Two Sides to the Coin of Creepy

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There's the warm side, of friends and firelight, holidays and companionship...romantic language and story-forms.  Tradition.  Tales told over and over but never written down...the same stories told in different ways in different places, the children of travelers, adept at blending in and looking at everything familiar through a different lens in each new location....and all the stories that have been written down.  Literature and folklore, transmission of cultures...Festive and social,  awash in spiced harvest foods, candy, and alcohol.  Creepiness as entertainment: a costume that can be put on and taken off with little or no risk in the comfort of society.  Quaint idioms to universalize and tie a clever bow around the primal reality symbolized and played out by the natural world at this time of year.

But the other side of the coin is not so much cold, as devoid of warmth.  There is no companionable feeling here.  No stories to distract and thrill.  Stories can be put aside, but what is here can never be put aside, because it is part of the whole fabric of which we are made. Nothing is familiar, there is no blending in.  No literature or art to make beautiful that which is inevitable and terrifying.
It is not human, not in our image or the image of any other creature we know.  It does not care or feel.  It is cold.  It is bleak, most of all.  It is what is left when there is nothing else.  Despair and emptiness.  Gray daylight ordinariness.  The most disorienting dream you have ever dreamed.
Sometimes you will catch a glimpse.  This is a warning.  Nothing lies beyond but more and more of the same.  This is what you have been looking for, and it's like nothing you could have imagined.  It is truth.