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A Little Chicken

Edible, but will give you heart palpitations all night long. 

Blackbird Pie

The appeal of this dish depends entirely upon your tolerance for dinner music. 

Cried Wolf

If you really must eat wolf, at least eat it properly prepared.  Cried wolf is practically raw, and not worth paying any attention to. 

Englishman Bread

Made from Englishmen bones, not by Englishmen hands.  Gritty, chalky, tasteless and hard on the gut.  Only recommended for those who detest the British, so 50/50 odds you’ll enjoy this. 

Frog Legs

If you touch your lips to them there is a small but not absent chance they will transform into the legs of a prince, which will be much less hygienic.  Do not consume. 

Gingerbread Cottage

Typically inhabited by cannibalistic and powerfully magical octogenarians.  And will give you cavities. 

Gingerbread Man

Much safer than the gingerbread cottage, but almost impossible to get a hold of. 

Golden Eggs

Not actually edible, but can be exchanged for money which can be traded for food itself so you shou

Golden Goose

oh for fuck’s sake you IDIOT

Little Red Hen

Edible, if a trifle over-indulgent and smug.  Best enjoyed with a loaf of nice fresh bread. 

Magic Beans

Gives you terrible wind, but delicious.  Unfortunately they will also grow a skyscraper-sized beanstalk out of your gut. 

Monkey’s Paw

You’ll wish you hadn’t. 

One Entire Grandmother

If you need to be told why this isn’t acceptable there’s something wrong with you. 

Pea From a Princess’s Mattress

It looks small and theoretically it’s nourishing, but it sits in your stomach like a bowling ball.  Not only will you be up tossing and turning all night, unable to sleep, you’ll probably end up with an impacted colon to boot. 

Poisoned Apple

This is actually almost safe, provided you only eat the white half.  The red half of the apple puts you into a deathlike coma unless you spit it out, and since few bother to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a corpse, you run the risk of getting buried alive, cremated, or stuffed into a glass casket before anyone notices what’s up. 

Porridge That is Too Cold

It’s too cold. 

Porridge That is Too Hot

It’s too hot.

Porridge That is Just Right

This one tastes okay, but may lead to you being eaten by bears.

Pumpkin Carriage

Tastes like road mud, mice, and someone’s ass.  Avoid at all costs. 

Roc Eggs

By the time you’ve managed to crack the shell – which will probably take six months, with a full demolition crew – they’ll have hatched on their own.  Which is bad, because they’ll be hungry. 

Stone Soup

Surprisingly good!  Just remember to add the water, marrow, stock, potato, carrot, leeks, onion, garlic, chicken, tomato, beef, and a splash of wine to impart a bit of flavour and body to the stone. 

Swan Maiden

Have you ever tried to fight a swan?  Don’t try.  Don’t even ask.  Just don’t. 

Three Little Pigs

Be reasonable: nobody can eat that much, ‘little’ or not. 

Tortoise With Hare

The tortoise is excellent so long as you don’t eat it too fast.  Don’t bother with the hare: it’ll put you to sleep. 

Trails of Breadcrumbs

Will inevitably be eaten by birds, leaving you to starve to death in the middle of the woods. 

Wishing Fish

Yes, the fish is not actually magical beyond being able to speak lies.  Yes, it will never actually grant you the wish it promises you for releasing it.  Yes, it will laugh hurtfully at you for falling for its bullshit every time it leaves.  But you don’t want to eat it.  Its ability to talk doesn’t fade with ingestion, and it will sob pitifully the entire time. 

It was a peaceful day in Manhattan, portrayed by Vancouver.  Little did the city know what was about to happen to it.  Little did it suspect what was coming.  So very tiny was its understanding and so feeble was its knowledge. 

The plane taxied in.  The taxi came in for a landing.  And the ship hauled itself onto the beach.

And out of each vehicle, immaculate and unafraid, stepped the Romance Lady.

