I read Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather for the first time at the end of last year. (Last year, already!) Like many other Pratchett fans, I suspect this will become an annual tradition.

Being honest, I don't have a lot of sophisticated stuff to say about this book. I haven’t done lots of historical research about how Christmas as a holiday has evolved over the years, and how that maps onto the different phases of Pratchett's fictional holiday Hogswatch. But it's the end of the holidays, and I want to write a newsletter in place of a holiday card, and I want to talk about this book, after a brief retrospective.

Looking back on 2025 feels a little strange. I felt quite rubbish for the better part of the last six months; it turned out that I was having some medical issues that had been causing a lot of the Vaguely Feeling Bad All the Time (low mood, low energy, brain fog, etc. Get your iron checked if you're dealing with burnout that simply won't go away!) Now that the medical side has improved, I'm feeling WAY better & more like my old self, but my knee-jerk reaction is to look back at the last year and mumble “sure, maybe it was okay, I guess,” because my default state for the latter half of it was Well Buddy, Keep a Stiff Upper Lip, Things Feel Vaguely Bad But Nothing Is Logically Wrong So They Must Get Better Eventually, Maybe Try Affirmations Again.¹

But when I take the time to actually look back on 2025—so much good stuff has happened this year!

• My second nibling was born

• Spent lots of good quality time with family

• Traveled to the West Coast for the first time, saw some dear friends face-to-face for the first time in years (or ever!) (and saw a whale, briefly, which is always wonderous)

• Finished a major revision of my book, which really pushed me to think about aspects of genre and audience that I hadn't considered before

• Reconnected with old friends at home & built up a social circle again after 2024’s international move

• Saw Hadestown for the third time

• Went to Worldcon, got tons of inspiration from listening to incredible writers & readers, got delightful life lessons from older Star Trek fans in the crafting lounge, got to meet one of my childhood favorite authors (Patricia C. Wrede!) by complete coincidence (she was also wonderful)

• Wrote seven pieces of flash fiction, some of which I'd like to revise this year & submit to journals (!!!)

• Pushed myself out of my comfort zone as a visual artist & found ways to make my workflow easier

• Played lots of TTRPGs with friends! Vampire: The Masquerade, Monster of the Week, Discworld, Masks. I also ran games of Eat the Reich and Wanderhome. (GMing intimidates me, so this was a good push out of my comfort zone!) I went to a Worldcon panel on collaborative storytelling, which made me realize just how much I adore telling stories with my friends—whether it's writing together, improvising together, rolling dice, etc. It makes me very, very happy.

• Tackled another set of revisions, which aren't done yet (the anemia kicked in) but which have taken me outside my creative comfort zone! I'm at the point with this book where the starry-eyed dreams of publication have bumped into reality & stopped being intrinsically motivating, but I'm finding other motivations. Writing a good story for my friends. Learning new skills for my creative toolbox. And so on.

• Started zero drafting another novel. Am loving it, and can't wait to get back to it this year.

• Went to a Renaissance faire and enjoyed it. Ren faires have been a mixed bag for me in the past, so I was ready to write them off as just not my thing, but this one was a really wonderful time. (Thanks, Jessica!)

• Did some very good baking

• Read 34 books and found several new favorites amongst them! (I will never not be thinking about Slaughterhouse-Five now. I may, in fact, write y’all an email about Slaughterhouse-Five soon - I want to write here more often, less perfectly.)

The Hogfather is one of those new favorites. It follows Death (yes, the reaper) as he takes on the role of the Hogfather (essentially Santa Claus) for one night, distributing presents to children, spreading joy and good cheer, and so on. It also follows Death’s granddaughter, Susan, trying to work out if her granddad is doing this because he’s finally lost his marbles. Like many Pratchett books, it's very silly, very heartfelt, and contains several passages that—out of nowhere—make me want to cry about humanity & believe in the possibility of kindness.²

Towards the end of the book is a passage that gets quoted frequently, so I don't feel too bad spoiling it. The Hogfather, we learn, was originally a winter god, and the celebration of Hogswatch was a ritual to ensure the rising of the sun in the new year. Old gods get new jobs, but if children stopped believing in the Hogfather—if the Hogfather died—the sun wouldn't come up in the morning.

Only a “mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world.”

It's not exactly that humans need fantasy to make life bearable, Death explains. Humans need fantasy to be human. “To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” You believe in the Tooth Fairy and the Hogfather to get practice believing the little lies, so you can believe the big ones:

“Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing. … Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy, and yet—’ Death waved a hand. ‘And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some… some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.’”

And, shortly after: “You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?”

My goals for 2026: pick one or two things that aren’t true, and keep believing.

Love,

Siobhan

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P.S. Couldn’t work out where to fit this in, but I also recommend listening to John Green’s “Auld Lang Syne” episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed for the new year. I listened to it this week for the first time since 2020, and it is wistful, hopeful, and full of love.