked beneath their crossed arms. Garishly painted plastic Santas that stood sentry on your lawn. The list was endless! But we enjoyed them all and relished their bright and gaudy brilliance.
One thing I remember from those early days of my childhood was our yearly trips to Harvey's Department Store to see Santa Claus. During those pre-mall days, you had to venture to the very heart of downtown to do your Christmas shopping and, for us, that meant enduring the hustle and bustle of Church Street in downtown Nashville. For a small boy, it seemed like a really big deal. My father would parallel-park his sharp-finned, two-toned '56 Chevy and we would enter Harvey's through the front entrance. Fred Harvey had opened the department store back in 1946 and was a first-class entrepreneur in every sense of the word. His way of doing business was to dazzle and impress, even if he did go a little overboard sometimes. His store was decorated with carrousel horses, fun house mirrors, and even a monkey bar on the top floor (no, not what you find on the playground... a snack bar with monkeys that Mr. Harvey let loose and let run rampant throughout the store if business was down!
Mr. Harvey also put out full-page ads in the newspaper announcing that the REAL Santa Claus was at Harvey's. That put all the other stores featuring St. Nick in somewhat of a predicament since everyone in town took Mr. Harvey's word for gospel. Kids and their parents would flock to Harvey's Department Store in droves, to the toy department and the most elaborately decorated Santa station in the mid-South. I remember Santa sitting on his velvet throne, offering a friendly knee to sit on, a patient ear for your rambling list of toys wanted, and a candy cane when you left. The entire experience reminds me of the Santa Claus scene in the movie A Christmas Story, but without the big red slide. There were still plenty of terrified, shrieking children though. That was always a big kick for me as a seven- or eight-year-old... to see how many little kids suffered trauma and emotional scarring simply because their parents dragged them, kicking and screaming, to sit in the lap of a bearded stranger wearing white polar bear fur and a blood red suit.
But the Christmas celebration at his downtown department store wasn't Mr. Harvey's only holiday contribution to Music City. As a gift to the people of Nashville, he set up an annual Nativity scene on the lawn of nearby Centennial Park, near the steps of the replica of the Greek Parthenon. Between the years of 1953 and 1967, this full-sized nativity, complete with human figures, camels, livestock, and palm trees -- all hand-crafted and imported from Italy -- graced the park, drawing thousands of holiday visitors.
I remember we visited the Nativity at least once during each holiday season. We would park our car near the Parthenon and, bundled in heavy winter coats, scarfs, and ear-flap caps, walk the length of the display in utter awe. For a child it was really something to see... the birth of Jesus depicted in such a way, the figures illuminated with lights that faded from white to blue to red, while a sound system softly played Christmas carols. I remember afterward, we would drive to the Krystal's on Charlotte Avenue, sit at the counter, and have some of those little square hamburgers that smelled deliciously of mustard and grilled onions. Yum! Sometimes we'd get home in time to watch shows like A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch Who Stole Christmas on our black and white TV.
Then came Christmas morning! Oh, to find a G.I. Joe standing, poised and ready for action, beneath the Christmas tree... along with an olive-drab jeep with a matching trailer, bazooka cannon, and working spotlight! A boy of six years old could ask for nothing better! And during those years of holiday joy in that little house on Elkins Avenue, Santa brought a platoon of Joes in various stages of military costume and gear. But after we moved from Nashville and out to the country, it seemed like we left a little of that Christmas magic behind. We rarely made it to Harvey's Department Store for the annual celebration and, after 1967, the Centennial Park Nativity was no longer put on display when exposure to weather had taken its toll on the figures. And, eventually, our old tree was replaced by a newer, greener one -- still fake, but much more life-like and traditional. A new era of childhood holidays followed, but they were never quite the same. They never sparkled and shined the way they had with every hue of the rainbow blazing from the silvery branches of that wonderous aluminum Christmas tree.
And now a few words about what’s been going on in our neck of the woods during the past few days…
Last week, my son-in-law, Chase Reeves, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Chase had been experiencing pain for several weeks and thought that maybe it was a hernia due to heavy lifting at his job. When his pain grew nearly unbearable, my daughter, Reilly, took him to the emergency room. He was misdiagnosed and told that he had a bad infection. A few days later, he went to a urologist, where the cancer diagnosis was made. He had surgery last Friday, but he’s not out of the woods yet. We are awaiting test results to see how aggressive the cancer might be and if he will require chemotherapy or radiation treatments. In any event, he will be missing a lot of work due to the surgery and doctor visits. Here are a few words from Chase himself concerning his condition.
Through the month of December, all sales at the RKHORROR online bookstore will go to Chase to help him and my daughter with living expenses and medical bills. If you would like to support Chase, you can order books, artwork, and t-shirts here. A number of folks -- several in countries outside the US -- have asked about making a monetary donation, rather than purchase a signed book. If you would be interested in doing that, please direct message me here through the Fear County Chronicle newsletter, or Ronald Kelly via Facebook Messenger, @ronaldkelly4 via X (formerly known as Twitter) or @dixiedarkun via Instagram, and I will be happy to provide you with the information to do so.
We would also appreciate your prayers and positive thoughts during this difficult time. Thank you all!
That’s it for this year’s Fear County Christmas Special. I’m sorry that it ended on such a somber note, but the trials and tribulations of life happen, even during the most magical time of the year. I do hope you and your family are blessed with peace, joy, and good health this holiday season!
This Christmas edition is so good. Brought back my childhood memories, as well. We never had a fancy silver or green artificial tree. We had to choose one off our land. Free was key:) A wide white pine. Top always cut off because it’d be too tall. Until the years we got to go up on the mountain to a tree farm in Monroe County. We’d get the blue spruce and Dad would plant along our driveway after New Year’s Day. I went back to my childhood home on one of my trips back to WV, and those trees had vastly surpassed their 6ft by about 40 feet. I decided to pull up in the driveway. No clue what I’d say. The words fell out , “My daddy built this house.” Turned out to be two of my friends from growing up. They invited me inside and we had a good visit in MY childhood home. 🏡
Praying for Chase🕊️🎄