Jehanette

So, I have mixed feelings about Christmas. On the one hand, I grew up Catholic, and celebrating Christmas was a pretty big thing in our house. We weren't super Catholic, mind, but we did still abstain from meat during Lent and go to church every Sunday (unless someone was sick), and Christmas was as much about the birth of Christ as it was about Santa coming during the night. I mean, my favorite Christmas special was The Little Drummer Boy.

But the thing is, I'm now agnostic. I still occasionally pray to saints, and I'm thinking of exploring paganism at some point, but I'm not Christian, and I'm definitely not Catholic. Even my family's kind of sliding into agnosticism. The last holdout was Dad, and he doesn't go to church on Sundays anymore. Christmas is much more a reason to gather with family (or at least my mom's side, since they're the ones in Colorado). And that's great! There's a lot of food, everyone winds up hanging out at some aunt or uncle's house for half the day, and we play board games and chat. It's still a meaningful holiday for me.

Outside of those family gatherings, though, it just doesn't feel as meaningful. Hearing fluffy Christmas songs with no meaning behind them beyond "yay I guess it's Christmas now let's buy shit" doesn't exactly fill my heart with joy, and it feels weird to give such weight to a holiday that's no longer properly religious. Insisting people say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" and trying to "keep the Christ in Christmas" doesn't make much sense to me when my main experience of it is no longer lighting the last Advent candle and singing "Joy to the World" with at Mass.

There's no real point to this post. It's just a collection of thoughts that have been building up inside me, and I figured Christmas morning was the right time to unleash them. Whatever and however you celebrate, I hope it's joyous.

I've currently got two novella projects going on (admittedly, one on hiatus until I get some solid library time and another in the first draft stages), but I've already noticed one major difference between the two: how easy the research will be.

Novella One is about a Japanese-American lesbian in the early 1900s. Novella Two is about a married World War II war correspondent sometime in the 1950s. There is much more material available about one of these subjects than the other.

Luckily, I have access to the internet and have started a list of books to look into. Doubly luckily, my sibling knows a librarian on Twitter who I can turn to. Triply luckily, one of my friends is Japanese-American and might be willing to read a polished draft. (I haven't asked yet. I will once I know what the fuck I'm even doing with the novella.) However, that does not make it any less irritating to start doing my research and find that a seemingly promising book is actually mostly about internment camps.

And yes, that was a huge part of Japanese-American history. It just at times feels like the only part, which I'm sure is not only difficult for historical fiction writers trying to do justice to a group they are not a part of. It's one part of a larger narrative, and I worry that a few hours between work and rehearsal may not be quite enough time to understand that narrative.