Books › Holidays on Ice
Holidays on Ice
First published 1999 · 166 pages
A hilarious, cynical antidote to the suffocating sweetness of the holiday season.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like escaping a suffocating family dinner to share a cigarette and a dark joke with your funniest, most cynical cousin. The pace is brisk and punchy, driven by sharp observational humor that skewers the forced cheer and commercialism of the holiday season. Instead of cozy firesides and heartwarming miracles, the mood here is festively bleak and delightfully chaotic, capturing the bizarre reality of retail hell and dysfunctional family dynamics. The prose is conversational but meticulously crafted, relying on deadpan delivery and impeccable comedic timing to land its punches. It is the perfect read for anyone who finds the holidays exhausting, offering a hilarious, unsentimental, and deeply relatable antidote to the relentless pressure of seasonal joy.
- Mood
- darkly comedic
- chaotic
- festively bleak
- Tone
- sardonic
- irreverent
- self-deprecating
- wry
- cynical
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- family dysfunction · retail hell · forced holiday cheer · absurdity of tradition · commercialism
- The writing
- Sharp, conversational, and meticulously paced, relying on deadpan delivery and impeccable comedic timing.
- The arc
- Begins in the depths of cynical retail despair and navigates through bizarre family dynamics to land on a twisted but genuine appreciation for human absurdity.
- Who it's for
- Readers who find the holidays exhausting and crave a hilarious, unsentimental antidote to forced seasonal cheer.
Content notes
- profanity
- substance use
- dark humor
- sex work references
About the book
A collection of Christmas stories. The story Dinah, the Christmas Whore, describes the reaction of a family when a daughter brings home a prostitute, while SantaLand Diaries is on a department store elf.
Description from Open Library.
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