Hello, Yuletiders–as you may have noticed, the anonymous setting on the Yuletide collection, which should hide all author names until reveals on January 1st, does not seem to be working as expected, and shortly after our planned works reveals, we had an unplanned reveal of author names. We’re very sorry for this unexpected breaking of anonymity!
We’re reaching out to AO3 to help us resolve the problem. In the meantime, we have updated all works manually, and author names should now be hidden again. If you notice we have missed any, please reach out to us privately at yuletideadmin@gmail.com.
Again, our apologies–and we hope you enjoy the collection!
Yuletide Madness is scheduled to reveal at 9 PM UTC on 25 December, but this may be delayed if necessary to ensure author anonymity.
ETA: We know many of you have received email notifications to say, "The collection maintainers of Yuletide 2025 have changed the status of your work [work] to anonymous..." This is a result of us updating them manually to hide author names, in order to achieve the same effect you would expect from reveals in an ordinary Yuletide. Sorry for the confusion! You can safely ignore these notifications; we will reveal author names on January 1st, manually if we have to.
Note the part where this is tagged as Original Music Composition! I GOT A GALAVANT SONG FOR YULETIDE!
There is a bug de-anonymizing the collection, so with any luck, my author will be willing to post more than the sheet music and save me from my current predicament of "I can sorta sight-read but not that well." I love the Madalena voice in this, so perfectly discontent with her amazing lot! and there's MUSIC!
Madalena's Ballad of Vast Success (1264 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Galavant (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Madalena (Galavant), Brief ensemble Galavant cast appearance Additional Tags: Character Study, Inspired by the song What Am I Feeling (Galavant), Original music composition, Post-Canon Summary:
Madalena stood on her balcony, in her castle perched high on a cliffside overlooking her vast and endless empire. "This is the best life has ever been. Everything I wanted is now mine... Yet sometimes it seems that there's something out there that eludes me, something I can neither buy nor take. But that's crazy! Who would dare deny me? Deceive or defy me? None at all! Well, almost none!"
Galavant 2:
The share button isn't working on Tad Cooper, a Life, which is an adorable summation of the life and times of Tad Cooper, as one can imagine from the title. I enjoyed the POV the author chose!
Slow Horses + Rivers of London:
My other Yuletide author took me up on my deep and soulful desire for Slow Horses + Rivers of London, and does great things with the interaction of law enforcement and Regent's Park, and the various characters. Spoilers for Diana Taverner's fate if you've only done the first book/show, but nothing that will surprise anyone. I love the way the mundane and magical intersect here:
The Spirit of Regent's Park (2370 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Slow Horses (TV), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Thomas Nightingale, Diana Taverner, Jackson Lamb (Slow Horses), Emma Flyte, Molly Doran Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Yuletide Treat, add some magic to your spy show Summary:
Newly minted First Desk Diana Taverner visits the Folly to find out who this Thomas Nightingale fellow is, and learns a few things about London that are closer to home than she expects.
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What I wrote:
2 stories!
Spot either and I'll write you a drabble. One of them is so me it hurts and the other is less obviously so but still extremely Petra.
Editrix’s Note: This cocktail is a rerun from last year, and therefore it is in whatever pluperfect future (?) the tense was in the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. How was your Christmas? Let me tell you about the treats my brother Joe left under the tree. In the process, we’ll talk about how to adapt a recipe off the internet (like this one!) when you don’t have all the tools or ingredients you need. If you know the hows and whys of mixology, you can get great results for nearly any drink. Time to make a Wandering Rambler. Here’s the recipe.
Don’t forget to
Wandering Rambler
2 oz El Dorado 8 Year Rum
1 oz orgeat
.75 oz lemon juice
4-6 oz fresh apple cider
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
Shake all ingredients and pour into an old fashioned glass over ice. Garnish with an orange twist.