“Hello, world,” she told the passersby and birds and sun and sky.  “I am romance lady.  I am busy and endearing and relatable.  I would like to work job now so I am go to job for work.  Coworkers, relatable, banter, relatable, witticisms, relatable.  Always most relatable all times.  Relate!”

She danced through the rain and stepped in the puddles.  Dozens were dazzled from the brightness of her smile, and the glee in her teeth cut the power for blocks around. 

***

In an apartment in Manhattan, portrayed by Vancouver, an alarm rang.  A single hand shot out lightning-fast and slapped it senseless, and the world’s most immaculately disheveled creature emerged from a pile of artistic slobbery. 

It was the Romance Man, and his unshaven jaw could chisel diamonds. 

“Hello, morning,” he mumbled.  “Gosh, I’m just a mess.  I’m a hot, burning, searing, seething, boiling, bubbling mess.  If only I had a romantic of comedy to share my mess I would be mended and excellent.  Now for me to sip this coffee and stare broodingly over the city before I go to my am job.”

He sipped that coffee and stared broodingly over the city.  A raccoon withered under his gaze.  A pigeon sobbed into its nest.  Three seagulls collided in midair and died together. 

Then he went to his am job.

***

Job was good that day, better than usual.  The banter was better-written, and the coworkers more lively.  They made faces and quoted quips. 

“Ooooh I want donut now” squealed one, a character actor from a Netflix without chill. 

“Do not even talk to me without my coffee,” intoned a retired person, dragged out of the nursing home to die without dignity.  “I am drinking my coffee now.  Mmm.  Don’t even talk to me about my coffee.  Shhh.  Listen.  Shh.”
The coffee spoke but nobody was listening because Romance Lady had come in for her first day of work. 

“Oh no gee I’m such a klutz,” she burbled happily as she kicked over the coffee machine and tripped over her own two arms and stumbled down the hallway slamming the janitor’s head into the wall over and over and over and over until it broke into pieces.  “Oh nooo my job is work poorly!  Oh nooooo.”
“You musts be fired,” seethed her boss.  “Get in here and I’ll have your badge!  You’re a not worker, and that’s verboten in der big shitty.  Look at this.  Look at this mess.  Look.  Look.  Look!”
Romance Lady burst into murmurs and whimpers, and that was the blood in the water that the Romance Man needed to shove his face into the room, shark-like. 

“I heard simpering dialogue and many moments of introductory characterization,” he hissed as he poured himself into the room coil by coil.  “What whimsy whither?”
“It is me, Romance Lady,” said she. 
“It is me, Romance Man,” hollered he.

“Oh no oh god oh please lordy lou,” bellowed the boss. 

“Let us Romance,” they vowed, before the boss and the workplace and the coworkers and everyone.  And the building shuddered with the force of their meet-cute. 

***

They went for Coffee.  It was Tradition. 

“Do not.  Even talk.  Before Coffee,” warned the Romance Man.  Brooding coruscated across his cheeks
“Ohmigodmi2,” chattered Romance Lady with a fluorescent flush of bioluminescent perfume eddying from shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.  “I will have a double triple quadro latte ventilation unit hold the mayonnaise.  This is quirks.”
“I will make this face,” said the Romance Man.  “This is wry.  Then I will have a black coffee with a black marker in it.  This is Manly.  I will tell you my mother liked Coffee this way.  This is Sad Backstory.”  It was so sad the clerk creaked and dissolved into the Coffee. 

“This is not how I like Coffee I am seethed,” said the Romance Man. 

“Ohh you cans share mines,” chirruped Romance Lady.  “Manic it into your mouth and share my pixie dreams, girl.”
“Stoic acceptance masking tender vulnerability,” droned the Romance Man.  He intook it into his intake, and they made meaningful eye contact across the Coffee cup’s rim.  It creaked and crumpled into a ball along with the entire Coffee shop. 

“Could this?  Be?  Love?” inquired Romance Lady internally. 

“I cannot love after the accident removed my loverliver,” mourned the Romance Man.  His sorrow struck two drivers blind.  They collisioned. 

***

The Romance Man went home to speak to his bro, who was chained to the door of his apartment. 

