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by Amanda Arista, Kim
Falconer, & Helen Lowe
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Introduction
Stories that make the heart beat faster are a big part
of what we’re all about, here on Supernatural Underground (SU).
And now we’re in the time of year, from Halloween,
through Thanksgiving, Hanukkuh, and Christmas, to New Year, that’s all about
festival and celebration—of fire and candlelight in the midst of winter’s dark
in the northern hemisphere, and of bright days and midsummer stars in the south.
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| Winter... |
Most of all, whether north or south, it’s the season
of coming together with others and of storytelling (as well as food, fizz, and
gifts!) As individuals and communities, we tell our tales of the year that’s been:
of the challenges experienced and also what’s lifted us up; of those we’re
missing and those we look forward to meeting again. We weave our magic of hope
and commitment to each other, in order to not only keep going, but advance with
renewed resolve into the year ahead.
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| Summer: Pohutakawa, the NZ "Christmas tree" |
With the celebrations
in full swing and the year’s end imminent, we were reflecting on all these
elements of celebration, festival and fiction—which brought us to this post,
not only to share our insights into how the elements manifest, but why we believe
they matter.
~*~
Amanda Arista: The Real Magic of Santa Claus
Santa Claus is my favorite holiday story. A man so
imbued with the spirit of wonder, so empowered with good will, he can visit
every good child in one night to give presents, with a magic more powerful than
time and space. I still enjoy watching movies like Santa Claus: The Movie
(1985), The Christmas Chronicles (2018), The Santa Clause
(1994), Arthur Christmas (2011) and my personal favorite
as a kid that honestly probably explains a LOT about the genre that I write, The
Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985).
What I particularly like are the origins of Santa
Claus, which most of these above touch on. How did Santa become Santa? Most of
them have Santa starting out as human who was given the mantle of Santa Claus
and all the powers that came with it. Usually, the gift was bestowed after a
resurrection moment where the man proved his dedication to the wonder of
children. In one version, he fights in a supernatural war. In another, he dies
on his way to deliver toys.
Now, if you read anything that I’ve written in the
past ten years, you’ll know that in my book, that makes Santa a hero, and his
elixir for his heroic moment was immortality, so he could give magic to all the
children in the world forever.
Told you it was the best story.
The story of Santa took on a different note when I
became a parent. I read all the stories to my own child, watched all the
movies. Her wonder, her belief, her story-wired brain adored the tales probably
as much as she liked the biproduct of them- PRESENTS!
But as a parent who knows that Santa is just that, a
story, I still wanted to maintain that wonder in my child. So what do I do? I
do what the story tells me. I hide presents. I stay up late and sneak them
under the tree, quiet as a mouse. I take
a bite of the cookies and carrots we leave out for Santa. Is this heroic?
Perhaps not. It’s hardly a Supreme Ordeal by any means, but it is doing
something just as special.
It’s creating magic in the real world. It’s creating
wonder in the real world. A tangible wonder that exists for my child, a magic
that tells her that the impossible can be done. A sparkle in her eyes that lets
her imagine. If presents can appear under the tree just like in the stories,
what else in the real world is possible? What else can be imagined?
Now yes, I know the wonder will end when she gets
older, and for a while, she will begrudge the big ‘lie’ that is Santa. We have
all been there. We all remember the moment our belief in magic faltered.
Honestly, this might be the first ordeal we have as children. The realization
that some of the magic in the world is just a story.
Some of the magic in the world is just a
story. Not all. What
I hope is that instead of becoming a miserly Scrooge and never being able to
experience the magic of Christmas again, she becomes an Elf, a helper, a believer,
a magic-weaver in her own right. I hope that I have done my part to show her
that you can now create magic for someone else, allow them to feel that magic,
know that wonder.
Santa Claus might be a story, but he does what all
good stories do – teaches us how to treat one another, the unconditional wonder
of children, and that magic is completely real.
Until next time, dear readers.
Happy Holiday,
Amanda Arista
~*~
Kim Falconer: The Ins and Outs of Celebration
Celebrations matter. No
doubt about it! They bring a sense of belonging, fulfilling basic human needs
like certainty, significance, connection and contribution. This importance in
celebration has been recognized for thousands of years as seen with the
transition of Saturnalia to Christmas, Equinox to Easter, Samhain to Halloween…
we need these times on the calendar in real life, and in our fiction too.
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| Celebration matters... |
For example, authors will
use festivals and special dates to situate readers in the culture of their
story world. It’s a ‘picture worth a thousand words’ backdrop to the plot that
lifts the spirts and animates the action. Admit it, celebrations, real or imagined,
are just plain fun!
Unless, of course, you are
on the outside looking in.
This outsideness happens
more than we know, for a variety of reasons: different belief systems,
estranged families, black sheep syndrome and other causes of isolations and disconnection.
In real life, it can be crippling; in fiction though, it’s pure motivation.
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| Salila in the "Amassia" series |
The ‘outsider’ character
comes into its own in Fantasy. There is so much to work with from a child
raised by wolves, aliens or demons to the hero who can’t conform. These themes
offer infinite possibilities for writers. They also offer the chance for
readers to experience nonconformity, or perhaps honor times in their lives when
they were very much on the outs. (Most of high school comes to mind for me.)
The outsider trope can also allow readers to see exclusion turned into an
asset.
A classic example of this
is Aragorn from Tolkien’s LOTR. While the rest of the world dines and dances,
he hangs back, watching. Protecting. Eventually, he is crowned King, but for
most of the story, he is on the outside looking in.
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| Aragorn |
Sleeping Beauty is another
example where the entire tale pivots around exclusion. The overlooked fairy
that was not invited to the celebration arrives anyway, with a hopping mad
curse. In
Fantasy, exclusion can bring the
gold, the development of inner gifts that otherwise wouldn’t be utilized if the
hero had been accepted (or curse-free) from the start.
