#those fckers are in my blood and yet my nation STILL suffers hundreds of years later via whitewashed propaganda

[nehswritesstuffs]

Selkie AU question: Is Ian into celebrating Christmas or does it perplex him with him being a selkie?

New to the blog and don’t know what I’m talking about? The go ahead and check out my Doctor Who Whouffaldi selkie!AU: The Seal Man of North Ronaldsay! It’s on tumblr, FFN, and AO3.

If Ian's allowed to know what IRC and Skype are, then I think he’s allowed to know what Christmas is, lol, and besides, if the canon version of the Doctor loves [secular] Christmas, then his AU version’s allowed too

Long version, though, is that the thing about Human religions and supernatural/fantasy folk creatures is that a lot of people like to imagine that they are very separate, and that the dividing line is a hard, clear one. If that’s how someone wants to approach their writings of such beings, that’s fine and I have no problem with it. I do it myself. An alternative that I like to indulge every so often, however, in is having these fae and fantasy beings just sort of latching onto Human culture, with sometimes religion being included. If you think about Christmas, there’s plenty of the Northern Hemisphere/European-based traditions that can be traced to folk belief and pre-Christian indigenous religions. While I’m not going to get into the logistics and morality of absorbing other traditions like this (bc trust me when I say that people have canceled Christmas due to numerous perceived moral complications and I’m not here to poke that beast (other than to say fuck the Puritans)), I also am sort of obliged to point out that for the most part, the United Kingdom--and Scotland by extension--is a culturally Christian nation. What does that mean? Well, that even people who don’t consider themselves religious or Christian still do things like exchange gifts on Christmas and get the day off work and enjoy the traditional seasonal foods and all that. There’s too much long-term, latent Christianity in Scottish culture* for one to really think that it never got to the fae, especially one of their numbers who has walked amongst mortals before. The same can be said for other religion-influenced cultures as well! If the setting was strongly Jewish, then he’d likely casually observe holidays like Rosh Hashanah, or if it was a very Islamic area then it’d be about the varying Eids and customs around them, or something with a Buddhist flair for appropriate areas, so on and so forth. Fae are waayy too curious about mortals and their customs to not learn a thing or two about our religions and cultures. They might not always understand in the way that we do, but they’re not your grauntie who literally needs to wear a LifeAlert button just to go from her people-watching chair to get a glass of water in the middle of watching Judge Judy and still only has a touch-dial landline phone. I think the Fair Folk care capable of being more with-it than we all think.

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*as well as Nordic culture, which had a heavy influence on the Orkneys, being that Norway owned them for a time and all, though that’s an interesting case considering how/when the Christianization of the Nordics compared to the Isles was just different enough to matter in how it permeated and presented itself within society but hey I’m no scholar just a weirdo with a lot of access to heavily-sourced wiki articles, loved reading history textbooks cover-to-cover as a kid, and a curiosity for learning about things I would never need knowledge of in my normal life if not for a single detail in a fic or answering an anon ask