Maybe something festive with LoZ: RR? Like Link and Hunter explain Hylian/Sheikah traditions to Neesha or something equally as lighthearted? Have an amazing day! c:
Squeaking in under the wire, with an hour left to spare on Christmas day!
So I actually started this short back in 2005. That’s not a typo. I have tried almost every year to sit down and finish it, and it’s just never worked out, but here we go! 2020 has been a Hell of a year so far, but at least I finally finished this Very Merry Interlude and can share it! Merry Solstice, Happy Holidays, and whatever you may celebrate, may it have been / be with those you loved best, in spirit if not in person! _________________
It started innocently enough.
In retrospect, that should have been more than enough to tip us off that things were going to get dramatically less innocent as they progressed, since almost nothing that starts with us ends innocently. But, as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and foresight is not our forte, if you catch my meaning.
“Merry Solstice!” said Hunter.
“Merry Solstice!” said I.
“What’s Solstice?” said Neesha.
And the innocence pretty much ended there. It’s hard to remember our exact reactions in the face of the grand horror that is Gerudo ignorance to our winter holiday. I think I might have shouted something about Blasphemy. I suspect Hunter might have stopped breathing. I think Neesha might have seen reflected in our horrified expressions the magnitude of the mistake she’d just made and attempted to make a break for it. The rest is a jumble of chasing her down the stairs until we each had one, flailing arm and had pinned her in a seat.
“Merry Solstice!” said Dad.
“Merry Solstice!” chimed Hunter and I.
“What are you doing to her?” said Bruiser as Neesha tried to kick us both in the head simultaneously and came pretty damn close to doing it.
Now, the thing to understand here is, that for the young and the young at heart, Solstice is only the biggest, most important holiday of the year. It’s bigger than birthdays, and that’s saying something. And Hunter and I were both young and young at heart (eighteen going on eight, forever and ever amen). And we both go a little insane at the holidays. We get it from Bruiser I think. He’s a big tough guy for most of the year, but once we start getting close to the Solstice…
As a matter of fact, right at the moment when he was demanding to know what we were doing to Neesha (because somehow, it’s always our fault), Neesha was making a face at the armloads of glittery, sparkly, gloriously tacky stuff both he and Dad carried and evidently trying to figure out what the Hell it was. Bruiser’s always the first one in the Market to decorate. Claims it’s good for business. We all know what it’s actually for, but none of us says anything because, as with most softies, Bruiser never reacts well to someone pointing out just how soft he is.
At any rate, the whole point of this is just to say that for my family (and at the time, I was still pretty new to the concept of family) Solstice is the biggest holiday of the year, and the fact that Neesha, who even then was becoming more and more hopelessly embroiled in our little reassembled clan, didn’t know what it was simply couldn’t be allowed.
“She doesn’t know Solstice?!” gasped Bruiser.
“She doesn’t know Solstice,” Hunter confirmed gravely.
“You’re all insane!” said Neesha.
Thus began the introduction of the Gerudo to Solstice – or at least, this Gerudo in particular. The only Gerudo with the unfortunate luck to have accidentally endeared herself to a family of Solstice-crazy Sheikah. Unless you count me, but I’m really only half Gerudo.
Solstice Lesson Number One: what is Solstice? Obviously, Solstice is the one day out of the whole year when everyone is happy and pleasant and generally acting out of positive, community-oriented motives instead of selfish or negative ones. It’s the day when we all come together to welcome back the sun and say a fond farewell to the winter, in the company of our loved ones and liked ones and sometimes even deeply hated ones. Solstice is when you give everyone who matters presents, and even a few who don’t. Solstice is when no matter where you go people are singing songs, and throwing snow, and for a brief, shining, wonderful day everyone gets to be eighteen-going-on-eight-forever-and-ever-amen.
Neesha seemed to be under the mistaken assumption that Solstice is merely the shortest day of the year.
“Blasphemy!” said Dad with a wide grin, obviously not taking this seriously enough.
“Can’t…breathe!” gasped Bruiser.
“You are what is wrong with this Kingdom,” Neesha snapped.
We held a family meeting right there to discuss the situation. It was pointed out that we still had a month to go until the actual Solstice, and that was plenty of time to initiate Neesha into the tradition, Gerudo or no.
“Never happen,” said Dad with a wisdom that can only have come from having married a Gerudo.
