Allen Steele - Zwarte Piet's Tale

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Zwarte Piet's Tale

by Allen M. Steele

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Science Fiction

A DF Books NERDs Release

First published in Analog, December 1998

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or

distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper

print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe

fines or imprisonment.

People often speak of Christmas as being a season of miracles. Indeed, it sometimes seems that's all you

hear about during the holiday season; download the daily newsfeed, and you're sure to find at least one

doe-eyed story about a lost child reunited with his parents, a stray pet finding his way home, a maglev

train that barely avoids colliding with another, a house burning down without anyone being killed. These

things can happen at any time, and often do, but when they occur at Christmas, a special significance is

attached to them, as if an arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar somehow has a magical portent.

That sort of thing may go smooth on Earth, but anyone on Mars who believes in miracles is the sort of

person you don't want to be with during a habitat blowout or a dust storm alert. Belief in miracles implies

belief in divine intervention, or luck at the very least; that kind of attitude has killed more people out here

than anything else. Luck won't help you when a cell of your dome undergoes explosive decompression,

but having paid attention during basic training will. I've known devoutly religious people who've died

because they panicked when a wall of sand came barrelling across the plains, while atheists who kept

their heads and sprinted to the nearest shelter have survived. Four people returning to Wellstown from a

water survey were killed on Earth's Christmas Day back in m.y. 46, when the driver of their rover rolled

the vehicle down a twenty-meter embankment; there was no yuletide miracle for them.

I'm sorry if this may seem cynical, but that's the way it is. Almost a million aresians now live on Mars, and

we didn't face down this cold red world by believing in Santa Claus. Luck is something you make for

yourself; miracles occur when you get extra-lucky. I've been here for over twenty years now, and I've

never seen it work differently, whether it be on Christmas, Yom Kippur, or First Landing Day.

Yet still ... there's always an exception.

* * * *

Sure, we celebrate Christmas on Mars. We just don't do it the same way as on Earth.

The first thing you have to remember is that we count the days a bit differently. Having 39.6 more minutes

each day, and 669 days—or sols, as we call ‘em—in a sidereal period, meant that aresians threw out

both Greenwich Mean Time and the Gregorian calendar in a.d. 2032, long before the Pax Astra took

control of the near-space colonies, way before Mars declared its independence. The Zubrin calendar has

twelve months, ranging from 48 to 66 sols in length, each named after a Zodiac constellation; it

retroactively began on January 1, 1961, which became Gemini 1, m.y. 1 by local reckoning. The

conversion factors from Gregorian to Zubrin calendars are fairly complex, so don't ask for an explanation

here, except to say that one of the first things newcomers from Earth have to realize is that April Fool

pranks are even less funny at Arsia Station than they were back in Indiana.

Indeed, aresians pretty much did away with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day,

and virtually every other Earth holiday. Our New Year's is out of whack with the rest of the solar system,

and instead of Columbus Day we have First Landing; when Mars seceded from the Pax Astra in 2066,

or m.y. 57, we began commemorating the event with our own Independence Day. A few religious

holidays continue to be observed at the same time as they are on Earth. West Bank, the small Jewish

settlement on the western slope of the Tharsis bulge, celebrates hanukkah in accordance with the

traditional Hebrew calendar; I was once there for the third night of hanukkah, and watched as the family

with whom I was staying lit its menorah when the colony's DNAI calculated the sun had set in Jerusalem.

Christmas has been imported as well, yet because the aresian year was nearly twice as long as Earth's, it

comes around half as often. The first colonists tried having their Christmas promptly on December 25th,

but it felt odd to be celebrating Christmas twice a year, sometimes in the middle of the Martian summer.

When the colonies formally adopted the Zubrin calendar in m.y. 38, it was decided that the aresian

Christmas would fall only once every two Earth years; this meant that we had to devise our own way of

observing the holiday. So instead of designating one single sol in Taurus as being Christmas Day, aresians

picked the second week of the month as Christmas Week, beginning on Ta. 6 and continuing through

Ta.13; it was roughly adapted from the Dutch tradition of observing December 6 as the Feast of St.

Nicholas. During that week, everyone would take a break from all but the most essential labor, and this

would give families and clans a chance to get together and exchange gifts. Devout Christians who wished

to continue unofficially observing December 25 as Jesus's birthday were welcome to do so—New

Chattanooga and Wellstown took two sols off each aresian year for a terran-style Christmas—but it

wasn't marked on the Zubrin calendar.

Most of the original Seven Colonies, with the exception of West Bank, accepted Christmas Week as a

respite from the hard work of settling the Martian frontier. As more immigrants from Earth and the Moon

began establishing new colonies along the eastern equator, they adopted Christmas Week as well. Yet,

as time went on, the aresian Christmas began to lose much of its original meaning.

Indeed, as some noted, the week never had that much meaning to begin with. Since it wasn't held to

celebrate of the birth of Christ, it had little religious significance. Families and clans tended to live in the

same colonies, often sharing the same quarters, so there wasn't much point in setting aside an entire week

for them to get together. These colonists lived on the verge of poverty; Pax trade tariffs and the enormous

cost of importing items from Earth made Christmas presents beyond the reach of most people, and giving

someone a new helmet liner is hardly the stuff of romance. So what usually happened during Christmas

Week was that people congregated in taprooms to get ripped on homebrew and hempweed; when the

taprooms closed, louts roamed the corridors looking for trouble. By mid-century, Christmas Week had

degenerated into debauchery, random violence, and the occasional fatal accident. It wasn't a lot of fun.

Worse yet was the fact that the first generation of aresians to be born on Mars was growing up with only

second-hand knowledge of what Christmas was supposed to be like. They'd read old microfiche stories

about Rudolph and Santa Claus, the Grinch and Scrooge, or watch disks of ancient films like It's A

Wonderful Life and Frosty the Snowman, and then go to their parents asking why Santa didn't drop

down their chimney to leave wrapped and ribboned gifts beneath a tree strung with lights and tiny

ornaments. Perhaps you can successfully explain to a four-year-old why there aren't any reindeer and

Douglas firs on Mars, or even point out that your two-room apartment doesn't have a hearth, let alone a

chimney ... but try telling a small child that there's no such person as Santa.

Mars was in desperate need of a St. Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In m.y. 52, he arrived

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