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Hello. I... this is Imriel. I've agreed to help provide music at the Liminal Ball.

...I'll probably need help. I play guitar - if anyone wants to join me in making music, let me know and we can find a time to meet up and practice together. And if anyone has songs they're going to want to hear, let me know and I'll try to learn them.

[He feels like he should say something more, but after a long, uncertain moment decides against it. The entire post is a little stilted, with how unused to using the network Imriel is. He's not even used to hearing it - he generally mutes the entire thing, unless someone addresses him directly, and he's never made a post before. Still, he's trying.]

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Well, I should be able to round that out, even if I've only really played rock music.

Do you know any... Christmas music? Is that the right name?

Yeah, that's the right name.

...and I can probably do a mean rendition of The Little Drummer Boy.

Can you teach me? Just the melody - I can figure out a guitar part from there.

Edited 2017-12-24 05:36 (UTC)

I can try. We can probably do a couple other simple ones, too. Like Jingle Bells, or Rudolph.

Rudolph? [Jingle Bells is easy enough to figure out from context - who Rudolph is and why there's a song about him is less so.]

Yeah, it's...

...uh...

...do you know anything about Santa Claus at all?

...About what? [In other words, no.]

Okay, so...basically, on the night before Christmas, Santa Claus travels around the entire world, and he leaves toys for all the kids who have been good all year. And he travels in a sleigh pulled by magic flying reindeer.

[This makes perfect sense, yes, yes...]

And so Rudolph is a song about one of those reindeer, because he had a shiny nose and none of the other reindeer liked him until he was useful.

That's stupid. There's not enough time for him to get to everyone. How would he know who had been good? And where would he get all the toys? And why would he do that anyway, even if he could?

[To say nothing of the song...]

...I hope he respected himself enough to tell them all they could fuck off, if they only like him when he's worth something to them.

It's just a story you tell little kids--the ones young enough not to question all that too much.

He's got elves making the toys for him, though. And magic. And he just does it because of the Christmas season and stuff.

[There's a pause.]

Most versions, he's just happy to fit in. Kind of messed up when you think about it, yeah.

...I'm not sure I like this Christmas thing. [Where you lie to your kids and reindeer don't have self-respect.]

Really, it's just an excuse to give everyone presents, get the family together, and eat a lot of food. You can ignore all the Santa stuff if you want.

Why is it there if you should just ignore it? [That's stupid.]

Traditions for the people that don't mind, I guess.

It's all a lot of harmless fluff, really. No one takes it really seriously.

...I'm not sure I'll ever understand your century.

It probably really only exists to confuse future generations anyway.

I absolutely believe that's something we'd do.

[Either bored or despairing with this conversation, Imriel goes back to the part he actually cares about.]

...Well, if you can teach me some of them, I'd appreciate it.

Sure I will. Do you know where my restaurant is? You can get a meal out of it, too.

Honestly, the Santa stuff is a fairly recent thing for most of the world? Like, Christmas has been a holiday for over a thousand years, but Santa has only been part of it for, like, the last century or two. He's like this dude from Dutch, German, and Scandinavian folklore who the rest of the world picked up because they liked the idea of a gift-giving spirit with a huge beard.

What Christmas actually is, Imriel, is a festive religious holiday celebrating the birth of the guy you'd know as Yeshua ben Yosef. It just has a bunch of other things mixed into it and most of the time people just focus on the other stuff because even in my world not everyone worships Yeshua, but sometimes people who don't still like Christmas.

...It's a Yeshuite thing? How does an impossible guy with a huge beard from Dutch and Scandinaven folklore fit into that?

Well. Okay, so, in my world, where they call Yeshua by the Greek--Hellene?--name of Jesus Christ, it's a much bigger religion than it is in your world. And there's a minor holy figure named Saint Nicholas who has a feast day that's a couple weeks before Christmas. He was famous for his generosity, so people gave and received gifts on his holiday. Like one of the stories has him putting gold down the chimney of these poor women in order to give them dowries.

Anyway, after a while the stories that got told about him got much more fanciful and less religious and that's how Santa Claus came about, as a blending of those stories. And when the legendary Santa Claus became so different from the religious figure, Saint Nicholas, then it wasn't as important that the gifts happen on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. So it all got folded into the Christmas celebrations and the stories got even wilder.

But if you know the old stories, you can kind of see where the Santa stuff comes from? Like the bit about throwing gold down the chimney in the Saint Nicholas story became actually going down the chimney himself as Santa. And so on.

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