Poll How do they celebrate Christmas in the Trekverse?
- Thread starter Kilana2
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Star Trek IV, Star Trek V, Star Trek 2009, Lethe, Will You Take My Hand. Her warm outfits in Journey and Yesteryear do match more with human attire of the time rather than Vulcan robes or the TOS style, and successfully disprove my "every scene" assertion.
Except for her first outfit. That still looks very Vulcan to me. The blues, the flow, the veil, and especially the Dracula neck-thing, which screams out Alien culture if not Vulcan.
But then I guess you'll disagree with all of this.
One thing you know for certain is Spock was no doubt always roped into playing one of Santa's elves on Christmas day. Makes you wonder who got to dress up as Santa. My money is on McCoy. He seems like someone who would kind of be into some old fashioned fun. New head -canon idea. Scotty in TMP is wearing a beard because it's actually Christmas time and he just beamed up from a Christmas party. That was why he was complaining so much about being recalled.
Jason
Jason
Certainly in the latter movie years, Scotty was Santa
Yep. Santa has to be someone with a stout build.
The complication here is that, of course, we're not comparing 21st century human apparel to Vulcan apparel. We're comparing 23rd century civilian attire to Vulcan attire, which can make it hard to tell if any given outfit is supposed to be alien or "just futuristic."
Plus, we should consider that, at the time "Journey to Babel" was filmed, we had seen other Vulcans exactly once--in a highly ritualized setting--in "Amok Time," so there would have been less of a sense, on the part of both the audience AND the costumers, as to what Vulcan clothing was "supposed" to look like. Hell, for all we know, T'Pol was wearing a traditional Vulcan wedding gown instead of everyday Vulcan attire.
They were making it up as they went along so I'm reluctant to read too much deliberate intent into Amanda's costumes in that ep. Chances were, they were just trying to come up with outfits that looked cool and futuristic.
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In one of the Foster adaptations of TAS, the Enterprise had a large Christmas tree keep in status in a lower storage hold, for most of the year. It was brought out for Christmas every year. The crew (or some of them) would decorate it.
It's too bad Star Trek never did a Christmas Special and made this happen.
Or...maybe it's not so bad....
The novels establish that Santa is another name used by the Greek God Zeus.
See this doesn't make any sense where the holiday is from Earth, and the Enterprise is in deep space where Earth time should not have any relevance. Should not have any relevance. I do recall Kirk implying the Enterprise did celebrate Thanksgiving but the producers were taking baby steps at the time and the writer of "Charlie X" didn't think that through when the line was written. I would believe the Enterprise from Kirk and Picard's era would be beyond these traditions and for the writers they could derive a holiday which would resemble X-mas to the audience, but with the distances away from our solar system, the crew could have Christmas every day for all that mattered.
I wouldn't mind an X-mas episode but it would have to be clever or better yet the Enterprise simply returned to Earth in order for the episode to make sense, but I don't see the point for the ship to hold a tree in storage... just for Christmas.
I might be missing something here. Why would the customs of the crews place of origin cease to be relevant? Seems to me that the occasional reminder of home would be of even greater relevance on a long voyage.
Especially since I think everyone on the crew was human except Spock. But he was half-human so I wonder how that worked out. Did Amanda sort of goad Sarek and Spock into celebrating it? I could see a compromise being made where they all go out to dinner or something instead of getting a Big Tree and presents and all the works. Assuming she was also into Christmas.
Also what about the other Realigious ones. Are they also still celebrated. Of course if Roddenberry had his way from his TNG days, chances are he would have written a episode were the crew celebrates , Godless day. The moment in which humans all agreed together to stop following religion and jettisoned all realigous texts out into space. Once a year everyone throws a big party where everyone comes dressed as their favorite aithest. Which I admit does sound kind of fun but I think I still prefer the presents.
Jason
Thank you for inducing me to read the Memory Alpha entry on Christmas. Paris and Janeway gave themselves away as closeted enthusiasts for the holiday.
A Christmas tree in Quarks would only be fair considering all the Bajoran festivities that were celebrated there. And: I guess Christmas is good for business....
I can only suppose that the Ferengi are staunchly in favor of Christmas, primarily as a pretext for the far more important holiday of Black Friday....
That said, I can imagine that some faint echo of Christmas may certainly continue to reverberate in 3-400 years’ time. But who can say how? I was raised more or less Methodist (mostly less) but presently consider myself to be a fairly devout Zen Buddhist, and while I celebrate Bodhi Day earlier in the month I also observe Festivus on or about the 23rd of December (on the basis that that’s about when my resistance to my wife’s impatience for presents tends to evaporate), followed by Christmas Eve with the wife’s (ostensibly Byzantine Catholic) family, followed by getting stocking stuffers on Christmas morning (which is predominantly about giving little presents to our many and varied pets, who don’t really care that much anyway), followed by some Chinese takeout for Christmas dinner (a curiously Judaic tradition, but why not adapt one more aspect into the whole scenario?).
That’s how one person’s observance of Christmas has mutated over 45 years. Who knows what three or four centuries, with an intervening nuclear war and the introduction of wholly non-human cultural elements, might yield?
—g
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Fundamentalism and atheism are opposite sides of the same debased coin: they both postulate a God who is contained within the Universe, and they both require the flouting of the laws of physics as an essential part of the definition of a miracle. The former is precisely backwards; as to the latter, the best definition of "miracle" I've ever encountered came from a screenwriter, in an episode of Quincy: it is an event that inspires faith.
No. It doesn't.
Just as many atheists make the error of assuming that all Christians think alike, many Christians make the error of assuming that all atheists think alike.
Broadly, what defines an atheist is that an atheist does not postulate the existence of any sort of god, whatever its properties.
If that works for you, great. But it's not like only extremists use the definition of miracle as an event contrary to understood laws of physics; when in doubt, define your terms.
One of my favorite illustrations of faith in media is in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indiana Jones has to take "the leap of faith" and step out into what he firmly believes is empty space. Indiana Jones had faith: faith that he was interpreting the test as recorded in his father's journal correctly, faith in his father on a variety of fronts despite their disagreements, and arguably faith that there existed a way to survive the test in the first place, or in other words faith in whoever made the test and that whoever they were put a way through into it.
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