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

[sartorias]

I think the Giftmas overlay is pretty terrifying overall. Beginning on 'Black Friday' the consumer glut and crush begins, ending in mountains of trash at the end of the year. Accompanied by some of the most godawful and glutinous muzak ever perpetrated outside of hell.

[sovay]

Accompanied by some of the most godawful and glutinous muzak ever perpetrated outside of hell.

I don't disagree. The person who asked me was looking for the North American equivalent of Krampus, about which I had no idea. A lot of what I know about the history of Christmas in the U.S. is that for a long time it wasn't even a thing.

[sartorias]

It wasn't a monster commercial thing as it is today, but then that can be said for weddings, birthdays, Valentine's Day, Halloween, etc.

For Christians it meant music, candles, food, decorations of holly, maybe a small gift or two. all centered around church. For anybody else, of course, another day.

[sovay]

For Christians it meant music, candles, food, decorations of holly, maybe a small gift or two. all centered around church. For anybody else, of course, another day.

I don't even think of it as ubiquitous among American Christians until the mid-to-late nineteenth century. It was not a Puritan observance and, in New England, the societal disapproval if not the official ban lasted well past the Colonial era. My understanding is that it took writers like Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore to start the nationwide revival. This is one of the reasons I find the whole war-on-Christmas rhetoric disingenuous as well as pernicious. There has never been a true, unbroken, religiously Christian continuity of observance of Christmas in the U.S. The very first Christians in this country thought it was a bunch of popish, heathen nonsense and pointedly non-celebrated the first occurrence in their new country.

[sartorias]

You're right about the puritans. I was thinking of later groups, specifically pioneers (many of whom were from Europe in later waves) and women's pioneer diaries. Also family stories. Like, in my mother's side of the family, Swedes who came over after the Napoleonic war, Christmas was a church-heavy period, beginning with advent and its candles and ending with Epiphany. On the day, my great grandmother told us, if they were lucky they each got an orange, a rarity. They decorated the wagon with boughs and brought food along for the church service celebrations. For the girls, St Lucia's day was a far bigger deal.