Yuletide - Fanlore

Name:	Yuletide, "while we tell of yuletide treasure"
Date(s):	2003-
Type:	archive, challenge
Fandom:	multi, rare
URL:	http://yuletidetreasure.org/, yuletide @ livejournal, yuletide_admin @ livejournal
Click here for articles related to this site on Fanlore.

Yuletide is an annual rare-fandoms gift exchange fanfic challenge, encompassing gen, het, femslash, and slash. Participants agree to write a 1,000-word (minimum) story for a randomly assigned recipient who has requested at least one of the things the writer offered to do, in return for receiving a story from a randomly assigned writer fulfilling one of the participant's requests.

The criteria for what constitutes "rare" have changed slightly every year as the admins try to find the right balance for the growing number of participants. For instance, in the first year, the challenge was for rare fandoms or rare pairings (which could be from a non-rare fandom). At one point fanfiction.net was used as one of the yardsticks for "how much fiction already exists", but a number of participants pointed out that Yuletide participants are largely from a different part of fandom than fanfiction.net users, and ff.net was later dropped as a yardstick.

The spirit of "rare" stays the same, though: the idea of Yuletide is to provide fiction for people who may never have seen any stories for a source they love, or have seen so few that they're starving for them. Wait Wait Don't Eat Me is an example of a story that pulled in a significant number of readers from outside of the fannish community, in part due to the rarity of the source.

Contents 1 History 2 The Archive 3 The Challenge 3.1 Challenge Prep 3.2 Signing Up 3.3 Assignments 3.4 Yuletide Madness 3.4.1 Controversy 3.5 The Reveal 3.6 The Author Reveal 4 New Year's Resolution challenge 5 Culture 6 Controversy 7 Notable Stories 8 Related challenges 9 References

History

Yuletide began in 2003, started by astolat and tzikeh, and is currently moderated by elynross and astolat. Participation has risen from roughly 300 people in 2003 to roughly 1,600 people in 2008, and over that time the number of fandoms with stories in the archive has climbed to almost 1,900^[1]. On the 25th December 2009 there were 3430 stories posted for Yuletide2009.^[2] Fandoms include live-action tv, anime, cartoons, manga, games, books, movies, RPF, commercials, and songs.

From 2003 through October 2009, all of the stories were posted to the Yuletide archive. For the 2009 challenge, posting moved to the Yuletide collection on the Archive of Our Own. At some point after the 2009 challenge is complete, the contents of the old archive will be imported into the AO3, which will then be the permanent home of the entire challenge.

The Archive

Because of the nature of the challenge, the archive opens and closes at different points during the year. For most of the year, though, it's open for browsing by anyone (and uploading for New Year's Resolution stories).

With a wide range of fans participating, the archive is fairly evenly balanced in terms of ratings and between gen, het, femslash, and slash. Stories are posted with ratings and summaries attached, but that's it: since every story on the archive was written with a specific person in mind, most don't have warnings attached. Unless indicated in the summary, readers may not be able to tell whether stories are gen, het, femslash, or slash, or what the central pairing is (if there is a pairing.)

Comments are very much encouraged, but with the caveat that every story was written as a gift for someone else, catering to their tastes.

The challenge is made possible because of a script for the matching process developed by astolat in the first year, which has been used in every succeeding year. Because the matching is somewhat automated, it's possible for the challenge to grow substantially in size every year -- the mods have never had to put a cap on it. This process, and the Yuletide archive itself, are a model of effective archiving and of using small and powerful scripts to help facilitate broad fannish projects like this one.

In 2009, the challenge was hosted on the AO3 for the first time, and was the first collection hosted there. RivkaT wrote a brief, outsider's-eye view of the various technical difficulties historically suffered by the database end of the archive that made a move to the AO3 helpful, if not vital, to the long-term sustainability of the challenge:

The move took away a few features (most notably, the spiffy "Latest story updated by [Author Name]!" with sparkly bright exclamation points of joy around it, along with the number saying which story it was of the total), but added many more, including an automatic gift notification in user dashboards, the ability to list all the fandoms in a crossover, tagging, filtering, and most importantly, the ability to edit one's story after upload, saving users endless hours of angsting after hitting "post" and the mods endless hours of manually going in and making edits to stories at desperate users' request.