This Christmas, I traveled to New York City to visit family. The city isn’t my favorite place in the world, but I did have the pleasure of visiting Astor Wines, one of the best stocked liquor stores I’ve ever seen. [Editrix’s note again! I used to go there in college on my way home from class, where they would always happily sell me something Hungarian for $2-$4.] Upscale NYC liquor stores tend to be a bit “curated” — they stock the stuff that the owner likes and skip the fundamentals. Astor Wines doesn’t have a single bottle of Bacardi, but they have several rare bottles of rum that I’ve lusted after all year. I purchased my big prize (Planteray Mr. Fogg, and my birthday is right around Memorial Day for future reference), and a bottle of 8 Year El Dorado as a backup. El Dorado's a favorite for fancy recipes in books like Death & Co, and I thought it would be fun to give it a try.
The next day, I visited my brother Joe and his family in New Jersey. Joe provided me with a heavy gift bag and an innocent smile. In the bag was a bottle of orgeat and … another bottle of El Dorado 8 Year. Joe pulled up a recipe from the Internet and showed it to me. “I thought you could make this for everyone!”
Now, I love my brother dearly, but he’s not a cocktail guy. That meant that he didn’t have the basic tools I keep at home for cocktail making, like a shaker or a jigger. The recipe he provided was in metric, which I don’t speak, at least when it comes to cocktails. And with six adults in the house, I needed to multiply his recipe several times over. However, I’ve seen enough cocktail recipes to understand why an ingredient is in a glass. With that information in mind, I knew how to take what my brother offered and turn it into a party offering on the fly.
Let’s break down the ingredients in this one and talk about some choices I made to get this to the table. There’s some interesting options to explore here worth discussing, and I want to give you the tools that I used to dissect this recipe:
Ingredient Shot. I’ll look back on this picture of the rum fondly.
El Dorado 8 Year Rum: This bottle proved to be everything I could hope for — a dark rum from Guyana with caramel notes and enough astringency to cut through the natural sweetness of the spirit. But if you don’t have it, nearly any rum would do. Mount Gay rum would be pretty close to perfect here. So would Hamilton 86. If none of that is on the shelf at the liquor store, good old Bacardi Gold will serve. Bourbon would do as well. So would reposado tequila. The flavors surrounding the spirit — spice, apple, almond — matter more than the spirit itself.
Figuring out how much rum to use was a bit trickier. Joe didn’t have a jigger or other measuring device. I’ve been behind the stick long enough to free pour successfully, and it’s a nice skill to have. But in a pinch, whip out the kitchen measures — two tablespoons will garner one ounce of fluid.
Orgeat: For the record, this is pronounced “or-zho,” sort of like Zsa Zsa Gabour. This sweet almond syrup gets paired up with rum all the time in tiki drinks, but this drink isn’t tiki in any meaningful way. Orgeat is thick, and adds body to a drink. The nutty flavor is useful as a stable base. No orgeat? Simple syrup is fine. Splash in a few drops of amaretto and you’ll be good.
Lemon juice: Acid to balance out the orgeat. We’ve talked about how acid and sugar balance in the daiquiri, and that knowledge is key here. Use enough juice to keep the drink from being sugary or sweet, but not enough to make it tart. Fresh is always best, but if you’re stuck with bottled so be it.
Peychaud’s bitters: Here’s the curve ball that let me know where this drink was headed. Peychaud’s is an offbeat ingredient in rum drinks. This anise-flavored bitter is common in New Orleans cocktails like the Sazerac, but doesn’t show up often at the tiki bar. To make things even stranger, my brother’s Internet recipe called this a “five spice rambler” ... with no spices in evidence. What gives?
It turns out that Chinese five spice powder features star anise as a primary ingredient, similar to the anise in Peychaud’s bitters. Roughly five years ago, five spice powder was a sexy cocktail ingredient paired with rum. Jeffrey Morgenthaler wrote a recipe for a Dark and Stormy using five-spice infused rum. Five spice syrup made its way behind several bars in its time. It looks like this cocktail author decided to use Peychaud’s instead of a specialty ingredient for the drink. But if you don’t have Peychaud’s, making a syrup with five spice powder would be fine, and not too hard to find at the supermarket.
Apple cider: How much to use? Enough. Specifically, enough to make the drink as strong as your audience. My parents, Joe, and his wife aren’t big drinkers, so the ratio of liquor to juice was pretty low. Use the juice to keep the drink tasty. That’s what matters.
Prep and garnish: No cocktail shaker? A big water bottle with a screw top lid will do. Strain out the ice as you pour. No orange peel? Do without and don’t fret. Sometimes sacrifices must be made in the field. In the end, the only thing that matters is good rum, good cheer, and good company. The rest is just details.
