19: The Baffling Tradition
“Tradition!”
Fiddler On The Roof
Brussels Sprouts. Candy canes. Stockings hung on the fireplace. A horse skull that will rob your pantry if you don’t keep it out with a singing contest.
And indeed a guy coming from the North Pole in a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer to come down your chimney and deliver presents to everyone in the world in one night.
There is a lot of weird stuff attached to Christmas.
Some of the oddities of the festive season already have entries here, but consider some of the ideas that haven’t stuck around.
Like we accept robins, but what is up with all the frogs on Victorian Christmas cards?
An aside like this can make a world feel lived-in, or just more odd. (My favourite example comes from Trinity first edition, where a sourcebook establishes that colour-changing mood rings and the like are now possible through biotech and were fashionable a few years ago.)
And traditions can turn plots as well. Borrowing a reference from a grand old White Dwarf article on games centred around nobility, traditions sometimes persist through inertia, and can also be brought back to make things happen...
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