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With the holiday season upon is, this month we turn our attention to an often neglected aspect of worldbuilding: holidays! Like so many worldbuilding topics, this could potentially be huge, but today we’re going to take a quick but hopefully useful look at holidays and how they can be used in fanfiction.
But what is a holiday? The word comes from the Old English hālidæġ – literally ‘holy day’. In the past, holy days might be among the few times when most people could take time off work, to relax, socialise, and celebrate. Nowadays holidays can take almost any form, from festivals of deep religious significance, such as Laylat al-Qadr or Easter, to the downright silly, such as Towel Day and Monkey Day.
So what does this mean for fanfiction? Most obviously, what holidays your characters celebrate is a point of worldbuilding in and of itself – an extra layer of detail and flavour to bring the world of the story to life. The holidays celebrated can potentially say a lot about the history and culture of a region. Are religious holidays held to be most important days in the calendar, or are national days? Do most people treat them as solemn occasions, or is it usually an excuse to party? Or are both of these true to different characters?
But another way holidays can be used is as a setting in itself. The festival episode is a classic television trope, as are Christmas episodes in sitcoms. Holidays can obviously be a novelty, a light-hearted break from the usual story. Some can be light-hearted to the point of downright bizarre – a striking example would be from Season 3 of Daria (Depth Takes a Holiday), where the cast meet anthropomorphic personifications of various holidays. Whether the plot really works, in an otherwise very down to earth animation, is up for debate. There’s also the question of whether the holiday really makes sense in the context of the story. A Christmas episode shoehorned into a setting where it doesn’t make sense (To quote from Daria: “I just don’t get it; if B.C. is a caveman, how can he celebrate Ash Wednesday?”) is probably going to look silly and tacky.
There’s no reason why holidays can’t be the backdrop for dramatic events, as well. King of the Hill has the darkly comic Season 3 episode Pretty, Pretty Dresses, dealing with the impact of Bill’s long-term depression and Hank’s ham-fisted attempts to help him through it. Pretty, Pretty Dresses is fairly inconsequential in the context of the show (None of the characters really learn anything from it), and it’s hard to get away from Bill’s role as the comic sad-sack. On the other side of the spectrum, Toradora!’s Christmas episode carries rather more weight. The holiday is integrated right into the anime’s melodramatic plot – there’s nothing about the episode that’s any less consequential than any other.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at different kinds of holidays and how they can be used in fanfiction.
Christmas
‘tis the season, so Christmas in fanfiction warrants a closer look – but much of what we say about Christmas can apply to adapting other religious festivals, as well. The obvious question is whether Christmas makes sense in the context of Pokémon. The name ‘Christmas’ is literally a shortened form of ‘Christ’s Mass’, and so on the face of it, the answer would probably be ‘no’.
Christmas as a holiday is a pastiche of many, many traditions, however, and many of the most iconic have nothing to do with Christian theology. The practice of gift-giving and feasting around Midwinter goes back at least as far as Ancient Rome, who celebrated the Saturnalia in December. Similar midwinter celebrations include Yule, a Germanic festival that also involved feasting and making religious sacrifice.
The upshot of this is that you can divorce many Christmas traditions from Christianity, if Christ the Messiah doesn’t make sense within the context of your worldbuilding.
National Days
Perhaps your characters would celebrate the founding of their nation, like real-world Canada Day, or Switzerland’s National Day. Many real nations celebrate their independence from a colonial power – perhaps most famously the United States. Others celebrate defining moments in national history, such as the Storming of the Bastille (Bastille Day, France), or the end of Nazi occupation (Liberation Day, Jersey and Guernsey). Others celebrate mythical or semi-historical nationhood – classic examples would be the national saint’s days of the British Isles (St. George, St. Andrew, St. David, and St. Patrick).
These types of celebration are useful for an author in that they allow you to build a sense of history without having to outright lecture the reader. With, it ought to be said, varying degrees of seriousness. Futurama has Earth Freedom Day (A Taste of Freedom), a transparently silly spoof of USA’s Independence Day. On the other hand, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch introduces the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, exploring the complexities of celebrating the anniversary of a revolution.
