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gs_silvaHolidays are material for mutual discovery in Alien Romance, as characters from different cultures and backgrounds become acquainted with each other's traditions. I've been skipping ahead a little on Draft 3 to the scenes that take place in Lyon, France, because they take place in and around Christmas, and I don't want to be starting that work in February when I'm thoroughly not in the mood. In fact, Maurice and Cathy first meet just before Christmas, go on one café date, and then their second date is a New Year's Eve pub crawl. Well, it was going to be. Somebody sabotaged it, so they end up sitting on a park bench with no shoes.
Oh no, I was going to put a cut here, but I forgot how. Oh well. If you want to skip it, just skim.
French Christmases are less flashy, more observant, and she dresses up for Mass (which I drew in LA Fourvière, so sue me, it's pretty and easy to get reference photos of the interior) and then attends a feast with extended family. Lumières, the big Festival of Lights event that takes over Lyon, hasn't been established yet, and anyway it ends before Maurice arrives. Before it became a grand municipal spectacle, it was just candles in the windows, so I drew some of that. And I drew Maurice walking through the famous market, eating a carrot for dinner in a nod to my own lean times.
The following Christmas, Cathy gets to experience it American style! A retail paradise! And I actually explored this with an important plotline that ended up getting bumped to Halloween. Cathy has no interest in mall Santa. She doesn't get confounded by mountains of gifts because they're all on tight budgets so they only give each other small token gifts. She does buy Maurice a shopping bag full of gifts, but soon learns that was a mistake.
Maurice comes from a small Midwestern farming community where most everyone is Christian and the holiday is a little more like a picture print by Currier and Ives. (Just a little!) Maurice and his parents own the local grocery general, so they sell the goods that make Christmas happen for everyone else in the county. But they don't do much to celebrate, themselves. Old Isaac may or may not have a Russian Orthodox tradition in his family background; he's never practiced it himself. It could also be a Muslim background, as the name 'Arzamastsev' is fairly common in southern Siberia and around Kazakhstan. Simone is Vietnamese and was only peripherally familiar with Catholic trappings when she arrived, so she minds her own business, and her business is retail.
Maurice has personal hangups about gift-giving in general. He feels like there must be a point or a philosophy behind it that he's missing, because his parents never taught him. And, sure, he had all of his good red-blooded American friends and neighbors to learn from, but he feels culturally alienated from them in a way that they wouldn't understand and would get personally offended over if he tried to explain it.
Ren is one of those friends from back home. He and Maurice are comfortable with each other's quirks, and Ren doesn't try to contextualize or challenge Maurice's discomfort with gifts. They clash over other things, though. They're both maturing rapidly, and growing in different directions, and the power balance between them is getting upended. I never dive into Ren's personal experience with Christmas. His experience with religion is complicated. Right now he's in a period of spiritual transition, but the foundation he has to build his spiritual life on is unstable.
More later, maybe.
Oh no, I was going to put a cut here, but I forgot how. Oh well. If you want to skip it, just skim.
French Christmases are less flashy, more observant, and she dresses up for Mass (which I drew in LA Fourvière, so sue me, it's pretty and easy to get reference photos of the interior) and then attends a feast with extended family. Lumières, the big Festival of Lights event that takes over Lyon, hasn't been established yet, and anyway it ends before Maurice arrives. Before it became a grand municipal spectacle, it was just candles in the windows, so I drew some of that. And I drew Maurice walking through the famous market, eating a carrot for dinner in a nod to my own lean times.
The following Christmas, Cathy gets to experience it American style! A retail paradise! And I actually explored this with an important plotline that ended up getting bumped to Halloween. Cathy has no interest in mall Santa. She doesn't get confounded by mountains of gifts because they're all on tight budgets so they only give each other small token gifts. She does buy Maurice a shopping bag full of gifts, but soon learns that was a mistake.
Maurice comes from a small Midwestern farming community where most everyone is Christian and the holiday is a little more like a picture print by Currier and Ives. (Just a little!) Maurice and his parents own the local grocery general, so they sell the goods that make Christmas happen for everyone else in the county. But they don't do much to celebrate, themselves. Old Isaac may or may not have a Russian Orthodox tradition in his family background; he's never practiced it himself. It could also be a Muslim background, as the name 'Arzamastsev' is fairly common in southern Siberia and around Kazakhstan. Simone is Vietnamese and was only peripherally familiar with Catholic trappings when she arrived, so she minds her own business, and her business is retail.
Maurice has personal hangups about gift-giving in general. He feels like there must be a point or a philosophy behind it that he's missing, because his parents never taught him. And, sure, he had all of his good red-blooded American friends and neighbors to learn from, but he feels culturally alienated from them in a way that they wouldn't understand and would get personally offended over if he tried to explain it.
Ren is one of those friends from back home. He and Maurice are comfortable with each other's quirks, and Ren doesn't try to contextualize or challenge Maurice's discomfort with gifts. They clash over other things, though. They're both maturing rapidly, and growing in different directions, and the power balance between them is getting upended. I never dive into Ren's personal experience with Christmas. His experience with religion is complicated. Right now he's in a period of spiritual transition, but the foundation he has to build his spiritual life on is unstable.
More later, maybe.
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Date: 2025-12-14 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-14 06:10 pm (UTC)Inventing new holidays and other cultural details puts me off from fantasy worldbuilding nowadays. I've done it all before, but I don't feel like it anymore. Nor keeping track of worlds I've already invented. Borrowing themes from old Pagan and/or existing fantasy cultures like you can do is an appealing alternative, certainly. But I feel like other people can do it better than I. I dunno. It's worth considering!
I wouldn't use Asian holidays as a guide to fantasy worldbuilding. I might use them later in Alien Romance. It seems like Maurice's mother would do a little something to mark Tet and Mid-Autumn Festival, among others. So he'd know a little bit about them. Tet is a gift-giving holiday, but it has specific guidelines that make it quite different from Christmas (and even different from the Chinese practices at Lunar New Year).