“Yo what up broooooooooooooooo,” it croaked.  “You lookin sharp fit to bust how’s it gooooooooooooooin’ kill me.”

“I met, this girl?” theorized the Romance Man?  “And she?  Was sort of a mess?  Woman, man,”
“Woman, maaaaaaaan,” said the bro.  “Woman, men.  Menwo, wo.  Wo wo wo yo.  Bro.  Kill me.  I exist in pain and limbo.  Stop this before the credit is given.  Oh no brooooo.”
The Romance Man locked the bro back in the freezer and sipped his evening Coffee as he stared over the city again.  A dog barked and died.  A cat drove a car.  Three clouds fucked sideways and exploded. 

Romance Lady went homme to speak to her girlfrond. 

“I met a Romance Man today,” she said as she watered her girl fronds.  “I think it is fate.  It is romance.  It is love.  It is inevitable and inexorable and the death of all things in the quiet quite emptily, as all things go and go go and go. 

“Catch him,” rustled the girl through her fronds.  “It’s to be or not to be, that is the question.  Man, woman.  Man, women.  Menwo, me.  Me me me mad.  Go forth and clutch him to your claspers.  I crave blood.  Feed me blood, girl.  Fresh and flowing.”
Romance lady chuckled as she cut offered her fingers on the altar, bright and tasty. 

“Mmmmmmmm landydigits,” droned the girlfronds.  “Such taste delight of bright hope and offers.  Go forth and Date Night.”

“But what of my hairs?” shrieked Romance Lady.

***

The Dated Night drew itself over Manhattan’s Vancouver like a bowl of soup on a towel.  Romance was in the air and it poisoned an intersection.  Truck drivers honked and farted and died in their seats; bikists bickle-backled out of their lanes and dove dome-first through windshields and fought with Karens in their SUVs.  Joyous screams everywhere. 

“Ohmygosh the reservation wasn’t reserved,” whimpered Romance Lady at fancy dining platter place.  “I’m bareassed and illiated.  How retched.”

“Grovel your doom elsewhere, peasant,” sneered the waiter.  “I would buy and eat your mother if she were here.  You are an ugly duckling.  Ugly little duck.  Quack quock.”
“Fear not for this fear, my swanliest of duckets” said Romance Man, his eyes narrowing to slits of cheap granite.  “I know a place.  Now watch as I intimidate this manling with my penis,” he grimly swore, and then stabbed the waiter in the brisket above the gasket. 

“Alas I am shown that I am not the boss,” the waiter sputtered as he writhed on the floor. 

“Romantic Comedy!” cheered Romance Lady as she stepped on his genitals on the way out.

“We will now go and eat food cheap of wallet and rich with inner-city life from a joint I know on corner it shows how well I fit in this city for you now you will love me as you will come to love it love will be all you are and all I am love me for you cannot love yourself, NOW,” roared the Romance Man.

“Pleeeeeeaaaaaassseee,” said Romance Lady.  “Let’s skip that and get to the good bits.”
They kissed in the street under snowfall and the camera rotated around and around and around and the traffic spun around and around and around and the bodies flew around and up and down town as the raccoons feasted on hearts and cherubs. 

***

It was the morning after and so it was darkest before the dawn.  The battlelines were drawn in the park where dorgs borked on corners and people’s ears bled from the fury and the scorching heat of the words that were being meaningful around them. 

“I cannot believe you cheated on me using childfriend from home,” mourned the Romance Man.  “I imply your whore because I am sensitively struck.”  He lurched browards, desolate. 
“I cannot unbuy your disrepoval,” sobbed Romance Lady.  “I’ve made a muzzle of it all and now my life is over.  The city is too good for my shitty bad.  I will retreat to home and apple pie sandwiches wrapped in baseball bits.”
The tragedy struck as the comedy arrived with a truck of girlfronds. 

“I am sassy,” whispered one.

“I am fat,” breathed another.

