Winter Celebrations in the Sultanate
Elvish families are complicated: siblings can be born a hundred years apart, people can easily divorce every fiftieth anniversary, taking a break from family life for ten years or so is an option, and having multiple partners simultaneously is not common but neither scandalous.
The winter festival is a chance to gather all these entangled threads of a bloodline and weave a shared history through storytelling: each winter, the eldest members of the family will welcome their relatives around the open fireplace at the center of the home in a collective rite of reminiscence and narration.
In a two-week-long celebration, sons, nephews, sisters, in-laws, aunts, and cousins will come to visit the chosen “elder fire” overlapping their arrivals, returning more than once, saying for some night if possible.
During this always-changing gathering of relatives, each will tell what they have done since the last time they met or some shared memory. There is always food and drinks, and since there is so little light up north, the gathering feels like a two-week-long feast. Some of the family members, those with artistic inclinations, will read pages of their diaries or put on some impromptu theatrical scene (and there is always a cousin who will happily play some songs on their lute).
Elves, with their peculiar sense of time, are not bothered if some family member skips a celebration or two or even is absent for multiple years in a row, but there is the understanding that the “round years” (those ending in zero) everybody should at least try to come together.
The public celebrations revolve around storytelling, usually in a mixed form of oratory, music, and dances. It has been described as having all the elements of an Opera but without the desire to unite them in a mise en scene. They are usually of historical subjects, either local happenings shared by the present or grand narrations of mythical times (that for the elves is just the times of their grandparents)
As the Fire they take as a symbol, the elves see change as the only constant, and they, as the flames, are forever changing yet ultimately the same. The winter gathering shows that it is true for the family as well.
To the surprise of most outsiders, elvish winter celebrations involve a lot of flowers as food, drinks, and decorations. Elves like out-of-season goods since they match their deep but somewhat paternalistic love for nature. Elves believe they are part of the world but not like the world: they are first among equals, as fire is to the other elements. People are willing to spend exaggerated amounts to taste a strawberry under the falling autumn leaves or to have a pet ermine sporting its immaculate winter coat in the middle of the summer.
Flowers in winter fit this mindset, but they became so popular due to a trend. The wife of the Sultan, Sultaness Sepideh-dam, hails from Hamise, one of the Steam Oasis, places where the life-giving vapors allow for year-round blossomings and harvests. The sultaness wants to be always surrounded by flowers, no matter the season, as a reminder of her home. Elves may seem detached from status-seeking behavior, but they are just more discreet about it, and slowly but surely, high-class people started to ask for off-season flowers to imitate the court. The massive caravans of wolly dromedaries bringing flowers from the faraway oasis to the Capital created a supply that even less well-off people could afford. Then poets started to embroider this custom with metaphors and symbolism, cementing the connection: “flowers are sheltered near the fire like the delicate family ties”, or “each petal is like a story shared around the flames” and so on.
Even if the winter flowers are a “new” phenomenon, being en vogue for “only” 200 years (as the elders often grumpily remind), it is becoming very ingrained in the culture. Many families will embark on long journeys to have a vacation in the Oasais during the winter, a way to taste some seasonal off-season springtime.
