Happy Thanksgiving!
Think about Thanksgiving for a minute. On the one hand, it is one of two quintessentially American holidays (the other being the Fourth of July); it’s been celebrated for a bit over four hundred years, if you start from the story about the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but it’s only been an official national holiday for 156 years. And if you widen the lens a bit, it’s part of a tradition of harvest festivals that goes back and back until it fades into the mists of prehistory.
Every human society that has ever been has celebrated holidays, either around natural phenomenon, like planting and harvesting, solstices and equinoxes, or to commemorate events, from the founding of a country, to recognizing and remembering those lost to battle, plague, or famine, to marking the birth or death of someone important.
And no matter how similar holidays may sound, every culture has slightly different customs for celebrating it. The ancient Romans celebrated the harvest with a feast, music, sports and games, but the feast didn’t feature turkey (which is native to North America) or football (which hadn’t been invented yet). People cling to their holiday traditions when they’re away from home. One of my friends has a ten-minute saga describing the difficulty she had in getting hold of cranberry sauce, or even just cranberries to make sauce, when she spent Thanksgiving in England one year – which was absolutely necessary because Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce was unthinkable, no substitutes accepted.
Even within a given culture, there are variations in how people celebrate, from regional differences to local or familial ones. Another friend of mine mentioned yesterday that her family starts their Thanksgiving meal with someone reading “The New Colossus,” the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. I think that is a cool idea, but it isn’t something my family ever did.
So whether you’re writing about people on another planet, in the distant past or far future, in distant countries or next door, stop and think about the holidays the celebrate, and how they celebrate them. Even if none of the holidays or customs you remember, research, or invent are directly relevant to the story you are writing, knowing what your people find worthy of commemorating or celebrating will give you a sense of the underlying unity (or lack thereof) of your characters’ culture. Your characters don’t have to spend two chapters on a massive Winter Solstice festival, even if it’s December – a quick remark about finding time to bring home a Yule log, remembering to buy rice for tangyuan, or needing to shop for Winterfair gifts can give a sense of time and culture that’s hard to get any other way.
I think I’ve only managed to have one novel feature any kind of holiday. I’m sure it dates back to my first year out of training in the military, when I had to work Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s – and I wasn’t even on day shift for them. The holidays stopped meaning much of anything. But I still should have some in my novels.
Hmm — two of my novels feature holidays in the sense that they occur and the characters do things, which affect the plot. But not in the sense that it is central.
I’m still trying to come up with a plot to go with Venturesome Sheep Day — a holiday celebrating when the colony was saved by (something) discovered by a sheep that had strayed too far from its flock.
Potential plot ideas (with help from the kids)
The sheep stumbled across a vein of gold or precious gems, so the colony could stay solvent; or an ancient ruin, which made the colony famous.
It found a plant that held the cure to the disease that was decimating everyone; or ate the plant that was mind-controlling everyone.
It wandered in front of a monster’s den, and its subsequent demise revealed the monster to the colonists before it could eat all of them.
It found the ancient artifact that would protect the colonists from the nightly monster attacks.
It found some natives, who proved to be friendly.
Those look good, how about some more?
To mark the day, one person is always chosen (by lot? village leader’s snit list?) to venture out into the wild lands, unarmed just as sheep are. Rite of passage? Unofficial ostracism or exile? And what will this year’s (ad)venturer find?
Just a thought…
Did the sheep survive or get killed? That’s going to make a significant difference in terms of the sort of holiday Venturesome Sheep Day is.
Venturesome Sheep Day is a great name for a holiday!
I love these. I’m ready to read a Venturesome Sheep story!
Rick
An alternate-history or urban-fantasy setting ought to make holidays easy. I’ve already written a couple of Christmas short-stories in my own alt-history setting. But I do need to think about how some of the holidays are more important, less important, or changed. (I’m thinking Valentines Day is going to be more important in my alt-history setting, and since my WIP is set there in February…)
For the other setting I’ve written novels in, I need to think about how holidays work. It’s an all-tropics land without notable seasons, and with very weak solstices. It’s hard to get excited about a summer solstice where the Sun rises a quarter-hour earlier than at the equinox.