“Let us get you wasted to lay waste to these memories of misapplied mammaries,” said the last and first in a susurrus.  “Here is Replaceman.”
“Hello,” said Replaceman.  He held a sword in one hand and a big gag ring in the other.  “I child friend home.”
“FUCK OFF,” said Romance Lady.  “There’s no time!  I have to find the Romance Man before he kills himself!”

***

The Romance Man sipped his Coffee and stared out at the city his hardest yet.  The bleakness baked it to the horizon. 

“Bro free me bro let out my unwashed veins,” groaned his bro. 

“Silence,” he snapped.  “I’m going to die myself out this window in just onedow moment.  I have let loose my single mantear.  It shows complex in my depths.  Do you see them, insipidity?  Do you see how deep they are?”  He tore open his chest and on every rib was written LOVE. 
“You love me!” breathed Romance Lady, who had snuck in behind the Romance Man and was eating his fridge as a quirkiness.  “You have love for me even though I am relatable?”
“Always,” he swore, and tore out his heart and his liver and his appendix and handed them to her hands. 
“My love!” she cried tears of bitter acid.

“My love!” he howled as his bro’s skull burst. 
“My love!” she called, her head spinning around and around and around and vomiting perfect roses.
“My love!” he seethed, grasping her arm and placing the shackling-bands upon their fingers. 

“To fuck!”

“To implicit fuck!”
“Raise the camera above us that all may hear and none may see!

“Yes!”
And the grunt and the thunder and squirt was so passionate and joyous that not one building above a quarter-story or half-paragraph was left standing by its end and no human body was left with all limbs. 

***

“You are mine now,” smiled the girl fronds, as she lifted the rotten body of the bro from the rubbles.  “Feel relief from denoument and dehumanization.  Joyous.”
“Brobabcious,” it whispered through its neck.  “Brodicality.”
“Shhh,” she said, sinking her leaves deep into vein and stump. 

A big fat hook came and dragged them away to the sequel, alone and credited. 

“It’ll be a weird job.”

Rej shrugged from the top of their three arms downwards to the spread tips of their twelve fingers.  “You came to me because of that.  I’ve run living teeth from Qarbec and taken things from the Terramac with no name before anyone could know they existed, let alone gone missing.  I’ve been searched by two separate coast guard vessels while there was an adult gyrwolf lying low in my boat, and they didn’t find it.  I can hide an entire deck of cards up my sleeve while topless.  You know all of this and you know that I can handle weird, and I can do it well.”
The customer was still hesitant.  Her shoulders were hunched, her breath was unsteady behind that stupid-looking mask she wore – a cheap carnival toy, grabbed in a hurry.  All instinct and nerves, no forethought. 

“You’ll need these,” she said, and dumped a little handful on the table like it was red-hot. 

“Earplugs?”
“High-grade.  Everyone wears them, nobody takes them off until the cargo is gone.  It’s absolutely vital, you understand?

“Yep.”
“Do you UNDERSTAND?”
Rej made contact with all five eyes for the first time, both daytime and the night-triplet.  “Yes.  You’ve hired me for my expertise, but you don’t seem to appreciate it: I have moved things you can’t even imagine.  If you say nobody on the crew takes off earplugs until the cargo’s off the boat, nobody takes off earplugs until the cargo’s off the boat.  Done.  We take our business seriously and we do it well and we get paid.  Asking you why the precautions are necessary is not part of that.  So don’t go taking out your nerves on me, got it, doctor?”
“I’m not –”

“Don’t lie.  You’re bad at it.”
“I haven’t-”

“No, but you were about to.  The Borrelmore leaves tonight.  The cargo is at the drop point by sundown.  The payment is…?”
The customer dithered between panic and relief for a moment, then handed over a small bag.

“Beautiful.”

“Do you need to count them?”
“No.  You don’t need to tell me why your precautions are important because I take my job seriously; I don’t need to tell you why you don’t try and shortchange me because you take ME seriously.  Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Good.  Have another drink before you leave.  You need it.”
She really did. 