More than a single
character, it might an entire culture that has been pushed out, as in Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.
They
killed my mother.
They took our magic.
They tried to bury us.
Now we
rise.
There are so many other
examples: Ropa in L. T. Huchu’s Library of the Dead, Raia in
Sarah Beth Durst’s Race the Sands, Aria in Under the Never Sky. N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, Brian Naslund's Dragons
of Terra series … the list goes on.
True to my genre, I utilize
both celebrations and ‘outsideness’ to build a more believable world and throw
characters into the deep end of the sea, literally. The hope is they swim,
though there is always the risk that they won’t.
For example, Marcus, in Crown of Bones, is a conformist, on the inside, educated in the Sanctuary,
heir to the throne, raiser of a warrior phantom. It seems like he has it
all, until he loses his throne, is exiled and his phantom goes rogue.
Ash, on the other hand,
begins the journey an outsider. She is the only non-savant with little rank and
status. But the exclusions she faces make her stronger, more resilient. In Curseof Shadows, it is she who has the strength to… well, you’ll have to
decide if it was all worth it...
As Rilke says:
“…only
someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even
the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as
something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
This holiday season, I find
myself wondering how my own life story might change if I could, as Rilke
describes, experience everything and exclude nothing… so much so, I am
making it my New Year’s resolution.
With that, I wish you all happy reading, writing and dreaming on into
2022.
~*~
Helen Lowe: Together and Alone – Story, Magic, & Real Life
As a child, my Christmas–New Year drew on the same
tradition as Amanda, with the ‘coin flip’ of being in the Southern Hemisphere, which
transformed both into summer festivals. Christmas was still very much the “big”
festival of the year, though, and I remember it as a magical time. Family was
front and centre, and we did “all the things”: decorations, carol singing by
candlelight (we had to stay up late for that, being midsummer!), special festive
food – and, of course, presents!
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| A traditional Christmas |
I’m sure I’m not alone in recalling staying awake to
try and witness Santa’s arrival, watching the flicker of the Christmas lights –
then waking to Christmas morning and having to wait until the whole
family was present for the grand unwrapping!
New Year, of course, being high summer, was always
about bbqs and picnics at the beach: yelling, running, and sand with everything
– equally magical in its way.
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| New Year at the beach |
Family, community, togetherness, and the rituals of
gifts, food, and storytelling, from the 2000-year-old Christmas story to the
family yarns of Christmases and New Years’ past: looking back, I can see how
those elements formed our season of celebration.
As a young woman, however, I experienced being Kim’s “outsider
looking in.” At the time, I was living overseas, and never felt aloneness more
keenly than during Christmas–New Year.
When reading Russell Janney’s The Miracle of the
Bells (1946) some years later, I agreed with the narrator’s observation
that, “No one but a homeless man can understand the utter loneliness of a stranger on Christmas
Eve in a ‘city of homes.’”
Yet during that first
Christmas alone, I was fortunate in being able to make common cause with others
who were similarly circumstanced, forging our own small community of
togetherness. Some did not have family or community available, for various
reasons as Kim says. But many were also from other countries, often with
different cultures and religions, festivals and celebrations. In getting together,
we were able to share those traditions and our stories of home – and found we experienced
something new, and rewarding, through our sharing of traditions, stories, and “found
community.”
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| Shared traditions |
In the midst of aloneness,
I also found another magic – that of experiencing my first “white Christmas”,
where lighting candles began early in the afternoon! I will never forget
walking to my “found community” gathering as the snow started falling. I felt a
little like Mr Tumnus, in fact, with my woollen scarf (only the last among
many other layers!), my arms full of my “NZ festive” contributions, and
snowflakes fluttering past a nearby lamppost. No umbrella, though! ;-)
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| Mr Tumnus_The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe film |
So when undertaking Fantasy
worldbuilding, it’s perhaps not surprising that my mind turns to festivals and
celebratory traditions, whether establishing identity and culture, as in The
Heir of Night, or where characters, such as Malian and Kalan in The Gathering of the Lost, must make their way in strange lands.
Yet as an
author, I also recall how in experiencing the magic of my first winter Christmas,
I recaptured the delight of my first encounter with Narnia’s fictional world. In that moment, I
lived AS Byatt’s wonderful quote:
"Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other."
And in my case, the
midwinter night, and the streetlight, and the falling snow – yet because of
that moment, I never question the value of telling stories or of reading them,
in terms of remaining connected to “real life.”
So wherever you are in your
story, this holiday season, I hope you’ll find a little magic to keep you
company.
~*~
About The Authors:
About Amanda Arista:
Amanda was
born in Illinois, raised in Corpus Christi, and lives in Dallas, but her heart lies
in London. Good thing she loves to travel!
Amanda is the author of the Diaries of an Urban Panther series and The Merci Lanard Files. A graduate of the SMU Creative Writing
Program, she now teaches other aspiring authors and loves discussing craft,
character, and structure.
You can usually find Amanda curled up on her couch with a varied
menagerie of dogs or lizards, writing away, or otherwise on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pantherista/ She tweets: @pantherista
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About Kim Falconer:
Kim Falconer, currently writing as A K Wilder, can be
found on Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram.
Or pop over to throw the bones or Raise Your
Phantom on the AKWilder.com
site
..
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About Helen Lowe:
Helen Lowe is an award-winning novelist, poet, and lover of story. With
four books published to date, she is currently completing the final instalment in The Wall Of Night series.
Helen posts regularly on her “…on Anything, Really” blog, monthly on the
Supernatural Underground, and tweets @helenl0we.
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See you all on the other side—in 2022!