In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!
We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck Bezos. Go read The Bar Book, by Jeffrey Morgenthaler. I’ve stolen a few of Jeffrey’s techniques behind the bar, and every single hack he comes up with is genius.
Yuletide just went live a little while ago, and I got not one but two lovely gifts!
(And, for the record, I opened both of them immediately upon golive before things glitched, so I haven't seen the writers yet and intentionally am avoiding looking to try to keep myself surprised since I know the mods are manually going through and fixing it right now.)
First up is my main gift, the kid is the turf for Home Alone. Some amazing person took my link to to a Bluesky post from last year ("the Wet Bandits team up against another burglar duo going after Kevin because he is *their* kid") and went with it, and it's brilliant. Gen. 3,489 words.
The second fic was a gorgeous treat for Stealing Fire by Jo Graham (part of the Numinous World series) called Her Last Confession. It focuses on Thais, written in the format of her speaking to Alexander decades upon decades after his death. Gen, with background F/M and M/M. 6,796 words.
As for my own fics, I ended up writing a fair number this year. I didn't beat my record from 2023 (ten fics), but I came close.
Thomas shook his head, gripping Vincent’s arms tightly to ascertain if this was indeed real and not a dream. Flashing him a warm smile, Vincent simply pats his arm comfortingly. Thomas felt his lips move, barely containing his pain and longing.
Movie of the day...The Return of the Vampire (1943).
An interesting old film with a two-part plot. Bela Lugosi gets to play a vampire, again, but this time he is the fearsome Armand Tesla, who terrorizes London during the years of the First World War. Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort) and her colleague Professor Saunders (Gilbert Emery) run a clinic and they have just lost a patient who has mysterious wounds on her neck. Then, Professor Saunders’ granddaughter Nicki, who is about four years old, is attacked and has the same wounds.
Saunders realizes he is facing a vampire. He and Lady Jane find Tesla’s tomb and drive a stake through his heart. More than twenty years later, however, a German bomb dropped during the Blitz unearths Tesla’s grave. Some well-meaning gravediggers find his body, remove the stake, and bury him again. But Tesla will soon rise from his grave. He is now free to stalk London again, and he wants revenge on Lady Jane!
Nicki (Nina Foch) and Lady Jane’s son John (Roland Varno) are grown up now and engaged to be married. Tesla plans to kill John and turn Nicki into his undead bride (which, when you remember that he also attacked her when she was a little girl, is a very special kind of creepy).
This is a pretty good vampire story from the black-and-white era. It was produced by Columbia Pictures and some people feel it is an unofficial sequel to Universal’s Dracula, with the vampire renamed to avoid any copyright issues. The script is not bad and most of the actors turn in decent performances. Lugosi is proud and ominous as Tesla. Tesla and Dracula are, not surprisingly, very similar characters, but there are a few subtle differences—Tesla is out for revenge and he seems more deliberately cruel in his actions.
Things get a little stagey at times, but not so much that it damages the story. There is an interesting subplot with a character Tesla has turned into a werewolf--can this poor man save himself and return to goodness? Finally, the sets and the cinematography are both quite good, deliciously eerie. Overall, if you are a fan of films from this period, it is a nice, entertaining movie.
I am trying to find the movie that belongs to this creepy scene i remember seeing in something like a watch mojo video.
It’s definitely from the 60s, I think black and white. This woman is in a cellar next to a set of stairs. A ghostly figure bolts across the scene while a high pitched score plays and the woman screams. The figure is witch like with a cloak. As it glides across the room, its form is totally frozen and spooky as hell.
Enjoy browsing the collection! Leave kudos and/or comments if you enjoy a story! Comment here to recommend stories, and/or recommend them at the yuletide comm!
I have three stories in the collection. Can you find them?
I shall now spend the rest of the day cuddling with my cats and reading Yuletide stories.
Enjoy 1539 works in 992 fandoms! (The number will go up as wranglers canonize fandoms - this will take a little time, though.)
The reveals process takes a little while to work in a collection of this size; if a story in the collection is still a mystery work an hour after opening, please let us know.
