I have been re-experiencing HP Lovecraft recently. I read pretty much everything he ever wrote back in the late 1980s when I was obsessed with the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. I can’t complain. It gave me my first non-fiction and fiction sales: “The City in the Sea” in Cthulhu Now! (1987) and “The Man Who Would Be King” (Eldritch Tales #24, Winter 1990). My reading of HPL was hurried and usually with the intent of finding useful bits to use in the game. So, in re-reading him, I am enjoying his work in a new – and I think – more honest way: as a horror writer.
One of the stories I re-read is “The Festival,” which appeared in Weird Tales, January 1925. I read it from a digital scan of that magazine that included the creepy Andrew Brosnatch illustration. January issues actually sold in December, making this the Christmas issue. “The Festival” is a perfect choice for such an issue since it is a Lovecraftian Christmas story. Now don’t expect anything as tame as a Dickensian ghost. Lovecraft was a complete atheist and so he isn’t trying to retell Jesus’s story or be Clement Moore. (Though HPL was a poet and followed up “The Festival” a year later with the poem “Yule Horror”: “But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallowed and old.”) Lovecraft wants to take us to the time before Nazareth and “Jolly Old St. Nicholas.”
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2016/12/cthulhu-christmas-classics-festival.html
I first read a version of the Festival in a comic book. I loved the moment of the waxen face. I didn’t pick up on the use of the Necronomicon in this tale, focusing more on the ancient underground rituals. I never really thought of it as a Christmas tale either, but it does work as a holiday tale.