I love a good theme. Once, I tried to steal a Klingon waiter’s boots at a Star Trek themed restaurant in Vegas. Parties, hen-nights, restaurants? It doesn’t matter. If there is a theme, I’m there. Admittedly, I’ll usually take an ‘…in space!’ approach and then have to explain the connection. Nevertheless, I’m there.

So this time of year – along with, to a lesser extent, Valentine’s Day and Halloween – is anthology catnip to me. There are themed anthologies everywhere you look.

‘Who killed Santa?’ – Crime anthologies.

‘You killed Santa!’ – Horror anthologies.

‘I shagged SANTA?’ – Office Christmas Party anthologies.

‘Santa is an evil wizard?!’ – Urban fantasy anthologies.

So, what’s the appeal of these holiday, in particular Christmas, themed anthologies? For me there’s two different sides to the chocolate coin: the writer and the reader.

As a writer, I suck like a Dyson at writing short stories to order. If I’d been on Cameron’s Titanic and Rose had said to me, ‘Write me like one of your French girls.’, I would have ended up on the bottom of the ocean with 92 false-start first lines. It’s expectation with no direction. The person saying ‘write this’ obviously expects something from you, but they aren’t telling you what. So you’re left to just guess at what, out of the infinite variety of story notions bopping around your brain pan, they want to see.

I can do it. I have done it. After the first 13 desperate notions you made up about people in the local corner shop (…that’s not just me, right? If it is just me, I’m joking and I never do that) get scrapped, you just buckle down and write. Something. Anything. I won a short story competition that way once, with a charming tale of poverty, incest and suicide. I was feeling my Irish quite a lot that month.

It’s just a cold start to the creative process, lots of stalls and kangaroo starts and dramatic declarations that all your ideas are dead and you might as well go and eat worms. Sometimes, chocolate is involved.

Get a nice prompt though, and suddenly allllll those ideas that were hiding in the folds of your brain, leaving you to rely on some half-baked concoction of supermarket drama, suddenly come out to play. You come up with silly ideas and half-baked ones, you add ‘…in space’ to prompts that clearly do not require them and, finally, you winnow it down to the one, diamond-focused idea that will dog your steps, sit and look at you with sullen recalcitrance, and suddenly come up with a new, brilliant ending just two days before the final deadline.

Themed prompts have led me into genres I don’t usually write for and stories I wouldn’t usually try to tell. I’ve never found one that made me want to write straight up contemporary romance (nothing wrong with it, I just like to be able to throw a corpse at the writer’s block and keep moving). Plus it’s fun, and what more can you ask from an obsessive passion that gets you up early and keeps you up late?

Which is something that any good anthology should do a reader. That masterfully slick segue – oh come on, that one was sweet – brings me to why I think readers like holiday themed anthologies. One is that frequently authors will dust off a beloved character/setting and give you a glimpse of them you don’t usually see. Or they’ll drop you into a part of the world that never made it into the novels and you can find out more about those side-characters you’re way more invested in than the protagonist.

Plus, you can be pretty sure you are going to get some sort of happy ending. It’s rare than a festively themed short story ends like a Hellblazer story –  a technical win, but the protagonist lost everything they cared about, accidentally made evil stronger and made some very questionable decisions along the way. You’re more likely to find that Christmas is saved, the protagonist and his love interest learn something about themselves (even if it is that one of them is related to a cult dedicated to killing reindeer) and get to share some sort of culturally appropriate festive feast. Gritty realism is all well and good, you’ll find no-one happier than me at throwing a gooey corpse at a plot, but it’s nice to just have a of escapism sometimes. One year I read Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse at Christmas. That did not help put me in the Christmas mood.

Finally… It’s Christmas and you love your family, but turkey is burned; someone has locked themselves in the shed for two days, coming  out only to eat Christmas pudding and cake in the night like some sort of Borrower; someone, might have been me, dropped the ham and hasn’t told anyone; and the dog is drunk*. At least you can look at your festive anthology and think, well, I’m better off than them, Grandma might be murdering Beyonce on the karoke but at least no one killed Santa here**.

If you are in the mood for some festive naughtiness to get you through the season, and the post-Turkey crash, then check out a few of these Christmas themed anthologies.

Rated: XXXmas from Loose ID

Nicely Naughty 2 from Loose ID

2014 Advent Calendar from Dreamspinner Press

Torquere Press will be bringing out the Santa’s Little Kinsters anthology on December 17.

And while not exactly an anthology, 20% of the proceeds from Share the Love by Riptide Publishing go to an LGBTQ charity.

*This happened once. We were not some sort of irresponsible doggie-drink pushers, but people had put their drinks on the floor and the dog was sleekit. He was also fine the next morning.

** Except for that one year my neighbour had one of those Santa ornaments that’s meant to look like he’s climbing a rope to the chimney? Only it was really windy and, long story short, the question was asked, ‘Did Santa hang himself?’