The Challenge

The challenge runs for several months starting in the early fall. The earlier a participant gets involved, the more likely she is to wind up with a fandom selection she's happy with; for instance, people who skip the nominating process can find themselves unable to choose the characters they most prefer, because those characters never made it onto the final list.

Challenge participants write one story and receive one story in return. The only requirement for a story is that it be for one of the recipient's requested fandoms, and that it include the characters the recipient requested.

Participants can also give additional details in their requests -- such as asking for the characters to be paired, or requesting a specific type of story -- and may also write a 'Dear Yuletide Author' letter following the matchup, giving further details about their preferences. However, all of these details are optional, and are meant simply to provide extra guidance for authors who may want more information. Authors are free to ignore any such optional details, so long as they meet the requirements of choosing a requested fandom and including the requested characters.

Participants are encouraged to write a story that will please their recipient, but because of the huge scale of the challenge and the vast numbers of small fandoms involved, they are equally encouraged to simply be grateful for any story that gets written for them in turn, even if it is not quite to their personal tastes.

Challenge Prep

With so many participants and so many fandoms to match them up with, there's some significant prep time involved.

Sometime in the fall, the Yuletide admins start things rolling by posting to the Yuletide LJ for fandom brainstorming ideas. Anyone can comment with fandoms they'd like to see, whether they intend to participate or not.

After brainstorming, the admins shift to the archive itself, and open up nominations for the current year's active list of available fandoms. A completely new list is generated every year, to keep the list from being cluttered with deadwood. People who plan to participate can nominate up to six fandoms, and characters they want to read/write for each. The limit is to keep the list of nominated fandoms down to things people are really interested in, not just any rare thing they can think of.

After the list is generated and has gone through a clean-up process to eliminate non-rare fandoms, merge duplicate entries, etc., signups begin.^[4]

Signing Up

Using the new list of available fandoms, each participant must offer to write a minimum of three different fandoms (there's no maximum). For each offer, she can choose up to four characters to write.

This gets tricky, since the matchups are based strictly on fandom/character; if you offer to write four characters, you could be assigned any combination of those four, including characters who form a pairing that doesn't work for you. (Writers are obligated to use every character their recipient requests, unless the recipient specifically says that's not necessary.) While it's allowed to write gen if you can't write a pairing request, a lot of participants prefer not to be put in that situation. The way around that is to sign up for a fandom as many times as necessary, using different combinations of characters, to avoid any combinations you're unwilling to write.

The urge to sign up for any source you've ever even heard of is strong. It's important to remember that your odds of being assigned those fandoms are as high as your odds of being assigned the fandom you know like the back of your hand -- possibly even higher, if not many people sign up for that fandom you sorta know and you're sure you won't get assigned anyway.

After completing the "offers" section, participants move on to the "requests" section of the signup.

Each participant must request at least three different fandoms, and up to four characters for each; they're allowed a fourth request as well, which could be a different fandom or a repeat of one of the first three with different characters. Each request also has a section for 'optional details', where the participant can put in a note giving a little more context, like whether they want gen, het, or slash, or if they like angst or fluff, or suggesting a possible storyline. These details are optional from the perspective of the author, who is under no obligation to fulfil them, though they are expected to try to write a story that will please their partner.

After submitting the signup form, a copy of the assignment is mailed to the participant so she can see if she made any mistakes. Signups can be changed at any time during the signup period.^[5]

Assignments

Assignments go out within a few days of the end of signups. Every participant is emailed a copy of their recipient's requests. There's generally a brief period of widespread panic and dismay at this point in the process as people wonder what the hell they were thinking to sign up for that fandom, omg.

Once the panic has subsided, authors have roughly six weeks to write a 1,000-word story based on their recipient's request, tailored to their recipient's taste as much as possible. The only requirements are to match the fandom and the characters, so it's fine to do a gen story if someone has requested a pairing. Most people do try to fulfill the specifics as best they can, though, and many spend some time looking through their recipient's LJ or website to get a feel for their preferences, including bulletproof kinks or squicks.