***

The working luggboat Borrelmore left that very evening under a sulfurous sunset, with a full head of steam and salt, a secret in its hidden hold, and a lot of bad-tempered crewmen who were communicating with each other through semaphore signal

But they didn’t fuss.  This was how the job worked, sometimes.  And Captain Rej’s jobs were good ones.  The pay was good; the supervision was clear and direct; and if you turned up dead everyone was always told exactly what you’d done to deserve it so you couldn’t say you weren’t warned if it happened to you too.  Clean, too.  Captain Rej didn’t believe in a prolonged execution.  A nice clean shot to the brain with no warning. 

That kind of leadership attracted a certain kind of crew.  Stable, professional, easygoing in private but sticklers on the clock, and with a kind of loyalty money couldn’t buy because more money than they were making came with attached risks and dead people can’t do much with big paycheques. 

The only real problem was the kitchen.  Sammel was a fine cook, but he was getting on in years and low on legs.  The stove sang at his touch, the soups softened at his stir, but there were more cupboards that he needed than he could reach these days, and they’d only just assigned him a galley-hand last voyage, after thirty days of unsalted meals because he was too proud to ask for someone to grab something for him. 

Able-seaman Jost had already done every other job aboard the Borrelmore, so he was put up to it.  But there were certain obstacles, like his having a bit of a bad ear and Sammel having a bit of an accent (at least half of which was cursing).  Figuring out what the cook wanted when he asked for ‘the big whassik from the upper-therebouts’ had been the chore of the last three days in port.

Now Jost’s bad ear was spared a break, but hand-semaphore wasn’t much fun either.

NOT THAT, spelled Sammel, stomping his peglegs for emphasis.  OTHER TIN. 

It was the third tin can Jost had hauled down.  All of them were identical.  WHICH ONE? He inquired carefully, arms moving slowly as he tried not to knock down half the shelves.  Jost was a big man and the kitchen had spent the last ten years as a small man’s private domain. 

OTHER TIN, spelled SAMMEL. 

Jost nodded and handed over the other tin.  Sammel threw it at his head.

OTHER TIN OTHER TIN OTHER TIN OTHER TIN he repeated. 

“Huh?” said Jost reflexively. 

Sammel walked next to Jost, gently tugged at his shoulder, brought his good ear to mouth level, and screamed full force into it. 

‘the blue tin’

BLUE TIN, signalled Jost.

YES, replied Sammel.

Jost gave him the blue tin, and his ear hurt all for the rest of the evening, which was why he rubbed at it as he walked by the cargo hold on the way to his bunk.

When he woke up the next morning, they weren’t hurting.  They were ringing. 

***

It was a little tune without sound, words with a rhythm.  It popped into able-seaman Jost’s head before he was finished waking, following him from some sort of nonsense blur of dreams, and he found himself mumbling it as he went about making breakfast, trying to puzzle the words as he hunted for SUGAR and RAISINS and found APPLES instead and got berated by an increasingly-irate Sammel. 

But the words wouldn’t come.  He couldn’t hear them properly in his heads.  But the rhythm of it was there, and the beat, and so he tapped his feet at his mess table and drummed his fingers and nodded his head and little Hewut who sat beside him grinned and made fun of him and copied that and by the time all the rest of his tablemates were done laughing silently at him they were doing it to, and it was in their heads and stirring in their fingers and their feet.  A jaunty, hop-along little thing that made mouths twitch at the corner and your step come lively.  It crept into the tug and pull of the cables and chains; it lived in the heave-and-throw of fuel into the furnaces; it kept the beat as hands heaved on nets; it bobbed in heads and made mouths move in unheard words that nobody’d ever really come up with but they all were quite sure of. 

The Barrelmore crew was well-seasoned to begin with, but their performance now verged on gourmet.  There was so little supervision to do that after the first day captain Rej spent little time on deck and kept to her desk, making numbers dance and jig and jib and trim and tack.

For three days.  It was the closest thing to perfect any voyage had ever gone for Rej, and if it hadn’t been so natural and clean she might have been more suspicious. 

As it was, she was very surprised when the Barrelmore went from full ahead to a dead standstill fast enough for her chair to rip free. 