This brings up an important point, which is that national holidays can inspire varying degrees of sincerity. Perhaps your characters mark the day with pride. Perhaps it passes more or less ignored by society. Perhaps it inspires civil disobedience.
Seasonal Holidays
Seasonal holidays tend to appear in response to people having a very real, very practical interest in the changing seasons. Very commonly they correspond with the agricultural calendar, marking the times of sowing and harvesting. The harvest has an especially strong pull on the imagination, as it is a time when most common people can be sure of having enough to eat in the months to come. Some are sufficiently old that they have become a tangled bundle of beliefs and customs – Easter being an excellent example.
It ought to be remembered, though, that seasonal holidays are common, but not universal. A culture used to different seasons than the temperate spring/summer/autumn/winter will probably observe them in a different way. This opens the door to a lot of creativity, and is an especially good way to tie together geography and culture in worldbuilding.
Religious Holidays
Religious holidays are probably the original holidays, and even a quick look shows the absolute dizzying scope of potential ideas available. The disadvantage to adapting religions holidays is the weight of worldbuilding implied (We touched on this earlier with Christmas). Whether you adapt existing religions or invent your own, you will usually need to answer questions of theology – who celebrates the holiday? What is the symbolic meaning? These are big questions, so let’s look at a few real religious holidays:
Easter: Also known as Eastertide, culminating in Easter Sunday. The holiday celebrates the crucifixion and eventual resurrection of Jesus Christ, taking place over the course of a week. Easter is of huge liturgical importance (The nuances of which are too detailed to go into here), but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the events Easter commemorates define Christianity. Easter is marked by a wide range of religious observances, including prayers, church services, and commemorative rituals.
From a narrative perspective, Easter is interesting in that it is a holiday of great religious importance that is eclipsed in popularity by Christmas. Most non-believers might not even notice Easter were it not for the associated chocolate eggs and the prospect of a guaranteed day off work.
Eid al-Fitr: Marks the end of the Islamic month of Ramadan, and therefore the end of a month of fasting. Eid al-Fitr is celebrated with feasting, gift-giving, and acts of charity, alongside a special prayer service. Celebrants may dress up in their best clothes, and decorate their hands with henna.
Being based in a lunar calendar, Eid al-fitr is an example of a religious holiday where the exact date is not fixed. The day is also a good example of one which embraces basic values – in this case, charity, patience, and worship, among others.
Diwali: The festival of light, celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains somewhere between October and November. Light symbolises knowledge and consciousness, the festival itself celebrating the victory of good over evil. The beliefs and rituals associated with Diwali vary, but the lighting of lamps, candles, lanterns, etc is a major event, along with fireworks and feasting. Family is celebrated over the course of the five-day festival – relatives are visited, and gifts are exchanged.
Diwali can serve as an example of a major festival not in the Christian tradition, taking place in the darker days of the year, but with nothing to do with the many Christmas symbols that many of us will be used to seeing.
Hallowe’en: Hallowe’en is possibly one of the most complex of holidays. Today it is hugely commercial, usually only tangentially related to the western Christian All Hallows’ Eve, or the ‘pagan’ Samhain that falls on roughly the same day. Wiccans celebrate Samhain as part of the cycle of the year – in common with the Christian tradition, as a time to celebrate, and pay respect to, the dead.
(The above is a real snapshot of the festivals described. There’s a real depth to these traditions that we can’t do justice to in a short space, so I really recommend doing some further research of your own into these festivals).
Putting it together
Let's look at an example of a real world holiday being taken and shaped to fit the world of fanfiction: Misfit Angel's Day of Lovers' Remembrance:
Hello, it's Misfit Angel here, and I've been asked to put my thoughts together on fictional holidays, as well as the process of creating them. To me, holidays are important times of the year. They're either mindless fun (Halloween, my personal favorite), bring us together with friends and family (Christmas and America's Thanksgiving) or encourage us to embrace our or others' cultural heritage (Saint Patrick's Day). These days offer us a chance to break free from the boring day to day grind of our lives, allowing us to kick back, relax and reflect on what the day is all about. That should be no different in the realm of fiction.