Finding works You can find your own gifts on your AO3 gifts page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR-NAME-HERE/gifts, or by searching the box at the top of the collection works page for the full name you signed up with, or by checking your email if you get email notifications from AO3. Note: your email notifications may bundle together, and it might look like you only got one gift, when in fact you got more.
You can browse the collection by tags or by fandoms. Some fandoms are new and may not show up immediately (wranglers are working on this) or where you expect them; please check labels such as Original Work, 19th Century Historical RPF, Object and Concept Anthropomorphism, and Unspecified Fandom. More info about Unspecified Fandom here.
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Madness For those still writing, the 2025 Yuletide Madness collection will stay open for new stories to be posted for 24 hours. It will close for posting, and open for reading, at 9pm UTC 25 December. If you're looking for prompts, there's a roundup of links here.
Problems If there is something wrong with your gift or you have another concern, please contact the mods at yuletideadmin@gmail.com.
...it's that time of year when there is a crisp chill in the air, a gentle hint of longer days to come, Santa Claus gagging a trussed-up Robin, and Batman proving that his claim to be “The World’s Greatest Detective” might be a little optimistic… (I mean… it’s fricking SANTA CLAUS Bruce!)
(It's from Batman #33 which came out in December 1945, so 80 years ago now!!)
Fandom: Heated Rivalry Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov Content Notes/Warnings: none Medium: digital art Artist on DW/LJ: n/a Artist Website/Gallery:linettesmth on tumblr Why this piece is awesome: Aaaand, it's the inevitable Klimt kiss portrait of Ilya and Shane, and very nicely done, too! I like the echoes of their team uniform colours in their robes. Link:Ilya and Shane
despite the fact that jud’s form and view of christianity is a very pleasant one, i appreciate that no part of benoit blanc is converted. it’s not like i expected benoit to become a christian obviously, but i expected him to potentially stay for a service at the end, when invited. or to show appreciation for what jud is building at his church. even just appreciation that he’s welcome.
after the whole movie, when benoit is given the invite, he stillsays there’s nothing he wants less than to stay in that church. it’s very, very reasonable and realistic of a traumatized atheist, but i almost never see it depicted in this way. usually they come around to “see the beauty” in one way or another. i just really appreciate that they didn’t do that.
What we put on our plates may matter more for the climate than we realize. Researchers found that most people, especially in wealthy countries, are exceeding a “food emissions budget” needed to keep global warming below 2°C. Beef alone accounts for nearly half of food-related emissions in Canada. Small changes—less waste, smaller portions, and fewer steaks—could add up to a big climate win.
Genuinely upset that I only discovered this absolute gem of a tv series a few weeks ago. As someone who has spent his teen years soaking up all kinds of horror films, especially low budget ones, until I was truly able to appreciate the high art of "trash", classical Grindhouse and exploitation as much as Lovecraftian dread, Blood Drive is simply everything obsessive weirdos like me could ever ask for. I'm completely amazed that a show like this exists.
In case you haven't seen it: Set in a post-apocalyptic retro future, it's about a race across what's left of the United States - using cars fueled by blood. (A concept it shares with the equally amazing Indie horror/comedy classic Blood Car - if you haven't seen that movie, you absolutely should as well)
As the story unfolds, the main chracters travel to weird towns, nightmarish truck stops and encounter all sorts of creative side plots. Amazing writing, awesome acting, a truly magnificent blend of all kinds of genres that's hard to describe. It's as if Firefly was set in a gore-fueled, dystopian nightmare that doesn't shy away from cosmic horror and the best aspects of Grindhouse movies. It's a loving hommage that blows up all limitations in every way and you should watch it right now because unfortunately, not many people did. Binged the whole series over the last few weeks and I'm left in awe.
I made a short psychological horror film focused on grief and family tension. It’s slow, quiet, and mood-driven, with an emphasis on atmosphere and emotional unease. If you’re into slow-burn horror, you might find it interesting.
Watching the Wizard of Oz and realized that THIS is the 1st movie that scared the hell out of me when I was a kid! That old bat taking poor Toto away to kill him, the witches feet curling up, mean looking flying monkeys & the wizards gigantic disembodied head! Not to mention, the wicked witch freaking melting from getting water thrown on her. JFC.
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