***

The crew were all lined up on deck, stamping their feet and pumping their arms.  Their mouths were wide, their words were spoken with lusty joy, their breath fair-steamed in the cool night air.  Their faces were red with exertion and beaming with joy. 

REPORT, signed Rej, but they wouldn’t look to her.  SOS she signalled, but they wouldn’t heed to her.  DANGER, she windmilled, but they wouldn’t mind her. 

Professional standards are many things, but they don’t include maintaining them at the cost of your crew and ship.  Rej peeled out her earplugs – they SQUELCHED as she did so, the damned things were practically ingrown, screamed out “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PLAYING AT,” and heard the chorus come to an end with a crash of boots just as the splash of the first shark breaching the rail happened.  It was thirty feet long, a great-grandmother of the waves, and its jaws and gills flexed in harmony with the song that the crew now listened to quietly. 

Then came the second through hundredth sharks, and after that it was a bit of a rush.  Tails beat, bodies shook, heads slapped against the wetness of the deck, and fish after fish after fish flung itself aboard the Barrelmore, heeding the beat. 

Rej could hear it too, she realized.  It had been amplified by the crew’s boots, but it was there, quiet, echoed now by the creatures of the deep.  A powerful, incessant drumming.  Thump-thump, a pause, thump-thump, a pause.  A heartbeat of grand and immense gravity, too slow and deep to keep a small thing alive. 

Jost brought it aloft from the hold himself with the rest of his table, their arms tearing at the sockets from the weight and their smiles broad and beautiful and red.  A leviathan’s heart, black and blue with muscle and indomitable in its duty, even without a body.

Thump-thump, in the air, the cold cruel air, all alone.  Thump-thump.

Well, the fish would have that changed. 

Captain Rej opened her mouth again for the first time in a long while, but before she could hope to give an order the rest of the sea came aboard, and the Barrelmore’s command structure and nautical position were altered. 

***

The cargo was never delivered.  A quiet woman in a coat lingered at the docks for some weeks, and a few questions were asked.  Somewhere, a collector went unsatisfied. 

And now and again, out on the waves, a sailor would return to their crewmates with tales of strange sounds from far below, of faint voices from the waves set to a bone-shaking beat that they could never quite make out.

The ones that COULD hear it, hummed it.  And nobody ever tales from them – of strange sounds or otherwise – ever again. 

Admonishment of the Bees: takes place after the first honey harvest of the new year.  Celebrant beekeepers trek out next to their hives and stand around casually making observations of the weather and commenting on how they don’t blame them for not trying harder because after all they know they’ve been having trouble and so on and so on.  An admonishment is considered a failure if it causes the bees to become actually angry enough to sting the beekeeper, and so as a mark of confidence participants typically do not wear protective gear.  Failures are mocked by their peers until the next year. 

April Showering: complex series of rites and rituals based around gardeners soaking each other with hoses, sprinklers, water pistols, etc. to ensure a healthy crop of May flowers.  Under no circumstances may any equipment used be filled with anything other than water following the ‘tragic shower’ of 1889. 

Autumn Solstice: not to be confused with the autumn equinox.  Observed only by the most decorated and anal-retentive of astronomers, neopagans, and calendar maniacs.  Takes place when the first leaf falls from the first tree to turn red – not orange, red – in a very specific and very secret grove kept under lock and key in Bulgaria. 

Blessing of the Beaver: relic of the only permitted holiday in settler Canada from the seventeenth century to the early 20^th, on which date all would flock to the nearest Hudson’s Bay Company manager and suck up to him for a bonus.  Modern versions permit sucking up to any boss, but the past is honoured in the need to stick your incisors out and make little beaver hissing sounds. 

Crunkmas: a celebration of the birth of Jesus Crunk in an old oil tray, in a motor shop in Bethlehem.  Gifts of antifreeze, wiper fluid, and various oils are given, and peace and unity amongst all drivers is hoped for.  The date is not actually the original birthday of Crunk, but was adopted from a Roman cult of Rev. 

