wherein Liz (conditionally) defeats Yuletide

Ha, victory! I knew once I actually sat down to write the damn fic, it would come fairly quickly, and I was right -- I wrote the whole thing in under twelve hours. The POV ended up switched to the other main character, and the plot arc took some unexpected minor swerves, but this is about 85% the story I intended to write, and that's a better outline-to-story accuracy rate than I usually get.

I need to get it edited, of course, but the main point is that there is something to edit.

(On that note, does anyone want to beta a short fic about what happened to a couple people after the end of their canon story? The book in question is obscure, but I can provide a canon synopsis and what I mostly need to know is if I adequately signaled a few things within my fic, and that requires no canon knowledge whatsoever.)

December Talking Meme, Day 20: holiday traditions

December 20: favorite holiday traditions (for musesfool) [Tumblr crosspost]

My family doesn't have very many holiday traditions, so I guess I'll just list what I remember.

The only holidays that qualify are Thanksgiving and Christmas. Well, and maybe birthdays? Vicky and I both quit having parties around thirteen or fourteen years old, and since then Mom and Dad take us out for a nice dinner instead. It used to be all four of us, but since Vicky lives in DC and I live in Ithaca, that's not practical these days. And if either of us happens to be visiting our parents near one of their birthdays, we join the dinner party at whatever restaurant the birthday-haver picks.

They also go out for a nice dinner on their wedding anniversary, which I suppose counts as a tradition after forty years. :-)

Thanksgiving is always the four of us, occasionally with guests. If there are guests, I get drafted to say grace before the meal. I'm not entirely sure why that became my responsibility, but I don't mind it. For the past decade or so, we've tended to do a blind wine tasting. That started because I live in a wine-producing region, which has lots of little touristy vineyards. We pick two or three Rieslings over the year and do the tasting on Thanksgiving afternoon, then drink the rest of the wine with Thanksgiving dinner. Mom has also decided that touring vineyards is a good way to occupy the Wednesday before Thanksgiving; this is easier if we're doing the holiday at my apartment, but New Jersey has some actual wineries these days so it works there too.

For Christmas, Mom still tends to hang stockings for me and Vicky on her mantel, though we have told her several times that we are grown women and it feels silly. I think she's indulging in nostalgia. We open presents between 9am and noon on Christmas day; the time depends on whether we eat breakfast first. Sometimes we've done the open-one-gift on Christmas Eve thing, but not consistently. Unlike Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner doesn't have a set menu, though we've gravitated toward bacon-wrapped steak for the main dish.

When Vicky and I were kids, Christmas was the go-visit-relatives holiday. We often ended up having three or four Christmasses, spread over the course of a week: with Grandmother Ruth in the Twin Cities, with Grandpa and Ardis a few miles away in a different suburb of St. Paul, with Granddad and Grandma Doris in Iowa, and on our own back home in New Jersey. All my grandparents are dead now, but this year we're doing Christmas in DC so I suppose the family roadtrip is making a resurgence as a tradition -- though at least this version is saner than piling four people plus dog into a minivan and driving twenty-odd hours nonstop from New Jersey to western Iowa, which we did a few times after both Vicky and I had our driver's licenses. *wry*

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December Talking Meme: All Days