I've only touched on one major holiday in my stories so far, one that's based heavily on Christmas, which I called the Day of Lovers' Remembrance. Here's a lightly edited excerpt from a special chapter I wrote last year that focused on the holiday, to briefly describe the idea of what Lovers' Remembrance is. This excerpt explores the origins of the holiday as well as the traditions:
There's already some obvious parallels between Lovers' Remembrance and Christmas. The decoration of a tree, gift exchanges with friends and family, and returning home to the warmth of those you love are all major themes I adapted from the Christmas season. One thing I couldn't carry over, as it has not happened within my story's world, is the heart of the holiday: the birth of Jesus. There is no savior of man born to a virgin mother who radically transformed the ancient world through his teachings, or the later stories inspired by his life and actions.
So I needed another hook that could be used to create a historical holiday that's celebrated throughout much of the world, one that evoked thoughts of warmth and happiness in the revellers. The idea came to me: how about a royal wedding that brought peace to two warring factions? Gifts are often staple tradition of weddings, which made the link easier. In addition, royal and noble traditions are often adopted by the masses over time and changed to fit their circumstances, which can naturally evolve into today's concept of gift giving during the winter holidays.
How widespread a holiday is celebrated can also be an important aspect in crafting one. Luckily, I had a convenient means of making mine a holiday celebrated around the world: the country in which my story takes place had a lengthy history of imperialism, which made spreading the holiday easy, much in the same way that Christmas came to the Americas with the pilgrim forefathers who settled in the new world. But a holiday doesn't have to be world renowned to be important, either! England's Bonfire Night is an example of an important day of historical remembrance that isn't celebrated in most other countries, including the rest of the British Commonwealth (or at least not celebrated properly).
Happy Holidays (Possibly)
Hopefully this article has been at least thought-provoking, if not useful. I now hand over to all you - what do you all think? And let the discussion begin.
But what is a holiday? The word comes from the Old English hālidæġ – literally ‘holy day’. In the past, holy days might be among the few times when most people could take time off work, to relax, socialise, and celebrate. Nowadays holidays can take almost any form, from festivals of deep religious significance, such as Laylat al-Qadr or Easter, to the downright silly, such as Towel Day and Monkey Day.
So what does this mean for fanfiction? Most obviously, what holidays your characters celebrate is a point of worldbuilding in and of itself – an extra layer of detail and flavour to bring the world of the story to life. The holidays celebrated can potentially say a lot about the history and culture of a region. Are religious holidays held to be most important days in the calendar, or are national days? Do most people treat them as solemn occasions, or is it usually an excuse to party? Or are both of these true to different characters?
But another way holidays can be used is as a setting in itself. The festival episode is a classic television trope, as are Christmas episodes in sitcoms. Holidays can obviously be a novelty, a light-hearted break from the usual story. Some can be light-hearted to the point of downright bizarre – a striking example would be from Season 3 of Daria (Depth Takes a Holiday), where the cast meet anthropomorphic personifications of various holidays. Whether the plot really works, in an otherwise very down to earth animation, is up for debate. There’s also the question of whether the holiday really makes sense in the context of the story. A Christmas episode shoehorned into a setting where it doesn’t make sense (To quote from Daria: “I just don’t get it; if B.C. is a caveman, how can he celebrate Ash Wednesday?”) is probably going to look silly and tacky.
There’s no reason why holidays can’t be the backdrop for dramatic events, as well. King of the Hill has the darkly comic Season 3 episode Pretty, Pretty Dresses, dealing with the impact of Bill’s long-term depression and Hank’s ham-fisted attempts to help him through it. Pretty, Pretty Dresses is fairly inconsequential in the context of the show (None of the characters really learn anything from it), and it’s hard to get away from Bill’s role as the comic sad-sack. On the other side of the spectrum, Toradora!’s Christmas episode carries rather more weight. The holiday is integrated right into the anime’s melodramatic plot – there’s nothing about the episode that’s any less consequential than any other.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at different kinds of holidays and how they can be used in fanfiction.