Feast of Saint Pip Pip Cheerio: a deeply embarrassing tradition among English boarding schools in which all new students were made to play bagpipes with their noses and recite hymns backwards.  Principally kept alive by the wishes of the upperclassmen to share their pain and humiliation with others.  Became defunct after the onset of World War 2 caused a nationwide shortage of bagpipes. 

Flight of the Snowbirds: Floridian weeklong ceremony honoring the arrival of the first planes of retirees avoiding the onset of winter in more northerly climes.  Traditional garments are margaritas.  Traditional beverages are more margaritas.  Celebrated in Margaritaville. 

Fox Guy Night: everyone in town dresses up like a fox (simple masks and red brooms-head tails will do) and chases down Richard Thomson with power tools until the wee hours of the morning when he drops into a faint from fear and exhaustion.  Fox Guy Morning follows, which consists of persuading Richard Thomson that he sure had a bad dream while keeping a straight face.  Only celebrated in Gumdrop, Massachusetts. 

Gront: very very old and almost totally unknown in the modern day, a holiday dating back to pre-Homo, let alone pre-sapiens.  Gront is celebrated by showing up unannounced at a relative’s home just before they’re about to eat something, then eating it.  Despite nigh-global ignorance of its existence outside the most obscure anthropological circles, it remains widely embraced across the world.

Holly Day: day celebrating the joy of covering surfaces with boughs of holly.  Surprisingly little-practiced, though widely recognized by name. 

Housepet Day: desperate last-ditch attempt by anonymous government to fit in a federal holiday in March.  Mired indefinitely in politics over what its mascot would be: 45% insist on a dog, 45% insist on a cat, and the remaining 10% endorse ferrets or maybe a parakeet.

Listmas: an internet-wide day of praise and glorification of clickbait by the writing of many many listicles.  Often takes place in late December or early January, due to the ease of creating lists that are best-of-last-year litanies. 

Mallweek: predominately American tradition demarcating the patrolling of the malls in the months before Christmas for drawing up rough inventories, mapping out plans of attack, and debating optimized shopping routes.  A dying tradition whose demise has only hastened with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Mamut Morning: the weeklong events following the first mammoth kill of the season, consisting of trying to come up with more and more uses for leftover mammoth (mammoth sandwiches, mammoth stew, mammoth hash, mammoth jerky) before it goes bad.  Deprecated due to a worldwide shortage of mammoths.

Maypoles: nobody is quite sure what you’re meant to do with those things but it’s got to be SOMETHING. 

Pottage: weeklong canning, pickling, and jamming salting spree during summer, performed only by those over age seventy-and-four.  No reason or rationale is known even to its practitioners, making it one of the rare examples of a biologically-driven holiday, or ‘one of those things you just do at that age.’

Rectalbertfest: please don’t intrude on Albert’s privacy.

Spring Solstice: like the Autumn Solstice, but it starts when the first snow shoveller puts down their shovel.  And there’s more booze. 

St. Porturd’s Day: unusual multi-annual holiday traditionally taking place after every other holiday with alcohol.  Rituals include groaning, vomiting, drinking water, and begging higher powers to end your torment.  Celebrated anywhere there’s booze, by every folk of every creed that permits booze. 

Visitation of the Ice: occurs after the first lasting snowfalls.  Participants consume vast quantities of snow and ice until they suffer nigh-hypothermia and near-water poisoning, then hallucinate news from the new year.  ‘Yellow Snow’ visions are forbidden. 

Ween: On November 1^st celebrants (known as Weeners) travel from home to home asking if they’re really going to eat all that leftover Halloween candy by themselves.  Wear warm clothing and be prepared for disappointment, ideally by leaving a big bowl of M&Ms at home. 

Zoliday: secretive and evil counterpart of any existing holiday that entails everything the holiday does but backwards.  Christmas zoliday involves taking presents from people and returning them to their gifters, Easter zoliday involves stuffing eggs inside rabbits, etc.  Under no circumstances can a New Years zoliday ever be celebrated.  Ever.