The desire to have much more, all the glitter and the roar

[sovay]

The mail this evening brought my contributor's copy of Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, edited by Bogi Takács. It looks like a splendid collection and I am honored to be part of its table of contents. Plus it got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. My contribution is "Skerry-Bride," on the theory of more Norse queerness. The nine daughters of Ægir and Rán are called the nine skerry-brides by the eleventh-century skald Snæbjorn: níu brúðir skerja.

The same package contained a small sealed envelope bearing the logo of the Monster Rangers, which looks like Scouting for people who miss Gravity Falls. I now have a Lanterna Badge. I am seriously thinking of ironing it onto my coat. We can use more light.

(I was asked this afternoon for pointers to weird, creepy Christmas traditions in North America. I couldn't think of any that weren't facetious, but I could say that the first thing that comes to mind when looking at Christmas darkness is the way the holiday functions as a weighing of the soul in two of the most famous British and American stories, A Christmas Carol (1843) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Religiously, wouldn't you expect that sort of thing at Easter, harrowing and redemption? But it's the dark time of the year, the turning away of the sun: it makes sense. You want to believe the light is going to come back. You want to believe people are, too.)

Comments

[ethelmay]

I've always thought Handel's Messiah ought to be an Easter tradition, but here we are with it firmly entrenched in December.

[sovay]

I've always thought Handel's Messiah ought to be an Easter tradition, but here we are with it firmly entrenched in December.

I would love to know when and how that happened. I assume relatively recently, because so much Christmas tradition codified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but I don't know (if I ever did, I have forgotten) the details. I do know it was not commissioned as a Christmas piece.

[ethelmay]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-glorious-history-of-handels-messiah-148168540/ does not have a complete explanation, but does say "It took time for Messiah to find its niche as a Christmas favorite. “There is so much fine Easter music—Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, most especially—and so little great sacral music written for Christmas,” says Cummings. “But the whole first part of Messiah is about the birth of Christ.” By the early 19th century, performances of Messiah had become an even stronger Yuletide tradition in the United States than in Britain."