Death is permanent. This is the falsehood that we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. It’s the lie that we tell our children so they don’t carry their little kitten’s corpse to the old cemetery deep in the forest, in the grove where nothing living grows. It’s the myth that we wrap ourselves in so we can ignore the gut-wrenching terror of what really follows death—the unfathomable unknown.

The truth is that some things don’t stay dead.

The child at the end of the dock that drowned years before. That woman who your husband was having an affair with—the woman who disappeared shortly after your husband stopped dating her. The prettiest girl in school, gift-wrapped for you in an old, forest cabin. The vampire that hovers around her old grave. Two Russian rock stars with a taste for human flesh and blood. These are The Misbehaving Dead, and they just won’t stay where we buried them.

• Holly Berry Dreams, in which a young girl hangs holly leaves above the doorway as a sign of better times to come while waiting for her father to return from war
• PJ Presents, featuring a single mom who enlists her neighbor to leave new pajamas on the front porch every Christmas Eve to surprise her children
• Too Much Christmas, in which a young mother buys up all the leftover tags on the Giving Tree, leaving her with too many tags and too little money
• Christmas Diaries, featuring a Scottish family who exchanges a diary every Christmas with their extended family in Germany that details the highlights of the past year