“Never say never,” said Hunter and Bruiser.
“Can I go now?” Neesha demanded.
Solstice Lesson One had not gone so well. Neesha now knew what Solstice was, but somehow our vivid, detailed descriptions had not melted her Gerudo heart and she was torn between laughing in our faces and running very, very far away. She settled for laughing in our faces, then running to the Palace where the Elite that still insisted on following me everywhere at that time were staying, likely hoping to find some semblance of sanity in the form of ten desert hardened warriors huddled in a pile of thick blankets and clutching hot chocolate mugs like their lives depend on it (all the while cursing the name of the only King in their history to ever drag them into Hyrule in the dead of winter).
And so began Solstice Lesson Two: the decorations. Anything spangly and sparkly, we told her. Greens and reds and icy blues and white. Anything with a snow theme, or a light theme, or a sparkly theme. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s mostly tactless – things you’d never get away with displaying any other time of year are considered beautiful at Solstice, we told her. Cover the banisters and doorframes with them. String them from the roof and along the windows. Decorate the walls and the cupboards and the stove. Get out the Solstice placemats and cutlery, iron the Solstice curtains, dust off the Solstice ornaments. Cover every possible inch of space with symbols of merriment and cheer until you’re covered in glitter that won’t come off until spring.
“It’s beautiful,” said Hunter.
“Wonderful,” agreed Dad.
“Why this?” demanded Neesha sourly, staring with deep dismay at her stubbornly sparkling hands.
So Solstice Lesson Two had not had the desired effect. Apparently, the magic of Solstice, which turns a gaudy, horrible ornament into something beautiful and worthy of envy did not affect Neesha, who looked at our horrible, gaudy ornaments and saw horrible, gaudy ornaments and no amount of protest was going to convince her otherwise.
But there are two traits that run in my family, and the youngest generation (i.e. me and Hunter) have them in spades: stubbornness, and a refusal to accept the Gerudo’s continued insistence that they don’t want to be friends. And so, the Archery Shop having been glittered and sparkled up (triggering a sudden panic of decorating all over the market, since, after all, Bruiser is the official harbinger of the Solstice season), we moved on to Solstice Lesson Three: the good deeds.
If Solstice is a paragraph, we told Neesha, then the good deeds are the parentheses around it. Perhaps not the most grammatically astute of arguments, but it made sense to us at the time. There are a variety of reasons for doing good deeds. One of them is to make sure people think of you when they’re making up their presents list, of course, but if this is your only, or even your main reason then perhaps you need to sit back and revaluate your priorities as you’re missing the point of Solstice. The more important reasons include, because it’s nice and it makes you feel good, because it’s part of helping people through the longest night, and because it’s Solstice and that’s just what you do.
So we woke up bright and early (for once in our lives) and dragged Neesha out into the early morning cold. There are sidewalks that need to be shovelled, we told her. There are kittens in trees that need to be rescued! Groceries to be carried! Horses to be brushed! Roofs to be cleared! Wood to be cut! And little old ladies with an excess of hot chocolate to be shared!
“6 sidewalks, 2 kittens, 14 bags of groceries, 3 horses, 5 roofs, 8 piles of wood, and 15 cups of hot chocolate,” counted Hunter.
“Mmmm…hot chocolate,” I said.
“It seems to me that we are not, in fact, doing good deeds, but other people’s chores,” noted Neesha, hugging her mug instead of drinking it as all Gerudo do. “Also, I can’t feel my nose.”
And so, Solstice Lesson Number Three met with about as much success as Lessons One and Two, and a good deal more frostbite. What next, we asked each other? The answer was obvious. Solstice Lesson Four: the buying of gifts.
Step one, we told Neesha, you need a list. Write down everyone you like and everyone you think should receive a present from you. Then you have a friend proof-read it and make sure you haven’t missed anyone (deliberately or otherwise), or added someone you probably shouldn’t have, and also to make sure your list isn’t so long you will be bankrupt by the time all the presents are bought. So we sat down to write up our lists.
“Zelda, Malon, the Sages, the Generals, Dad, Uncle Bray, Bel, Mel, Thomas,” said Hunter, ticking them off on his fingers.
“Mido, the Know-it-all Brothers, the twins, the Deku Tree Sprout, the Elite, Talon, Ingo, Anju…” I added.
