Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Hanukah!

[brightknightie]

Happy (US) Thanksgiving! Happy Hanukah! What are your favorite Thanksgiving and Hanukah fanfictions in fandoms I may know (especially FK, HL, YB, original BSG)? Please link me!

My own favorite Hanukah fanfic is the counterintuitively named "I'll Be Home for Christmas," a Forever Knight story by Marian G. (December '93) that's not available online, but you can enjoy it if you can find the hard-copy zine Forever Net Before Christmas edited and produced by Valery K. (or if you visit me in person, you may read it from my shelf ~grin~).

Off the top of my sleep-deprived, holiday-hurried head, however, I can't think of a single Thanksgiving story. How odd!

Comments

[kickair8p]

A few years ago (yeeesh, about a decade now) I was writing an HL one, but never finished it. But yeah, I can't remember reading a Thanksgiving fanfic either. Closest I can come is a Lammas fic (also HL).

Of course, AO3 has a Thanksgiving tag, but there's nothing familiar there.

~

[brightknightie]

Good luck finishing your HL Thanksgiving story someday!

Yes, Thanksgiving seems to be a curiously under-served holiday, fanfic-wise. Of course in FK, the food and the timing make it a bit challenging to involve the vampire characters, but those are hardly all the characters, and Thanksgiving would seem to be amazingly well-suited to HL's Duncan. How curious that it hasn't attracted many writers!

[pj1228]

I can't think of a FK Thanksgiving story either. After pondering on why that is I've come up with the following possible reasons/ideas:

1. A present day Thanksgiving story would naturally be set on the Canadian Thanksgiving which is in October. I don't know if that is observed in the same fashion as in the US.

2. Our characters spent a great deal of their time in Europe. I don't know about the customs in other states, in Germany Thanksgiving is no big deal. It's set on the first Sunday in October, not even a holiday. In some rural areas there are parades with floats decorated with pumpkins and hay to give thanks for the harvest. In that context, a flashback story to the origins of Thanksgiving might be interesting.

3. A good timeframe for a traditional US Thanksgiving story might be Nick's Chicago era. Might be interesting to develop a mortal Schanke-like friend who would invite him to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family.

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to you!

[brightknightie]

Thanks!

>"I don't know if that is observed in the same fashion as in the US."

Perhaps interestingly, while the respective Canadian and US present-day Thanksgiving holidays have come to be celebrated in much the same way -- although the holiday is universal in the US and by-province in Canada -- with family gatherings, a large meal of harvest-season foods, parades and football, they historically diverge significantly.

Canadian Thanksgiving corresponds largely with European harvest festivals. It wasn't fixed by Canadian law until 1957, Wikipedia says.

US Thanksgiving is as much a festival of national identity as it is a harvest celebration and feast of thanks to God. US Thanksgiving celebrates a core founding myth of the Pilgrims -- what we call "the First Thanksgiving" -- as our national forebears (the children's version of the story praises their pursuit of religious freedom and their friendship with local Native Americans; the real history is, um, much more complicated). Also, it carries the history that it was made a national holiday in 1863, during our Civil War, as a gesture of unity.

So, yes, as Thanksgiving isn't as big a deal in Canada as it is in the US -- where it's the second biggest holiday of the year, after Christmas -- that might be a reason that we've had vanishingly few stories about it in FK. And you're absolutely right that the vampire characters lived most of their long lives before and far from this incarnation of this holiday. I'll add that a holiday mainly celebrated by a lavish meal usually eaten before sunset is a great challenge for a writer focused on the vampire characters, too! :-)

But the human characters... Schanke, Natalie, Stonetree and all!

>"A good timeframe for a traditional US Thanksgiving story might be Nick's Chicago era"

Good idea!

Yes, a 1950s US Thanksgiving -- pre-"Spin Doctor" -- is full of potential for a Nick story, whether Nick joins a celebration, or avoids an invitation, or simply experiences the holiday from the outside looking in. Hmmmm. He was full of hope at that time (until the events of "Spin Doctor") took that hope away, and perhaps his hope and gratitude harmonize nicely with the holiday itself, as well as with a first-season FK spirit.