December Poetry Prompts
Quick answer: December poetry prompts on last light, lists, endings and the year turning over, with craft advice for writing the crowded, dark final month honestly.
December is two months wearing one coat. There is the advertised December, lights, carols, cinnamon on everything, and there is the other one: four o'clock dark, year-end accounting, the strange audit a mind runs on itself between the 27th and the 31st. Most December poetry crowds into the first month and leaves the second nearly empty, which is a poor trade, because the quiet December is where the durable poems live.
A craft note: endings are December's real subject, and endings on the page work like endings in music, they need something withheld. Whatever your December poem is about, keep one thing unresolved. The year does the same.
The Prompts
Fifteen year-end openings. The festive ones are here, but so is the other December.
- Write the week between Christmas and New Year as a room where time pools: nobody sure of the day, chocolate for breakfast, the year idling with its engine still on.
- The last page of a diary, and the small printed calendar of next year already waiting on it. Write the handover between the two years in the diary's own voice.
- Write a poem structured as a list of lists: cards to send, food to order, people to forgive. Let the third list break the poem's composure.
- The 21st, 4 p.m., the earliest dark. Write the streetlight outside coming on as a colleague clocking in for the long shift, and the kitchen answering with its own light.
- Write the tree lot on the 23rd: the leaning unsold spruces, the man with cold hands counting a summer's growth into car boots. End on the trees nobody chooses.
- A December swim, sea or lido, the shock written from inside the body: the gasp, the iron cold, the ten strokes that reset an entire year. Write why anyone does it.
- Write the year's unfinished business as luggage on a carousel in an empty airport: what circles back, what was never claimed, what you finally let go round without you.
- The first card arrives from someone you had not thought of since last December. Write the friendship that lives entirely in stamps, two lines of news, and thirty years.
- Write frost flowers on a single-glazed window, the old kind, ferns of ice on the inside of the glass, and the child's finger that melts a porthole to see the milk float.
- A poem for the shortest lunch break of the year: daylight spent entirely inside an office, the sun risen and set against the same spreadsheet. Write the body's objection.
- Write the December birthday: the joint presents, the wrapping paper in the wrong colours, a candle-lit protest at being annually absorbed into someone else's festival.
- The nativity play from the donkey's point of view: a costume with two children in it, one script, no lines, the front half's stage fright and the back half's revenge.
- Write the 31st as a landlord's inspection of the year: what was damaged, what improved, whether the deposit of January's hopes gets returned, and who signs.
- A poem made from the year's last light on the 31st, whatever it falls on: a parked van, a kicked football, a kitchen tap. Dignify the accident of it.
- Write the resolution not made: the one everyone expects you to announce, held back this year, and the private thing quietly planted in its place.
How to Use These
December writing time gets eaten alive, so go small and defended: ten minutes, door shut, one prompt, no rereading. If the festive machinery has flattened you, choose the quiet prompts, the diary handover, the last light, and let the poem be the still place the month is not. Drafting on the 27th, 28th and 29th is a secret worth having; the year is over, nothing has started, and the mind runs its audit whether you write it down or not.
In revision, watch for borrowed warmth. Cut any glow the draft did not earn through an actual object, an actual person, an actual cold walk home. And test your ending against the month's own trick: hold something back. A December poem that resolves everything is a carol; one that leaves a single window lit and unexplained is a poem.
What poets can take from this
- Write the un-festive December too; the 28th is as real as the 25th.
- Endings need something withheld; resolve the scene, not the feeling.
- Let lists structure your drafts: December thinks in lists, so the form is native.
- Dark afternoons are material, not obstacles; draft at dusk with the lamp off.
- One cold outdoor stanza will pay for all the fireside ones.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which the old year and the new year pass each other on a station platform at midnight, one boarding, one arriving, and exchange only a look and a single carried item.
Questions
What should a December poem be about besides Christmas?
The solstice dark, year-end reckonings, the odd suspended week after the 25th, December birthdays and the earliest dusks. The month's quieter corners are less written and often more moving than its festive centre.
How do I write about the end of the year without clichés?
Avoid clocks, fireworks and countdowns, and pick one small physical scene instead: last light on a parked van, the diary's final page. Concrete endings carry the big ending better than any midnight chime.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the October contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.