“Well I know who I’m not putting on the list,” said Neesha nastily, and proceeded to write down all those names but leave out mine and Hunter’s.
We exchanged our lists and started proofreading. We told Neesha that the great thing about Solstice is that you don’t have to get someone a present just because they got you a present. You only do it if you want to, so it was perfectly fine if she didn’t want to get Hunter and I a present, which took some of the wind out of her sails. Then Hunter and I argued about whether I was politically obligated to buy presents for the nobles I’d left off my list.
“But Eldrick’s a bastard,” I protested.
“Eldrick is a bastard,” Neesha agreed.
“Eldrick’s a bastard – but you still need to get him a present,” Hunter insisted.
Stage two of the buying of gifts, is, of course, the quest for the perfect gift for everyone on your list. Neesha seemed to brighten considerably at this part, which was cause for tentatively happy suspicion. Why, we wondered, after being so sullen and cranky about the whole thing up to this point, would Neesha spontaneously decide that perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all? And then it hit us.
“Did we say ‘acquire’?” Hunter asked dully.
“We meant ‘purchase or otherwise earn through completely legitimate, above board, will-not-get-you-thrown-in-jail means’,” I clarified.
“Well what the Hell’s the point then?!” Neesha cried, more frustrated than ever.
Undaunted, we dragged her out into the cold once more and we spent the next three days crawling all over the markets and shops of Hyrule, taking the Ocarina if required. We managed to find the perfect gift for everyone, excluding ourselves of course, that would have to be done in private. We even found the perfect gift for Eldrick: an authentic, gourmet Gerudo snack: dried leevers.
“You think he’ll like ‘em?” I asked with a wicked grin.
“I think if he doesn’t, we can accuse him of being unappreciative of a gift from a foreign dignitary and of offending the Gerudo race on the whole. Zelda might even have to issue a reprimand and demand a public apology,” Hunter answered, flashing his teeth.
“I thought you wanted to get him something bad,” Neesha pointed out, chewing on one of the leevers and missing the point entirely, which is a thing she does from time to time.
Lessons Number Five through Eight, covering everything from traditional (and less traditional) foods, to traditional (and less traditional) games, to traditional (and less traditional) songs, which turned into an argument that would have turned into a fist fight if it hadn’t been Solstice, over what turned out to be a rather crucial difference in the lyrics of the third verse of a particular song between the Sheikah and the Hylian versions, went roughly as well as you’d expect, based on the success rates of the previous lessons.
I have to admit, that even we, in our indefatigable determination were beginning to think maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. Maybe the Gerudo were immune to Solstice. Maybe it was the fact that they didn’t have snow, or their nights tended to be much kinder to them than their days, or they had their own entire culture that had nothing to do with our own and to expect them to place the same value on cultural touchstones from nations they had long been actively excluded from and opposed to and ostracized by was actually rather insensitive of us all around and not entirely within the Solstice spirit.
I mean, if even Hunter and I, the second- and third-most dedicated Solstice adherents (after Bruiser) couldn’t agree on the lyrics to the third verse of an ancient Solstice hymn, what were we doing, really, thinking we had any business pushing it as some kind of universal truth to be inherently understood, even by people who had never once in their lives been part of it?
I’m not gonna lie, this was a depressing line of thought.
“Is it possible we have been engaging in un-Solstice-like behaviour?” wondered Hunter, mournfully.
“To see the end of the longest night one must first survive its darkness,” mourned I, wonderingly.
“Can I go now?” said Neesha, without adverb.
We let her go, because what else could we do at that point. Then we took ourselves to the pub, because that seemed an appropriate place to attempt to drown our shame, and we did our best, I want that on the record, to stay morose and defeated. That felt like it would be appropriate. It’s just between the Solstice food, and the Solstice singing, and the traditional dances, and managing to con one table of rowdies to buy us a drink before the innkeeper caught on and cut us off for being too young for that nonsense (“They’d let us in Kakariko!” Hunter protested.
“They’d let you keep a cow in your house in Kakariko, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” came the response, and neither of us had an answer to that) it was a little difficult to remain sombre.
Still, we thought, as we eventually sang our way back out of the inn and into the snow of the Marketplace, we had done our friend wrong, at Solstice of all times, and that was unacceptable. We had not approached this the right way at all. The goal, we agreed, should have been inclusion, not conversion, with the consent of the included. We just loved her so much, you see, and this celebration is all about loving people enough to share a candle with them through a very long night, and Neesha, more than anybody else in the world, deserved that light from us. We just focused on the wrong part of it.
