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

[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.