Once the story is written, it's uploaded to the Yuletide archive.^[6]

If any recipients don't have stories uploaded after the upload deadline, their request details are sent out to pinch-hitters, who very quickly work to get appropriate stories written and uploaded, so everyone has something waiting for them on reveal day.^[7]

Yuletide Madness

Yuletide Madness is a backup to the pinch-hitting process, as a way of guaranteeing that everyone signed up for the challenge has a story waiting for them on reveal day.

Most of those people have a pinch-hitter working on something, but emergencies happen, and rather than scrambling for a backup pinch-hitter at the 11th hour, the mods prefer to use a safety net.

So somewhere around December 23rd, after the vast majority of stories have been uploaded, the mods post a list of prompts for anyone who doesn't yet have a story in the archive. Those prompts are open to any signed-up participant or pinch-hitter to write a 1,000-word story for, and the membership at large is encouraged to have at it. Some people, however, look to find something to write through people's Dear Yuletide letters towards the beginning of the fest in order to give themselves time to write.

Sometime on December 24, once everyone has a full-size story in the archive, the word limits are lifted, and all prompts are thrown open for stories of any length. In the original archive, this meant that anyone could post a story of any length to that year's Yuletide collection. In the AO3, the mods create a new subcollection specifically for shorter-length stories (under 1000 words) called Yuletide Madness [Year]. Treats over 1000 words were asked to put into the main collection.

The stories themselves are known as Treats (originally Stocking Stuffers, a term that some people still use), because they are extra little treats for the recipients, and for the membership at large.

Controversy

The mods' belief is that Yuletide Madness is a way of providing more stories for everyone to read, as well as providing a safety net against emergencies where a pinch-hitter has to bow out at the last minute. Many Yuletide participants share that belief, and for many Madness is their favorite part of Yuletide, full of energy and excitement.

For some participants, though, writing a story -- especially a full-size story -- for a recipient who already has an assigned author or pinch-hitter writing for them is stepping on that author's toes, and taking away from the specialness of their gift. Those participants choose not to participate because they don't want to hurt someone else's feelings. And it is true that some authors do get upset when their assigned recipient gets more than the story they wrote for them; this is particularly hard to take if the second story is better-received, either by the recipient or in terms of comments and/or recs.

For others, the rush of last-minute, quickly written, often unbetaed stories lowers the overall quality of the archive, in stark contrast to the care most participants take with their assignments. This impression is spurred in part by the explicit calls made on the Yuletide community to increase the story count to a certain level each year - a specific call for quantity rather than quality.

With the move to the AO3 and its subcollections, the quantity vs. quality issue may relax, as people who don't want to see the hastily written short pieces can easily avoid them.

The Reveal

At some point on December 25, the admins re-open the archive to browsing with all of the new stories available, and every participant is emailed with a link to the story written especially for her.

Participants are strongly encouraged to leave a comment on the story written for them.

Author names are hidden for the first week, leading to an orgy of reading and reccing while the stories are standing entirely on their own merits.

The Author Reveal

Sometime on January 1, the admins un-hide the author names, and participants can finally see who wrote stories for them. Authors are also allowed to post their stories to other places at this point.

New Year's Resolution challenge

Once the author names have been revealed, the archive is opened to uploading by anyone again, and the New Year's Resolution (NYR) challenge opens. All of the unfilled requests from the Yuletide challenge are listed on a page, and anyone who wants to can write a story for one of them, uploading it for the recipient. The requirements here are a bit looser; since the recipient has already gotten the gift she signed up for, it's not necessary to try to tailor the story to her preferences.^[8]

NYR runs until signups for the next Yuletide open, at which point the archive is closed to new uploads as the admins prep for the new cycle.

Culture

One's Yuletide presents are brought to one by the Yule Goat. The reasons for this are lost in the mists of several years ago (but this editor is pretty sure Liviapenn started it singlehandedly^[9], and made fetch happen) but a Yule Goat is felt to be less religiously affiliated than a Santa.

Yuletide is a large fannish event, and is sometimes assumed to be a universal experience, like stepping on a lego brick in the middle of the night. Fans will ask "What did you get for Yuletide?" without first ascertaining if if you were a participant.

As yuletide approaches, the #Yuletide chat room becomes a site of increasing hysteria and hilarity, and for several months after you may expect to see reference to memes born there. The weeks leading up to Yuletide are often permeated by mass panic.

