In case you’re feeling a little sick of the Christmas spirit at this point, Nora Charles from The Thin Man has your back:
I always forget that The Thin Man set around Christmas because it’s not a “Christmas” movie. I have to say, I really enjoy when holidays pop up in books and movies that aren’t about that particular holiday. It’s a chance to get your characters in a different setting or pressured in different ways. For example, I like that John Green’s Looking for Alaska includes a Thanksgiving scene, which gets the main characters away from boarding school and into the home of one character.
It’s also a nice reminder that your characters live in the same world we experience. A character doesn’t have to live in a Lifetime Christmas movie to share the holidays with their friends/family, just like we might not have the most dramatic/exciting holiday ever but still have meaningful experiences on that day. (Similarly, I like when characters get sick.)
Have you used holiday scenes in your novels?
I have Thanksgiving in my second book, although I’m not sure if I’ll leave it in or not. I also have a Christmas scene (“I thought this looked like a scene out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but then I remembered that Norman Rockwell never painted vampires”) that is definitely staying in. There’s a birthday and a prom (which includes a shootout in formal clothing) and a graduation, too, plus a first date and a trip to see “Spamalot.” (A couple of my vampires really like Monty Python.)