And so, contrite, and righted in spirit, and perhaps just a little tipsy, as the shortest day ended and the longest night began, we headed back toward the Archery Shop and its precious, precious candles. And as we rounded the corner onto our street, we came upon a sight that made us stop and gasp.
The snow-coated street was lit as fiercely as an aurora, and at its epicentre, blazing with all the sparkling, glittering, gaudy beauty of a tacky, tasteless thing that is loved so fiercely it can’t help but shine, was the Archery Shop. There were people everywhere, candles in their hands, or lanterns, or small, magical flames, that danced and leapt and were passed from hand to hand, wick to wick, like something precious. Because of course, it was. The whole town must have been there. Everyone we had done chores for, a few who had done chores for us. People I recognized from the palace and the tavern and even the Ranch – I could see Malon and Talon and Ingo, who had made the trip all the way in from Lon Lon.
And more, there were the Sages. All of them. None of their usual retinue, this was not an official trip, then. Just a quick visit. And scattered among the crowd were the Elite. Amplissa and Aliza, making out in a way that caused me deep concern one of them was about to light the other’s scarf end on fire with her distracted handling of her candle. Indiga chatting with somebody I didn’t recognize like they were old friends, holding out her own candle to him when a stray snowball caught him in the shoulder and the wet shrapnel put his out. Bruiser and dad, moving through the crowd with trays full of hot chocolate and cookies and burn salve, Bruiser with a grin as wide as his shoulders, stopping often, chatting and laughing with a voice that filled whatever empty space the noisy crowd had left, knitting it all together tighter. Dad, shyer, still not used to crowds, still thinking of himself as a stranger here, but smiling kindly at folk and offering them a light from his lantern where one was needed.
And this was supposed to have been a relatively quiet Solstice for us, everyone had been busy with their own celebrations or a general sensible thought that maybe our little reassembled family needed quiet time to just exist for a while on its own, even I had maybe thought that and quiet was not my default mode, but somehow this was better, or not better, really, this was the same thing, just an extension of it, because they were here, these people I loved so much, and these people I liked so much, and these people I didn’t know that well but was already planning to be half in love with before the night was over. They were all here, and we were all together, and the longest night of the year had nothing at all on that.
“What--?!” managed Hunter.
“I don’t--!” gasped I.
“You guys look so ridiculous right now,” said Neesha, with deep self-satisfaction.
She had done this. After we let her go. She had gone to the palace and talked to the Gerudo and explained that the holiday was very strange, and had a lot of useless bits around it that she didn’t see the point of, but it mattered a lot to us, and so she thought maybe it would be good for them to come to the Shop and be part of it, because the candle part didn’t sound so bad, and Bruiser had promised food and he was a good cook. And then Indiga had suggested that maybe they should invite Zelda, since I was determined to be attached to her despite their misgivings. And Zelda had thought it was a grand idea, even though she still won’t tell me how it was presented to her, and Nayru, Farore and Din would I like to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation, and suggested that she might do some jumping around and collect the Sages if they were free, even just to pop in for a little bit before returning to their own celebrations at home. And at some point someone must have filled Dad and Bruiser in, because then they figured, well, if we’re having all those folk over, might as well go get the rest and make it A Proper Thing.
A Proper Solstice.
“You said Solstice is about family, so I went and got the rest of the family,” said Neesha.
“Guh,” said I, because I don’t really know how to spell the sound of me bursting into tears.
“Neesha of the Gerudo, you are hereby relieved of any duties relating to anyone’s emotions for the next three weeks for this incredible, amazing, perfect thing that you have done,” said Hunter, patting me gently on the back.
Pleased with this, and herself, Neesha turned to vanish into the crowd. But then she paused and hesitated, turning back to us briefly: “You’re still gonna give me real presents, though, right?” she asked. “Like material objects? Because I wasn’t opposed to that part. And I don’t even like most of these people, I just made them come for you.”
“Yes. We do presents at sunrise,” said Hunter gravely.
“Guuuuuuuh,” said I.
“Then Merry Solstice!” said Neesha.
And so, her light, metaphorical and all the more real for that, shared with those she loved best, Neesha’s first Solstice turned out to be my favourite of them all.