HOL Ravenclaw

As you finish reading the message within the locket, you and Mitri are stunned as a loud cracking sound erupts from all around you, accompanied by a flash of bright, yellow-green light.

Momentarily unable to regain your vision, you’re startled to feel your body being bounced and bumped around quite aggressively and unexpectedly.

Upon reclaiming your senses, you look down to find that you and Mitri are in a golden carriage drawn by white horses whose skin and hair shine in a most beautifully opalescent way. Colors of the rainbow glint off the silvery lavender snow storm that’s swirling viciously around as they race you through the night.

Enamored by the glowing beauty of the horses, it takes an extra beat for you to realize that they aren’t just galloping you toward an unknown destination, but away from something. A blood curdling sound comes from behind, causing you and Mitri to whip your heads around.

A horrific herd of dark horses are chasing the carriage you’re desperately trying not to get tossed out of into the storm that’s brewing stronger by the second.

“Why are those horses chasing us?” You have to shout in order for your question to be audible.

A worried look upon his face, Mitri answers, “Those aren’t horses. They belong to Ghastputin”

“Who?”

“The evil sorcerer. They’re his helhest. If they’ve risen from the underlands, he can’t be too far behind now.”

Although unfamiliar with that word, the sound of it immediately makes your heart freeze over with fear.

Focusing your gaze more intently, you realize that the creatures following you are only similar to horses, with some strikingly different aspects. The most awful of which being that their blackened bodies appear as if the flesh is dead and falling away, exposing skeletal protrusions, and that their sprint is rather disjointed due to the fact they each have only three legs.

The foggy, snow filled air around the helhest looks gaseous and toxically green, and you don’t doubt for a second that no good will come of them catching up to you. Something in your gut tells you that, whatever they are, one touch of their poisoned looking skin would not just be incredibly unpleasant, but lethal.

Mitri keeps yelling something you can’t quite hear due to how loud everything has gotten, but finally you make out that he’s shouting for you to play the music box.

“Why?!” You holler back, while frantically grasping to comply, ever so grateful that the locket is still clutched firmly between your fingers.

“The sound of music drives the helhest insane.”

Task:
Whether depicting an opalescent horse in all their glinting rainbow tones, or one of the dark helhest, fill in your preferred Coloring Page from the following two options, using a variety of different shades, then share your work below! Images imbedded directly into posts must be kept within 600x600 pixels.


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Alternatively you may share your Opinion in a minimum of 75 words describing one or more of your least favorite holiday songs and what drives you crazy about them.

This task is worth 15 beans/sapphires, with an additional 15 bonus beans/sapphires for completing all Week Two tasks by end of activity. Deadline is 11:59pm (HOL time) on Thursday Decemebr 21st.

My least favorite holiday song is "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. Some people love this song and consider it a classic. However, I think it's overused and gets old fast. Especially when radio stations play holiday music for two months straight, and this song is every ten songs minimum. The song doesn't even make me feel festive anymore. It's hard to feel jolly when you're continuously force-fed the same song every couple of minutes for months straight.

My favourite Christmas song is ‘White Christmas’. I was born in and spent the first few years of my life in a country with a lot of snow, until my mother remarried and we moved to a country in the southern hemisphere where the only snow you see is at the tippy top of mountains. Following the move, there was some excitement about experiencing Christmas in summer, getting to go camping and play on the beach on Christmas Day. For my mum and I however, there has always been an element of sadness. Neither of us has returned to our home country in several years, and we miss our white Christmases. So, every time the song ‘White Christmas’ has played over the years, my mum would grab my hands and we would dance around the house like we did back home, remembering the white Christmases of our past. Although my reasons for this song being my favourite are more sentimental than actual enjoyment of the song, it has been my favourite Christmas song since I was a child, and I expect it will remain my favourite for many years to come.

My least favourite Christmas song is probably 'Santa Got Stuck up the Chimney'. In school in my stepdad's country, we had to sing it every single year at Christmas, right up until we started high school. The song itself is pretty okay, but I have so many awful memories of having to sing it in full school assembly, in front of all the parents, that I can't even stand to hear those words anymore. I mean, you just have to think about 300 kids singing offkey to understand why I dislike the song now! I didn't particularly enjoy school either, so I suppose the negative feelings I have towards school influenced how I felt about that song too.

My least favorite Christmas song would have to be “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. Part of the reason it drives me crazy is actually because it is so overplayed and I hear it so often that it gets stuck in my head and I cannot get it out no matter how hard I try! Just thinking about it and writing about it now is probably going to get it stuck in my head until the New Year. I also think that there is too much hype around it and people like it even though there is no good reason for it.

I think my least favourite Christmas song is “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus”. There’s a few more I don’t like, but I couldn’t remember the names so I settled on this one. The reason I don’t like it is not because of the song itself but rather the memory I associate with it. It’s embarrassing for me at most and I can’t believe I’m recounting it at all but - I attended my sister’s Christmas recital and right after that song played, one of her teachers spotted me and became very upset with me to the point she cried to my teacher that I had insulted her sense of authority for attending without specifically asking her permission. It still makes me cringe to this day and I feel all sorts of guilt and anxiety like I’m minutes away from getting reprimanded all over again.

One of my least favorite holiday songs, through no fault of the original artists, is Last Christmas by Wham! When I was about 10 or 11, it was the main song people my age were singing at Christmas, but they were changing the lyrics, to varying degrees of hilarity and success. There was the classic version "last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day it was on Ebay," but also a hundred other versions (which didn't always rhyme.) Even now, I can't really get any joy out of hearing the original version - although that is helpful in my house as we play a game called Whamageddon, where you have to try and make it from December 1st - 25th without hearing the song playing.

Dominick the Donkey' has got to be one of the most annoying holiday songs ever. It's catchy, sure, but the whole concept of a singing Italian Christmas donkey just drives me crazy. The repetitive 'hee-haw, hee-haw' chorus is like nails on a chalkboard after a while. It feels like a novelty song that overstays its welcome. I prefer the classics that capture the true spirit of the season without resorting to quirky animal characters.