I also find I need to avoid falling into an “It’s always Mardi Gras in New Orleans” situation when trying to create holidays in fantasy worlds.
A writers group in Seattle celebrates every Yule by writing a series of ghost stories.
Why ghost stories?
It’s a tradition.
A Dickensian tradition?
The Venturesome Sheep put a hoof through the roof of an ancient water system. People were able to repair it, and the land flourished.
Both my novels (so far) feature Christmas celebrations. Current WIP starts on Low Sunday, goes past Ascension Day, I’m not sure yet where/when it will end. And I have to keep track of when it’s Sunday and what the phases of the moon are. More than once I’ve had to rewrite a chapter because the night is going to be dark when it should be light, or vice versa. Gnash.
I want to read the Venturesome Sheep Day story, whenever it’s done and whatever it’s about! Because I second Chicory – that’s an excellent holiday name. (Rather viciously, I also love the idea of someone being sent out to explore unarmed as a likely punishment, but my tired brain briefly interpreted that as “being sent out unarmed except with a sheep,” and I’m now trying to figure out who/how one would fight while using a sheep as a weapon.)
About season-related holidays near the equator – speaking as a Floridian with southwestern U.S. relatives (okay, not the tropics, but places where construction-paper “fall leaves” and “snowflakes” and “spring flowers” seem either silly or very oblivious), many places without ridiculously strong sunlight changes nonetheless have distinct seasons. Florida has thunderstorms-and-very-warm season; drying-off-but-possibility-of-hurricanes season; cool-and-mostly-dry season; and ugh-this-feels-more-humid-than-summer-OR-it’s-a-drought-why-do-people-like-the-spring?! season. I very happily celebrate the official starts of the drying-off and cool-and-mostly-dry seasons. Many other places have a monsoon season and a less-wet season, and I can imagine some farmers celebrating the former, while their neighbors closer to the streambed look very apprehensively at every cloud.
I don’t think any holidays have directly made it into my novels yet, but I have written a few writing-exercise scenes about my current work-in-progress’s characters preparing for/attending/avoiding various equinox and solstice recognitions, and I’m really glad that I did. Several characters acquired some highly useful pieces of backstory… (Useful for the work-in-progress, not for the characters who would have preferred to spend the whole holiday asleep.)
“Sometimes, despite all the technology available in 2060, what you really need is a live sheep.”
—Ursula Vernon
I’m loving all the Venturesome Sheep ideas!
@Deep Lurker: I like to think the sheep survived. Perhaps wandered back home after several days AWOL, carrying traces of the (something) on its feet/fleece. The colonists took one look and said “We must figure out where this sheep has been!” and set about back-tracking its path.
@K. M. D. – I have no idea, but I will work “unarmed except with a sheep” into the story if I possibly can.
In that case let me toss off a few ideas.
o Seeds of an important-for-terraforming plant that was suppose to be waiting there when the colonists arrived.
o Dead native parasites (smeep-ticks) that were killed off by something the sheep survived.
o The alien equivalent of diatomaceous earth, or some other locally important material. Maybe something needed for the colony’s water-purification plant. Something reported ‘present’ in the pre-colonization scouting reports but that the colonists hadn’t been able to find.
Another variation could be: “That doggone sheep wandered off again. Go track it down, Jan.” After an arduous search, Jan finds the sheep peacefully grazing in the middle of .
(something)
(I guess it didn’t like the brackets.)
Haven’t invented any new holidays yet, but the novelette I’m currently shopping around is a Christmastime SF romantic comedy, with hovercraft taking the place of a sleigh.
The novel from which that story was spun off also has a Christmas Eve scene — because it seemed to me especially poignant to have the heroine required to sing a solo song (based on an old G.K. Chesterton poem) that was especially relevant to the trouble she was in as part of a prelude. It was almost the first image that came to me for the novel.
Rick
Which Chesterton poem??