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This week: Holidays Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.
-P. J. O'Rourke
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
-Dave Barry
A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.
-Abraham Polonsky |
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Holidays
Here in the US, we like to refer to the upcoming month and a half or so as the "Holiday Season." This isn't, as some would have it, some sort of battle in the War on Christmas, but instead an acknowledgement that a) Christmas isn't the only holiday celebrated around this time and b) not everybody celebrates Christmas. The "season" starts here with Thanksgiving, which wasn't given its current day and significance until 1863.
There are certain things, such as numbers, the calendar, and holidays, that many people seem to think are carved into stone, as if they appeared, Minerva-like, fully formed. The truth is, everything had its beginning somewhere, and usually with something else entirely. Thanksgiving doesn't have to be on the fourth Thursday of November, for example - it's lousy timing for what's ostensibly a harvest festival, anyway - nor does there have to be a November, or a Thursday, or the concept of the "fourth." All of these concepts were created, at some point, made up out of someone's head...
...which of course is our job as fantasy writers.
So, say you're creating a society on a different world. They're not going to have the same calendar that we do - which should be obvious - but naturally, their holidays will be different, too. Even if it's a world colonized by Earth, their ways of celebrating Earth's holidays are going to change in some ways.
And yet, some things will probably be very similar. If the society is, or recently was, agrarian, there might be an emphasis on planting and harvest holidays. If it's especially warlike, you'd get more focus on days similar to Veterans' Day and Memorial Day. Especially religious cultures might be more inclined to focus on that sort of holiday. Or you get what we have here, which is a mix of all that, plus a few days also set aside to remember influential people or movements.
The point is, though, that all of these holidays will be different from what we're used to here on Earth. I know that sounds like it should be obvious, but when writers draw on inspiration for their made-up holidays, it's most often something similar to a familiar holiday such as Christmas. However, remember that even the way we celebrate Christmas has changed over the years - it wasn't always so heavy on the gift-giving and obnoxious "holiday cheer." Fantasy societies don't have department and discount stores, and most of science fiction implicitly assumes that we've grown beyond the whole big-box store phase of our cultural development.
So to help determine what sort of holidays might be celebrated, ask yourself, first of all: What kind of culture is this? Is it pastoral, agrarian, medieval, industrial, technological, futuristic, primitive? Does it depend on the sea, or space, or on land transportation for its commerce? How warlike is the culture?
All of these things influence the type of holidays celebrated. A pastoral society's holidays are likely influenced by phases of the moon (or moons); an agrarian one might focus on more solar celebrations, such as the ancient solstice and equinox observances. As I mentioned before, warlike societies might have holidays to commemorate military victories, or to honor fallen soldiers, whereas a peaceful one might instead have days to honor philosophical pioneers. An especially repressed culture might have a holiday where anything goes, where debauchery rules the day just this one time. That sort of thing.
As for futuristic societies, you're on your own.
Also consider that not everyone may celebrate every holiday. Are there alternatives, and how is the minority treated?
Including holidays as plot points, or even just background, into your stories gives them a sense of realism, provides the reader insight into the culture without having to overexplain things, and adds depth. Be sure to include them in your worldbuilding. |
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Last time, in "Fantasy Newsletter (October 24, 2012)" , I talked about going beyond the familiar.
fyn  : Describing music to the deaf, color to the blind or the taste of water to anyone is an excellent writing exercise! I've found that one of the best keys to unlocking an alien existence is that it needs to be real, accepted and familiar to the writer; only then can they write convincingly of this other world. Too often, writers have not clearly envisioned this world with all its logic. What happens, who interacts and how things work must still make sense both in the world and to the reader.
This I agree with, but I still ask the rhetorical question: How far can we go and still maintain some sense of the familiar?
Quick-Quill  : Building a world is more important than the story. Sci-Fi, Fantasy, supernatural, paranormal they all start with a World. Here is my suggestions to accomplish that. [Submitted Item: "Creating the Supernatural World" [E]]
While I believe that building the world is important as an ongoing process throughout the writing project or projects, in the end, what the reader is going to relate to is the characters, and to a lesser extent what happens to the characters (the story). The background is very important, of course, to creating a deep and believable world into which to drop the characters and plot.
Jay's debut novel is out now!  : Great question without a clear answer to it.
I think, a lot of times, it comes down to explaining things in-universe, like you said, rather than trying to "translate" for the audience. Readers in general are a clever lot and can detect that they're being talked down to from a mile away, and doubly so when it comes to having things "simplified."
Context is a variable when you're working in speculative fiction. I like to use this to my advantage. 
Well, I think it's a question that every writer - and reader - must answer for him- or herself. Some people have a much lower tolerance for the weird and quirky, and others have a lower tolerance for things that are simply outside our everyday experience.
Thanks for the comments and submissions! That's it for me for November - until next time, stay sane and
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: November 20, 2012 Issue [#5373]
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