Foreign Holidays

[tomash3]

Cross-species holiday moments - what could go wrong?

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Tycho Brahe popped into Stolon’s home sim. He paused, like he always did, to adjust to a horizon that was just farther away enough to feel instinctively strange.

He’d brought a rack-like chair that many thirdracers favored. Tycho had heard Stolon mentioning that they should get some more seating many times, but they'd never followed up on that. So, Tycho had made them a chair. He could tell he’d done something wrong with the finish — he was an astronomer, not a carpenter, after all — but he knew that, in a place of near-infinite abundance, it really was the thought that counted.

Tycho knocked. It didn’t take long for him to hear the clacking of claws. “Tycho!” Stolon exclaimed, pulling their door apart.

“Merry Christmas, Stolon!” Tycho replied. “I made this for you.”

Stolon looked at Tycho, confused. “Merry Christmas?” he repeated.

“Oh, right. Happy Christmas …,” Tycho searched for a word from the Nanon he’d learned much more of since he’d moved, “festival, Stolon!”

Stolon blinked at their friend. “Is there a festival? I don’t know about any that are soon, or maybe, no, I’m right about the day.”

Tycho straightened up in shock. “I knew I’d forgotten something! I … forgot I'd need to tell you about Christmas.”

He looked down. “Should I go?” he asked Stolon. “I don't want to spring something like this on you.”

“No, no, come, stay!” Stolon said, pulling open the door further. “Tell me about your festival!”

Tycho followed his friend into their home, setting his gift down near the entrance.

As he walked, Tycho became more animated. “So, Christmas. Happens every year, around the end of the year, just a few days after the shortest day — on Earth’s northern hemisphere, which is where it’s from. It was originally a religious festival to celebrate the birth of Christ, but these days it’s a winter festival for a lot of people.”

“We have something like that, I think,” Stolon replied. Their next word was in their native tongue. “You could say something like warm-calling night, but that’s not quite right. It’s in … 43 Artemis-days. Used to be about fire-gods, still is for some, but it’s a time to celebrate.”

“Celebrate?” Tycho asked, having forgotten the word.

“Do festival things,” Stolon clarified. “What do you do for this Christmas.”

“Get together with friends or family. Eat a lot of food, often stuff you don’t usually make. Give gifts — it’s why I made you the chair. And a lot of people decorate their houses beforehand. They’ll string up lights, maybe put up a tree —”

“— A tree?” Stolon interrupted. “Is that why I’ve seen so many trees with lights recently? I wondered what they were for.”

“Yeah, probably.” Tycho’s voice and hands slowed. “I haven’t usually been that big on celebrating myself, didn’t like being around so many people, but I thought I’d do something for you, at least.”

“Thank you!” Stolon said. “I — you didn’t need to —”

“I wanted to,” Tycho said. “I am happy to be your friend, and I wanted to do something for you, and Christmas seemed like a good reason, so … here I am.”

Stolon looked around. They weren’t sure how to respond, so they let their friend’s words settle in, until they found something to latch on to. “We should celebrate, then! I’d like to know this festival! We can put lights on a tree and eat the food!”

Their head and upper limbs slid into what Tycho had grown to recognize as a thirdrace smile. “In the interests of convergence, yes?” The alien acknowledgement sounded strange on Stolon’s tongue.

Tycho smiled back. “Sure, why not?” He paused. “It’ll give me a reason not to go to any events someone might remember I should be at.”

Then, he sent Stolon an invitation to skew +2.75 so they could get the preparations done before it was too late.

---

Two scientists scrambling to put up something for Christmas was already a recipe for decorations that had clearly been thrown together in a hurry. One of those scientists being from another species, and thus, had an entirely different set of ideas for how winter holidays looked, didn’t help matters.

For one thing, the tree was leafy. And much more of a bluish-green.

The lights took more vine-like paths around parts of Stolon’s home than Tycho would have used, and many were the dull red of a stove coil from Tycho’s perspective, though bright and inviting from Stolon’s.

Despite their best efforts to stay on task, the process ground to a halt several times for questions about the significance of some festive item or tradition. Tycho got more practice with looking things up real quick the Artemisian way — namely, by skewing his personal time fast enough that the world stood nearly still while he, for example, refreshed his memory about the history of Santa Claus.

Eventually, everything was in place enough, and Tycho and Stolon slowed back down to eat. Neither of them was interested in, or good at, cooking (even without the species barrier) so the food had been pulled off of Artemis’s construct library.

Stolon draped theirself over the chair that Tycho had made for them. “This is good,” they said. “Thank you for this, and for the chair. I’ve been wanting a new one.”

“I know.”

Stolon looked over their table at their strange featherless under-limbed friend and relaxed into a smile. In that moment, they remembered how they’d wanted to join Artemis’s voyage, during their own species’s convergence, partly to meet all the interesting people and different ways that life could exist … and they realized how thoroughly they’d succeeded.

“Merry Christmas, Tycho,” Stolon said.

“Merry Christmas, Stolon.”

And so it was.