Christmas
‘tis the season, so Christmas in fanfiction warrants a closer look – but much of what we say about Christmas can apply to adapting other religious festivals, as well. The obvious question is whether Christmas makes sense in the context of Pokémon. The name ‘Christmas’ is literally a shortened form of ‘Christ’s Mass’, and so on the face of it, the answer would probably be ‘no’.
Religion in Pokémon fanfiction is a huge topic in an of itself, so whether Christianity makes sense in fanfiction really up for debate. For the purposes of this article we’re going to assume it doesn’t.
Christmas as a holiday is a pastiche of many, many traditions, however, and many of the most iconic have nothing to do with Christian theology. The practice of gift-giving and feasting around Midwinter goes back at least as far as Ancient Rome, who celebrated the Saturnalia in December. Similar midwinter celebrations include Yule, a Germanic festival that also involved feasting and making religious sacrifice.
The upshot of this is that you can divorce many Christmas traditions from Christianity, if Christ the Messiah doesn’t make sense within the context of your worldbuilding.
National Days
Perhaps your characters would celebrate the founding of their nation, like real-world Canada Day, or Switzerland’s National Day. Many real nations celebrate their independence from a colonial power – perhaps most famously the United States. Others celebrate defining moments in national history, such as the Storming of the Bastille (Bastille Day, France), or the end of Nazi occupation (Liberation Day, Jersey and Guernsey). Others celebrate mythical or semi-historical nationhood – classic examples would be the national saint’s days of the British Isles (St. George, St. Andrew, St. David, and St. Patrick).
These types of celebration are useful for an author in that they allow you to build a sense of history without having to outright lecture the reader. With, it ought to be said, varying degrees of seriousness. Futurama has Earth Freedom Day (A Taste of Freedom), a transparently silly spoof of USA’s Independence Day. On the other hand, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch introduces the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, exploring the complexities of celebrating the anniversary of a revolution.
This brings up an important point, which is that national holidays can inspire varying degrees of sincerity. Perhaps your characters mark the day with pride. Perhaps it passes more or less ignored by society. Perhaps it inspires civil disobedience.
Seasonal Holidays
Seasonal holidays tend to appear in response to people having a very real, very practical interest in the changing seasons. Very commonly they correspond with the agricultural calendar, marking the times of sowing and harvesting. The harvest has an especially strong pull on the imagination, as it is a time when most common people can be sure of having enough to eat in the months to come. Some are sufficiently old that they have become a tangled bundle of beliefs and customs – Easter being an excellent example.
It ought to be remembered, though, that seasonal holidays are common, but not universal. A culture used to different seasons than the temperate spring/summer/autumn/winter will probably observe them in a different way. This opens the door to a lot of creativity, and is an especially good way to tie together geography and culture in worldbuilding.
Religious Holidays
Religious holidays are probably the original holidays, and even a quick look shows the absolute dizzying scope of potential ideas available. The disadvantage to adapting religions holidays is the weight of worldbuilding implied (We touched on this earlier with Christmas). Whether you adapt existing religions or invent your own, you will usually need to answer questions of theology – who celebrates the holiday? What is the symbolic meaning? These are big questions, so let’s look at a few real religious holidays:
Easter: Also known as Eastertide, culminating in Easter Sunday. The holiday celebrates the crucifixion and eventual resurrection of Jesus Christ, taking place over the course of a week. Easter is of huge liturgical importance (The nuances of which are too detailed to go into here), but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the events Easter commemorates define Christianity. Easter is marked by a wide range of religious observances, including prayers, church services, and commemorative rituals.
From a narrative perspective, Easter is interesting in that it is a holiday of great religious importance that is eclipsed in popularity by Christmas. Most non-believers might not even notice Easter were it not for the associated chocolate eggs and the prospect of a guaranteed day off work.
