\o/

[karanguni]

I am done with Yuletide writing, if not with Yuletide editing. Tried my best - missed some things I wanted to do for people, but 6 fics = not too bad.

Trying to take a nap, but instead stealing this from thefridayfive: open to flist! Ask me and I'll ask you the same thing in return. Feel free to twist these into fandom specific questions :D

1. Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas – which one do you use?
2. Do you own an ugly Christmas sweater?
3. Do you celebrate the Winter Solstice?
4. Now that you are ‘in the know,’ what would you leave out for St. Nick on the 24th?
5. Tired of the snow and icky weather yet? For those fortunate folks in the other hemisphere, are you tired of the humidity and hot weather?

Open game: any other questions about the end of the year/holiday rituals/&c.

Comments

[rosefox]

Do you celebrate the Winter Solstice?

Do you do any other "light in the darkness" type things?

Does your family have traditions around this time of year?

[karanguni]

Good god, I didn't realise I had autoformatting turned off - sorry for having to read that!

Winter Solstice - no, but I live in an incredibly hippy/bougie part of the US currently, so I hear about it a lot! I celebrate DAYS GETTING LONGER.

I don't do any other light-to-darkness rituals, quite, because my family was pretty much agnostic before a chunk of them went Converted Christianity on me, but we've always used Christmas as a holiday party for the extended family on both sides - which is awesome, and fantastic. I'm sad I don't get to be in the white noise much anymore.

[rosefox]

No worries about the formatting—I didn't even notice!

Days getting longer is DEFINITELY something to celebrate.

[karanguni]

You? And have any of your celebrations changed over the years with, say, locational moves?

[rosefox]

I've done solstice vigils in the past, but it's kind of too easy; staying up until dawn is a normal night for me. (I wish it weren't, but if wishes were sunlight I wouldn't need a light box.)

I am extremely diligent about lighting Hanukkah candles, and also like being the one to screw in the light bulb/press the button/flip the switch on electric chanukiot in places I frequent (my office building, Kit's daycare). That far predates my current interest in Jewish religious practice. It's all about the increasing light, and Jewish visibility.

When I was living in California with roommates, I tended to just go along with whatever winterhols things they did. My personal observations have shifted in accordance with my spiritual practices. But always Hanukkah candles, and other candles, and clinging to every scrap of sunlight.

My family's holiday traditions have always focused on Rosh Hashanah and Pesach. Hanukkah's not precisely an afterthought, but it's not as important. When I was growing up, my mom would give me and my brother a gift every night, usually just a little thing most nights with one big present at the beginning or end of the holiday, and we would give each other and the adults single gifts.

This year for Hanukkah, Kit was perfectly happy to just light candles and eat dreidel-shaped cookies; I don't know whether we'll do presents of some kind next year. Kit's birthday is at the end of December, but we definitely don't want that to be a reason not to give Hanukkah presents. It's more that the three of us have no habit of giving occasion gifts. When we find things that we think would make great presents, we gift them spontaneously. For occasions like birthdays, we're much more likely to get together with friends or go out to dinner. My mom and J's mom want to shower Kit with presents at the slightest excuse, so maybe we will leave object-gifting up to them, and do experience-gifting with Kit ourselves, and see what they turn out to prefer.

My Jewish grandparents threw Christmas parties for all their Jewish friends in their heavily WASPy suburb; my mom still calls me on Christmas to wish me "gut yontiff" (Yiddish for "happy holiday"). X and J and Kit and I are sort of inadvertently creating our own Christmas tradition of having J's mom over, as she flies in from Singapore every winter for J and Kit's birthdays and likes to travel on Christmas because airports are empty. And of course Yuletide has become a big Christmastime thing for me. :) I've also done a lot of Christmas caroling over the years, mostly because I absolutely love choral singing and it's the only spontaneous choral singing tradition that's been available to me. I sing alto/tenor, so once Christmas music starts playing everywhere, I have near-constant harmony line earworms for two months. (Right now it's a very pretty line for "Silent Night" that I learned with a barbershop chorus in San Francisco.) Oh, and more often than not I've been that person who starts listening to the RENT soundtrack at precisely December 24th, 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

[karanguni]

(Oh that's hilarious - I didn't realise we had a Singapore connection.)

Hooray for your Jewish traditions and starting to formulate new ones with your own family unit! :D

[rosefox]

Oh yeah! J's stepfather, HH, is a Japanese doctor. He and J's mom met while he was at Columbia University, and after they married, he moved the family to Osaka and then to Singapore, where he opened a clinic for the local Japanese population. J moved back to the States as an adult. I got to visit his parents in Singapore once, which was wonderful, and I hope to take Kit there someday.

This is a lot of why I know random esoteric bits of East and Southeast Asian history, culture, etc.—primarily osmosis from J and his family. :)

[karanguni]

Well, that's creepy, considering I studied Japanese at Columbia University after coming up here from Singapore...

[rosefox]

Ha, sort of the same journey in reverse!

Shortly after J and I met in California, one day he mentioned his friends Donna and Al in L.A., and I said "I know people named Donna and Al in L.A.", and we started comparing notes and realized that we had at least a dozen friends in common from when we had separately lived in New York. In fact I had made out with his ex-roommate, in his ex-apartment, on his ex-couch. So really, no degree of coincidence surprises me anymore.

[karanguni]

HA!

[filigranka]

Tired of the snow and icky weather yet? For those fortunate folks in the other hemisphere, are you tired of the humidity and hot weather?

Do your prefer the current dark:light ratio or the one in the other side of year?

Do you celebrate end of the year/beginning of the new one in any way?

[karanguni]

I WISH I HAD SNOW; in spite of being so close to the mountains, it's been a bone dry December. For most of my life I lived in perpetual humidity and rain during December, and I almost miss that - this cold, dry air is neither here nor there for me. What about you? :D

Dark:light ratio now is terrible; bring me back those 8pm sunsets.

EOY celebrations: I USED to watch Nightmare Before Christmas every year while my parents were out as a kid. It sort of was a fun personal thing; my family is much older than me so I self-entertained, and the (belated Christmas) message of "you do you" always rang out. I stopped when I moved to college, and now some very good friends have birthdays on the 31st so the new year is usually rung in celebrating them. And, in spite of living in NYC for 4 years, I never did quite do NYE there: a major regret!

How about you?