Comic Holidays

Holidays are approaching for roughly all mainstream religions, winter holidays for non-observers, and Christmas is generally the main theme for at least the western world. It's a festive season all around! People rush for Christmas shopping, make plans for vacations or leisure or gatherings, brace for meetings with the extended family, and more.

What about in your webcomics?

Are there holidays included in the plot, or perhaps allow for a 'holiday special'?

Or it's something that would throw the audience off because there's no way that our society's winter holidays/ holiday season could be observed?

The holiday season can be a great plot device if the setting and worldbuilding allow for it. Technically, there's no worldbuilding that doesn't- even in fantasy, civilizations would have evolved to have some holidays with some protocol of festivities everyone agrees on.

When a protocol of celebration is the norm, people tend to try and conform to it in various ways: 'the season to be jolly' may make characters put in effort to be jolly even if that isn't their normal countenance or the situation they live it. How they go about it will reveal a lot about their psyche and their needs or wishes. Or they may buck the entire holiday and even actively, aggressively try to undermine it. Or they may feel unable to be jolly, and suffer emotional impact or even backlash for it.

The way characters act and react during the holidays is a great way to get to know them better, making them even more 'real' for the audience.

On the other hand, especially when it's a commercial gag employing well-established and popular IPs, a holiday season sequence, episode, or 'special' may be shoehorned in. And that's when the ham and cheese or the uncanny valley threaten to make the holiday segment …weird.

Christmas, for example, is a very specific holiday. In a world where there never was Christ or Christianity, having Christmas (or even 'holidays' with the exact protocol of celebrations we recognize as 'Christmas') is effectively 'breaking' the world. Characters can't react to the situation in an organic way because they will be called to have an emotional connection to a religion they don't have any exposure to (let alone ownership).

The better way to have them be in a festive season would be to develop it from the context of the world itself: if it's a largely secular world, then 'Christmas' can't exist. There can be 'Winter Holidays' or 'Celebration of Plentifulness' or some such thing, assuming that there is a winter or that they have plentiful harvests. If there is a religion, then the holiday season will be celebrating important events within that religion. Things can be reminiscent of our holidays but they can't be 'inserts'.

How do you deal with holidays in your webcomic (if at all)?

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