Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year!
My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short.
And now that we have that clear…what are your characters celebrating?
It’s oddly rare for fantasy and SF to include holidays (except, of course, for the giant victory feast at the end of the story, which always seems to me like Thanksgiving with medal-awarding, at best, and at worst like the sort of retirement dinner where everyone eats rubber chicken and the honoree gets a Certificate of Appreciation in lieu of anything that might actually be useful or worth something). It’s even rarer for fantasy/SF to include multiple holidays for different cultures or belief systems. Surely the insectoid aliens from Betelgeuse don’t celebrate Hanukah or Christmas or Diwali? And surely both the elves and the dwarves have their own holidays, which are distinct from those celebrated by humans? (Not to mention the fact that there really ought to be multiple different cultures and traditions for each race – see Hanukah, Diwali, Christmas, etc.)
But it often seems that the only holidays in fantasy are the solstices and equinoxes and maybe a harvest feast, which are celebrated by everybody in the story, whether they’re humans, elves, dwarves, or dragons. The elves don’t celebrate the Faerie Queen’s Jubilee; nobody has an equivalent of President’s Day or a bank holiday. Heck, fantasy and SF children don’t even seem to get off school for snow days (though I suppose that if children are home-school or apprenticed, that wouldn’t be a possibility).
And I’ve almost never seen (or written; I admit it) the sort of massive feast-and-gift-exchange events that seem to be common across cultures in Real Life (birthdays, potlatch ceremonies, Christmas, etc.) except, occasionally, in stories like the Harry Potter books that use a setting close enough to reality to use the same real-life holidays.
I’ll also point out that while food is often a big part of holiday traditions, different real-life holidays frequently have different foods associated specifically with them. Chocolate eggs are not commonly associated with Valentine’s Day, nor heart-shaped pink-frosted cakes with Christmas.
Holidays aren’t going to fit into every story, but they’re both a fascinating aspect of worldbuilding and a potential source of much character conflict and/or background revelation (if they do fit the story), which makes them well worth considering for at least a few seconds. So in between whatever happy holidaying you are doing this month, think about what your characters celebrate and why, and what differences there may be, both from character to character and from holiday to holiday.
Merry Christmas!
My WI-annoyingly-slow-P pivots around a mid-winter ‘year’s-getting’ celebration. That’s fairly intense and detailed, because it establishes a lot of local texture and character for what has become the heartland of the tale. Of course, the Wassail is – on purpose – about as far as it’s possible to get from a thoroughly original idea.
My favourite wholly invented celebrations are the High Queens’ Days in my Ambrian calendar. They commemorate the birthdays of all the High Queens whose reigns the oldest person in the village has lived through, and they’re celebrated wherever the Goddess’s religion holds sway. The current HQ has the chief – and most generic – holiday. Those of her predecessors tend to evolve locally around their supposed salient features: Arien’s generosity, Carully’s martyrdom breaking the wheat-blight, Sianin’s publication of that new beetroot variety that really does well around this valley, and so forth.
Those were fun, and occasionally germane to the tale. Finishing either of the major stories in which they occurred would be even more fun; but hey, I still haven’t given them up altogether!
Having trouble coming up with many examples from published fiction too. Earthsea’s festivals seem to be mostly standard astronomical ones, but they feel native to me: Le Guin makes the Long Dance and the Moon’s Night seamlessly things of their world, if you know what I mean.
Actually, I’m in the process of trying to worm out the details of a painfully important midwinter celebration, and I’m having serious trouble with it. But it’s good to know that someone out there WANTS to read things like that! I’ve always felt that there should be more “real life” instances in Fantasy. Of course, there is always the problem of using the Gregorian calendar in a made-up world, but I’m hoping no one will notice 🙂
The trilogy I’m writing right now actually has its roots in a massive, week-long festival that was structured after City Dionysa in Ancient Greek times (if you are at all familiar with that.) The most fun part about the first book, for me, is creating the world of the festival and inventing things that might be going on at a gathering like this.
Merry Christmas!
I think that holidays really put in a ‘real’ aspect to a novel. Making some up would also help to delve into the story (native tradition, celebrations, ect.). Also, it could add in a new way of thinking or yet another part of the story. Say, if the dragon had flown away with the mayor, who was the only one who could by tradition start the official celebration of Saint So-and-so Day, and the village couldn’t celebrate it, how would that affect your story? Or if your MC was born on the winter solstice, would that make them have certain magical powers? The way holidays can change stories adds yet another layer to a thick novel! This is just my opinion, of course. I have not actually had my characters celebrate a holiday so far, but maybe they will soon!
Oh, what an interesting post! You’re so right about the dearth of holidays.
Hmm. Maybe I can use something like that to increase the time pressure on two main characters in my WIP. They need to get out of town before the Windy Season is any farther advanced, anyway–maybe a local festival (celebrating the end of the Burning Season?) in the town where they’ve taken refuge could poke the action with the proverbial sharp stick. And I’m sure the Ngarran festival would be quite unlike what they’re used to.
I have to go in to work tomorrow. Must find time to look through my library’s copy of Holidays, Festivals and Celebrations of the World.
Thanks yet again!
Happy Martyrdom of St. Stephen.
Or Happy Hogswatch if you’re that way inclined.
And what happens when your merry band of questers arrives in town to find everything shut for the holiday? Including the Inn and the Grocery Store?
The characters in my sort of Chinese mystery fantasy would have just finished celebrating the night the Winter twin decided that to let the sun return. Much persuasion is needed, including the fruits of summer, to get him to agree that, yeah, his time needs to end so his sister’s can begin.
Given this year’s solstice was a lunar eclipse, he may have needed especially nice treatment.
One of my favorite things about all of Brian Jacques Redwall books is the numerous celebrations they are always having – all with mouth-watering descriptions of the feasts! Those Abbey mice seriously know how to live it up.
I remember reading about the Great Snow Dance in CS Lewis’ The Silver Chair, and thinking what a fantastic festival that was.
Both this post and all the comments on it have been really fascinating, and helpful, and given me much to ponder in my own writings!
Merry Christmas!
My characters are celebrating the First Blossom Festival, which is a sort of beginning-of-spring, New Year, and universal birthday celebration combined (and also when people initiate courtship.)
I love thinking up celebrations but I keep getting caught up in inventing background myths to explain the ideas behind them. Which is good, but really slows down my writing -and then I’m tempted to try and shove the backgrounds into the story whether they fit or not.
`Watership Down’ has -not exactly celebrations, but definite cultural differences. I’m especially thinking of warren with the trip-wires, with the storytelling competition between Fiver and Silverweed.
Another great post that has just made my head explode and get all eager for the rewrite of my teenage angst novel. Lots of angst opportunities around holidays! 😉
Just returning to this post after a similar discussion on another writing blog. I think the most successful use of invented holidays in fantasy that I’ve ever seen is by your friend Lois McMaster Bujold. Her use of the days of the Holy Family in the Chalion books is nothing less than brilliant. It ties together plot, world-building and exposition in a way that is completely natural.