Happy holidays, everyone! There are quite a few of them this time of year regardless of where you live and what traditions you follow. They play such a major role in our lives, so it is natural that they make some impact on our games as well. Holidays are, after all, gathering points. They are times of heightened emotion and increased social interaction. For many people, the best and - regrettably - worst memories often revolve around these specific points of the year. It stands to reason, therefore, that our characters should have similar experiences. So, just in time for the holidays, we're going to talk about the how and why of adapting or designing holidays for your roleplaying games.

If your game is set in the real world or an approximation of it, then the answer is pretty simple. There are so many meaningful and exciting holidays, from Diwali to Halloween to Martin Luther King Day. These holidays can simply be celebrated as they currently are or can be altered in accordance with the themes and plot of your game. Nothing makes players sit up and pay attention like being presented with something that should be very familiar but is suddenly just a little bit off.

Outside of the real world, things become a lot more fluid. One option is to make world-appropriate versions of actual holidays. This can be used as a quick-and-dirty shorthand or as a statement about your world or ours. As modern social commentary isn't really the purview of this column however, I'll direct you to Terry Pratchett's Hogfather for examples of how to do that well. What I will focus on is designing holidays from the ground up.

Holidays that are unique to your world can serve many purposes in a game. They can provide the players with background information about the setting and plot as well as making the world seem more alive and natural. Furthermore, they can create a feeling of wonder or of being an outsider in a strange new place. They can even serve as a tutorial or an integral part of the plot, depending on how they are designed and presented.

Holidays traditionally originate from one of three different sources. The first, and likely oldest, are cycles of life. These can be social cycles like harvest festivals or personal cycles like marriages or funerals. Secondly, there are commemorative holidays. These tend to focus on things that shaped the history of the town, kingdom, or world. They could focus on events, like Thanksgiving, or on specific individuals, like MLK Day. Finally, there are religious holidays. Often steeped in mythic and extraordinary stories and combined with specific holy rites, these are often the largest and also the most impenetrable to newcomers. Ramadan, Hanukkah, and Easter are some of the most recognizable today.

At this point it should be obvious that these three categories are not mutually exclusive. Hanukkah commemorates the historical recapture and rededication of the temple in Jerusalem. Funerals and marriages both tend to have heavy religious influence. Thanksgiving is essentially just a harvest festival with an emphasis on turkey-centric imagery. The older a holiday is, the more layers will be added to it as societies modify it to suit different needs. The most obvious example of this is Christmas.

The earliest late-december holidays were solar cycle holidays. Festivals to celebrate the rebirth of Mithras and germanic Yule celebrations were large feasts where the community gathered to celebrate the coming of warmer times. When proselytizing christians came into contact with these hugely popular holidays they chose to co-opt rather than compete with them. Christmas became a religious holiday, swapping animal sacrifice for high mass and the birth of Jesus for the birth of Mithras. The local festivities were left largely unchanged, which led to vastly different images of Christmas in different parts of the world. Finally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Christmas became a commercial holiday, crystallizing much of the imagery we know today.

Thus we arrive at Santa Claus, who began life as a nordic god, became combined with a Turkish saint, and currently endorses Coca-Cola. Layering holidays in this manner adds color to them and allows them to take on bizarre characteristics in order to suit the needs of a game.

Often this layering manifests itself in the many different levels at which holidays are celebrated. As the biggest holidays are observed at every level of society, their celebrations tend to bleed into every facet of life. Most established holidays are celebrated in each of the following ways in some form or another. First is symbolism, which usually comes out in decoration. These are essential for getting "in the spirit" of modern holidays and will go a long way toward setting the tone and atmosphere in game so your players know what to expect. Second are the old traditions. Everyone knows that you sing Auld Lang Syne on New Years and throw a bouquet at weddings. The original reasons why are often lost to time, replaced by the fact that they have simply become tradition. While in the real world this simply adds a bit of amusing color to the occasion, in games there can be much more to traditions. They can create subtle mysteries or clues that harken back to much more significant or sinister origins. A third element is re-enactment. This could come in the form of actual re-enactments, like annual commemorations of the Battle of Gettysburg, or symbolic re-enactments like the seder meal during Passover. These tend to be highly ritualized and can create stunning or terrifying scenes for your players, especially if they do not understand what is actually going on. It is also important here that not all holidays are happy and cheerful, and the same goes for the re-enactments. The Shi'ite festival of Yom Ashura could have been a terrifying spectacle for anyone unfamiliar with it because the associated mourning rituals often included self-mutilation with knives or chains. The fourth, and often most overlooked when designing a holiday, is "something for the kids". Children take up a surprising amount of social space and they and their parents must be accommodated in every social gathering. In some cases this means getting them out of the way with some side activity to occupy them, like the classic dreidel during Hanukkah. Other holidays come to revolve almost entirely around children and their activities, such as Halloween. Regardless of how you do it, remember to address children when designing a holiday. It is a social gathering, so they have to be in some way accommodated, and their presence and actions will likely have an impact on what actions your characters deem acceptable. Finally, there is mythology. Every holiday has larger-than-life figures or traditions with supernatural origins as integral parts of their celebration. This is another element that simply adds color to events in the real world but could be game-defining in a setting where the supernatural actually exists. What if Halloween costumes were worn to confuse actual monsters and keep them from killing indiscriminately on the scariest night of the year? What if a bride had to be carried over the threshhold of a new home because demons could actually be waiting inside? These questions the biggest reason why you should use holidays in your game: They add fantastic elements to both natural and supernatural worlds while creating very particular atmospheres and settings for your players to explore.

So, whether for exploring the implications of real world traditions or setting up scenarios that are believable, bizarre, and engaging all at once, holidays are an excellent addition to a game in almost any setting. They can add flavor or a change of pace to a long campaign, and work wonders as a one-shot. Given that it's the holiday season, there is no better way to get your gaming friends together and in the spirit of your celebration of choice.

Have you ever designed or played through a fictional holiday? If so, do you have any further advice or other perspectives I may have missed? Let me know on the forums and in the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season and keep gaming on!

Our Story is a column about using history in your roleplaying. Whether you need ideas for a character, an adventure, a campaign, or a world, history is rife with examples and inspiration, and I will be digging them up every month. Feel free to ask any questions in the forums, or send me an email at ourstorycolumn@yahoo.com.