The Zombie Night Before Christmas
Along with “peak zombie,” the early twenty-first century saw the mass zombification of classic literature, the seminal text being Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The Zombie Night Before Christmas was published a year later, and what I was reading was the 10th anniversary edition, though I don’t know if they made any significant changes.
What we have here is most of Clement C. Moore’s classic poem – whose original title was “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and which Moore may not have written – mixed in with some references to rotting corpses and flesh-hungry zombies. Basically the world has been overtaken by the zombie apocalypse and now everyone is a zombie, but still going about living their normal lives. For some reason, however, nobody has told Santa about this turn of events (he knows if you’ve been bad or good, but not if you’re still alive). So on Christmas Eve he’s in for a rude surprise, and soon finds himself on the run from the hungry dead.
To be honest, I felt kind of sorry for Santa in this one. He manages to avoid an initial zombie attack by landing on a roof, but then gets jumped by a zombie as soon as he comes down the chimney. Again, I don’t know why he’s bothering at this point, seeing as he knows the situation. But anyway, he’s bitten and then “A blink of his eyes / and twist of his head, / Soon let me know / he was now living dead.” And all his reindeer too.
It’s a cute little book and a bit of fun. But maybe they needed to take a freer hand with the poem to come up with something really new. Either that or just illustrate the original text with zombies. Mad Magazine used to do adaptations like that, and it’s an approach that might have worked here. This sort of tries to have it both ways, and the result is more a light work of whimsy than a deathless Christmas classic.
Alex Good 
I should think a light work of whimsey is enough at Christmas, there’ll be darker things to come in the new year I suspect.
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Then this is the stocking-stuffer for you!
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Nope, I’m so over zombies!
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28 Years Later is coming up. Can’t kill a genre that’s already dead.
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True.
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PP&Z was barely even a novel. I mean, I hated the idea, but they gutted the actually writing and turned it into a piece of garbage.
So I can only imagine what the losers did to an actual poem…
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Well, I quote a bit of it for you. They actually keep a lot of the original poem but then throw in some zombie stuff. If you didn’t like PP&Z I don’t think you’d like this. But it’s Christmasy.
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I’m just grumpy this morning.
One day off for Christmas in the middle of the week just seems wrong to me. It’s like living in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol…
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Yeah, that does kind of stink. You should get The Night Before Christmas Day off. And Christmas. And Boxing Day is basically a holiday already. Then there’d be no point going back to work on Friday so that should be off too. At least a week then.
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I 110% agree. A week, solid. bookended by 2 weekends. I need it at the moment.
Even without zombies!
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Agreed! So miserly of Booky’s employer, Scrooge springs to mind!
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Aw Booky that is totally wrong. Would the world end if they gave you a week off or something?
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I have a feeling “they” think it would.
If I had enough vacation time, I would be taking it off. But dr’s appointments for my diabetes and eyes take up most of my vacation time over the year.
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Does seem weird. I know grocery stores stay open most days except Christmas. But I’ve been doing a bunch of legal work and those offices are all closed now until after New Year’s. Why the rush for surveying? Is there a backlog to get through?
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I’d LOVE if we shut down from Christmas to New Years. I feel like we’re living in a scroogeworld…
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Blimey that’s mean.
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I would gladly take those individual days off unpaid to have a week or so altogether at Christmas…
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Are you not allowed to do that? Take unpaid leave I mean.
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Nope. If we request time off, we have to use vacation time. It stinks.
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It does. Here there’s no legal right to paid time off for appointments, but employees have ‘duty of care’ and most will allow unpaid leave,and some (like my boss) will pay you anyways.
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A worker’s paradise! Sounds like it might be worth the move to the UK. Sunderland even.
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Hah! Depends on where you are in the world I think, even Sunderland might be paradise to someone.
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