In 2008 eruthros and thingswithwings created One-Night Fandoms, a Yuletide tribute vid that celebrates the "the willingness to make fic and make fandom out of anything and everything, to throw yourself wantonly, joyfully, and passionately into a new fandom, even if it can only last a short time."^[10]

Controversy

In October 2007, fan mamadeb made a post in which she expressed her discomfort with the fact that signups for Yuletide were to take place during Sukkot, a turn of events that would make it more difficult for religious Jews to participate. Her post drew a lot of criticism, much of which chopchica assembled into another post, don we now our flameproof armor. In it she reposted her own first response to the situation: "All most of us are asking for is some acknowledgment that when a fic exchange takes place over Christmas, co-opts symbols used for Christmas, and goes live on Christmas, that people agree that it's Christmas-based...Instead, what we tend to get is mocking at the best, claims of playing the race card and screaming oppression, and accusations of trying to destroy everybody's holiday squee. That's what drives me (and many others) nuts." Other Jewish and Muslim fans spoke out about their own experiences of the Secret Santa phenomenon, which chopchica later rounded up in a list of links.

In their counterargument, many fans pointed out that the mods are Jewish, that the trappings of Yule are originally pagan, and that devout Christians would have just as much, if not more, trouble meeting the demands of Yuletide for religious reasons.^[11] Furthermore, while signups began on a Jewish holiday that year, they usually run for 1-2 weeks during late October/Early November. ^[12] As there is no benefit to an author signing up on the first day as opposed to the last day, the fact sign-ups opened on a Jewish holiday felt like a nonissue to many fans. Others noted that the framing of the conversation was itself problematic; Kass wrote, "When we define ourselves as the non-Christians who find yuletide problematic, we turn ourselves into the 'un-cola' -- a negative definition, rather than a positive one. We become complicit in a diminished definition of Judaism, one which centers around this snarl of tangled feelings of marginalization and victimhood."^[13]

For some Jewish fans, the issue became a symbol of the invisibility of Jews in fandom, and was one of the original inspirations for the founding of stilljewish.

Notable Stories

While the spirit of Yuletide is really about crafting a story to please one single recipient, in some years certain stories go viral, often due to being widely recced, and become well known within fandom, all the more for being relatively unique.

• Slave Bear Of Care-A-Lot by Tami, Care Bears BDSM (2005)
• Every Good Girl Does Fine by Charli J, Peanuts (2005)
• The Amazing Adventures of Hat Guy and the Girl Who Stole His Hat, by Raven, xkcd (2008)
• the sandwich story by Meredith, Calvin & Hobbes (2008)
• Wait Wait Don't Eat Me by Nestra, NPR (2009)

Related challenges

• Make The Yuletide Gay - not directly related, just a similar time of year and gets confused with Yuletide
• I Saw Three Ships - again, not directly related, but tends to get talked about together
• Dark Agenda Challenge

References

1. ↑ Updated ref: http://yuletidetreasure.org, accessed January 7, 2009
2. ↑ http://archiveofourown.org/collections/ accessed 25 Dec 2009
3. ↑ RivkaT. Yuletide retrospective (with links and references), 25 December 2009. (Accessed 26 December 2009)
4. ↑ The Yuletide FAQ: Assembling the fandoms, accessed August 29, 2008
5. ↑ The Yuletide FAQ: Signing up for Yuletide, accessed August 29, 2008
6. ↑ The Yuletide FAQ: After You Get Your Assignment, accessed August 29, 2008
7. ↑ The Yuletide FAQ: Pinch Hitting, accessed August 29, 2008
8. ↑ The Yuletide FAQ: What is the New Year's Resolution Challenge?, accessed August 29, 2008
9. ↑ Liviapenn. The story of the Yule Goat (äntligen!!!), 20 October 2009. (Accessed 26 December 2009)
10. ↑ thingswithwings, eruthros. One-Night Fandoms: A Tribute to Yuletide, 25 December 2008. (Accessed 26 December 2009)
11. ↑ Yuletide persecutes Jews, in: Fandomwank, 09 October 2007.
12. ↑ Yuletide Schedule accessed December 31, 2008
13. ↑ On Judaism and fandom, accessed November 3, 2008.