This was written for the Under Mistletoe Challenge! Thanks to svmadelyn for organizing! :D
Enormous thanks to: __fallen for cheerleading above and beyond the call; to sdraevn, akukorax, and kiezh for music (yay music!); and to wanderlustlover, akukorax, megolas & kasandaro for the generous and wonderfully helpful beta-work. Thank you!!!
References, Shout-outs, Riffs, Shameless (Grateful!) Plundering, and Mad Pimpery:
1. The epigraph is from "Casualty" by Seamus Heaney.
2. This Sci-Fi.com Atlantis wallpaper. Um, that's a LOT of buildings. With a lot of floors in each building, and presumably many, many corridors. That doesn't even begin to show the sublevels.
3. Bone's fantastic Pudding Series.
4. Hth's equally wonderful Alpha Centauri series.
5. Permetaform's amazing vid "Welcome Home".
6. Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". (full illustrated text)
7. Mrs. Cratchit's Christmas Pudding (note: pre-colonial recipes did not contain citrus, though it's a standard ingredient now.)
8. Navajo Code Talkers in World War II. So very cool in an entirely geeky way.
9. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. *pets his inscrutable head*
10. Scrooged
11. The Muppet Christmas Carol
13. Tomb Raider
14. Blade Runner
15. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm not sure how influential this was, actually, but I was reading this while writing the story, so I fully expect that there's bleed-through. Scary, but (and?) I loved it.
Story Notes:
I did try to write the obvious Rodney as Scrooge story that the challenge prompt ("Ghosts of Christmas show up.") seemed at first to call for. I did, really! Well, okay, I thought about it, scratched my head, and thought about it some more, but I just couldn't make it go. Mainly, the problem was that the Dickens story is a about guy who has the crap scared out of him by four progressively more menacing ghosts-supposedly in an effort to make a good Christian out of him (kind of like 1950s educational films against the scourge of bad drivers and venereal disease).
As I see it, Rodney's already had his rude awakening (in The Storm/The Eye, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, etc.), and he doesn't need a ghost to tell him that the people he lives and works with are real, feeling, and all-too-mortal people. He's got the t-shirt, and that experience (more than his brilliance) is, for me, why he's earned his gruff, petty, arrogant place among the collective Atlantis wolf pack. (*saves meta on Kavanaugh-as-Outcast for another time*)
So…in short, I went for ghosts instead. We don't have much canon dealing with what the show's various cultures do, ritually, with regard to the dead…and we've been given almost nothing that addresses religion (beyond Ancient-, Chaya-, and Wraith-worship), so I wrote what the muses told me to. For the record, I have NOT seen much of SG-1 to know how the other part of the show deals with any of this, so we'll hope it (more or less) fits.
Also, Hth has drawn her own version of what happens in the Satedan afterlife…which I totally forgot about until rereading her series after I got back the first betas of this story. She has a different take on it, but the same themes are in play (since Ronon's grief is at the crux of the matter), and I'm sure her sense of Ronon's ghosts was spinning around in my subconscious with everything else.
As a side note: This is completely unsupported by canon, but in my head, Satedan religion is sort of an impenetrable blend of ancient Greek, Hindu, and…something vaguely shamanic that I haven't pinned down yet. I wish I could point to a book on the shelf and say, "There, that's religious life on Sateda…before the Wraith destroyed it." Maybe someone (who is not me) should write that. *g*