Eid al-Fitr: Marks the end of the Islamic month of Ramadan, and therefore the end of a month of fasting. Eid al-Fitr is celebrated with feasting, gift-giving, and acts of charity, alongside a special prayer service. Celebrants may dress up in their best clothes, and decorate their hands with henna.
Being based in a lunar calendar, Eid al-fitr is an example of a religious holiday where the exact date is not fixed. The day is also a good example of one which embraces basic values – in this case, charity, patience, and worship, among others.
Diwali: The festival of light, celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains somewhere between October and November. Light symbolises knowledge and consciousness, the festival itself celebrating the victory of good over evil. The beliefs and rituals associated with Diwali vary, but the lighting of lamps, candles, lanterns, etc is a major event, along with fireworks and feasting. Family is celebrated over the course of the five-day festival – relatives are visited, and gifts are exchanged.
Diwali can serve as an example of a major festival not in the Christian tradition, taking place in the darker days of the year, but with nothing to do with the many Christmas symbols that many of us will be used to seeing.
Hallowe’en: Hallowe’en is possibly one of the most complex of holidays. Today it is hugely commercial, usually only tangentially related to the western Christian All Hallows’ Eve, or the ‘pagan’ Samhain that falls on roughly the same day. Wiccans celebrate Samhain as part of the cycle of the year – in common with the Christian tradition, as a time to celebrate, and pay respect to, the dead.
(The above is a real snapshot of the festivals described. There’s a real depth to these traditions that we can’t do justice to in a short space, so I really recommend doing some further research of your own into these festivals).
Putting it together
Let's look at an example of a real world holiday being taken and shaped to fit the world of fanfiction: Misfit Angel's Day of Lovers' Remembrance:
Hello, it's Misfit Angel here, and I've been asked to put my thoughts together on fictional holidays, as well as the process of creating them. To me, holidays are important times of the year. They're either mindless fun (Halloween, my personal favorite), bring us together with friends and family (Christmas and America's Thanksgiving) or encourage us to embrace our or others' cultural heritage (Saint Patrick's Day). These days offer us a chance to break free from the boring day to day grind of our lives, allowing us to kick back, relax and reflect on what the day is all about. That should be no different in the realm of fiction.
I've only touched on one major holiday in my stories so far, one that's based heavily on Christmas, which I called the Day of Lovers' Remembrance. Here's a lightly edited excerpt from a special chapter I wrote last year that focused on the holiday, to briefly describe the idea of what Lovers' Remembrance is. This excerpt explores the origins of the holiday as well as the traditions:
There's already some obvious parallels between Lovers' Remembrance and Christmas. The decoration of a tree, gift exchanges with friends and family, and returning home to the warmth of those you love are all major themes I adapted from the Christmas season. One thing I couldn't carry over, as it has not happened within my story's world, is the heart of the holiday: the birth of Jesus. There is no savior of man born to a virgin mother who radically transformed the ancient world through his teachings, or the later stories inspired by his life and actions.
So I needed another hook that could be used to create a historical holiday that's celebrated throughout much of the world, one that evoked thoughts of warmth and happiness in the revellers. The idea came to me: how about a royal wedding that brought peace to two warring factions? Gifts are often staple tradition of weddings, which made the link easier. In addition, royal and noble traditions are often adopted by the masses over time and changed to fit their circumstances, which can naturally evolve into today's concept of gift giving during the winter holidays.
How widespread a holiday is celebrated can also be an important aspect in crafting one. Luckily, I had a convenient means of making mine a holiday celebrated around the world: the country in which my story takes place had a lengthy history of imperialism, which made spreading the holiday easy, much in the same way that Christmas came to the Americas with the pilgrim forefathers who settled in the new world. But a holiday doesn't have to be world renowned to be important, either! England's Bonfire Night is an example of an important day of historical remembrance that isn't celebrated in most other countries, including the rest of the British Commonwealth (or at least not celebrated properly).
Happy Holidays (Possibly)
Hopefully this article has been at least thought-provoking, if not useful. I now hand over to all you - what do you all think? And let the discussion begin.
