Troll the ancient Yuletide carol

[primeideal]

Around this time of year people sometimes make posts revealing the Yuletide fics they wrote and discussing the writing process. This is not that post. (That one's coming.) This is the post about "a bunch of stuff that happened over winter vacation visiting my family, much of which is sort of Yuletide-adjacent so I didn't want to spoil it." Under a cut not because it's particularly awful, just rambling.

• • My brother is trying to hype my mom up on the new chatbot AIs by getting them to write her sermons for her. "Please write a 1300 word sermon on Matthew 4:12-22, with a self-deprecating anecdote and a joke." "Why did the Lutheran cross the road? To get to the other side! ...and to remind everyone that Jesus' love comes first and doesn't take any action on our part." "Okay, now have them cite feminist theologians like Nadia Bolz Weber and Richard Rohr." And the bot does a good job at reading Bolz Weber's quotes and finding stuff that is relevant, so this may or may not be coming soon to a pulpit near you.
  • My dad is into the Polar Explorers "fandom," which was a breakout Yuletide hit this year. "Did you read Alfred Lansing's 'Endurance,' about the Shackleton expedition, back in the day??" "Yeah, great book." "This one is also great." It's called "Empire of Ice and Snow" and despite the name is actually not that much about why imperialism is bad mkay. The protagonist is a captain named Bob Bartlett, and the antagonist is a somewhat cravenly expedition leader named Vilhjalmur Stefansson. There are also such heroes as a small Scottish mathematician known as "Wee Mac," and a Norwegian ski expert who Bartlett tells "listen, we're going to have a track and field event for Christmas, but you're only allowed to enter two events, I don't want you to sweep all the prizes and make everyone jealous." So yes, hopefully this becomes the next breakout ensemble.
  • My sister's boyfriend visited, and signed up for the extended-family gift exchange, which is a big deal in terms of being an "official" part of the family ;) but I don't know him super well so I was like "what should I get him for immediate family stuff..." We'd had a fun conversation about aliens when he visited last Christmas, and he'd requested "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang for the extended family list, so I got him "Project Hail Mary" which I'd really enjoyed. He got me "Foundryside" by Robert Jackson Bennett...which I'd already read but at least he has great taste!
  • I got the first volume of Takahiro Arai's "Les Miserables" in English from the extended family! My cousin-once-removed who drew my name last year but confused me with my sister (we have similar-sounding names) also got me a gift card so I can get more colorful jeans.
  • My oldest cousin invited my siblings and I to spend the night at his family's cabin in central Minnesota. Age-wise, we're about halfway between the cousin/his wife and their kids, so it's kind of a cool intergenerational relationship. He showed us how to use a rifle and shotgun, and we behaved like responsible adults targeting pop cans and clay pigeons. (I was having double vision trying to get the beads on the shotgun to line up so I decided not to attempt it, but my brother was still very impressed that I studiously attempted to load the bullets.)
  • I had/at least started a difficult conversation with my almost-oldest cousin and the world did not end.
  • Immediate family watched "Glass Onion," which was fun because I'd just seen "Knives Out." I am not really predisposed to be a fan of watching Rian Johnson be like "hey see these obviously bad guys? they're obviously bad" for two hours, but we enjoyed the puzzle boxes. (I was surprised that the "COVID spray" never came up again beyond being a plot device to get us out of the Zoom-call intro. Missed Chekhov's gunning.)
  • The week after Christmas my mom and her church colleagues often do a Christmas hymn singalong--it's nice to have a big church of people who know how to sing. They also have a lot of banter/commentary about "ah yes, this is one of the traditionally Swedish hymns as opposed to the Norwegian and the German..." and like, I know organists can be full of themselves but nobody is there to hear the same anecdotes about your childhood in North Dakota, we are here to sing.
  • Edit to add: puzzles! seekingferret pointed me towards a series of Chanukah mini-cryptics, of which I have solved 5/7, still working on 2/7, and have not yet attempted the eighth/meta. (I may wind up attempting it even if I don't complete the two holdouts.) My dad often sends me WSJ puzzles of which only 1/4 are cryptics, but since I had a hard copy I figured I should try one of the non-cryptics. And I filled in enough to guess that one row ended LES_ _ _ (three blanks). There was a clue for "Parks and Rec heroine Knope." And I knew enough to osmose "Leslie? Is it Leslie Knope?" It was. And that wasn't even where that answer went! Sneaky deke from the puzzlers. There was also a clue about "island that was the site of Survivor season 10." I have only seen two seasons of Survivor. 10 was one of them. (Thanks to a certain friend for introducing me to over-the-top melodrama, you know who you are.)
  • My siblings and I went to do pub trivia with a friend of my brother's. I had somehow osmosed enough about "How I Met Your Mother" (again, canon-blind) to guess that for a question about "petty larceny." Thanks fandom. And I actually made a more educated guess about "song that played a role in an iconic series finale" to get that right. Unfortunately we are all bad at recognizing pop songs so we did not place too well.

Anyway, a fun break overall, and hopefully I won't be too listless/frustrated trying to get back to work. (But it's me, so no promises.)