Tales of Ethshar

About “The God in Red”

We’ve been making our own Christmas/Yule/solstice/Chanukah/whatever cards for decades. Usually they’re pretty much your standard card, with a captioned picture on the front and a holiday greeting or punchline inside. Sometimes the art was commissioned, sometimes my daughter Kiri drew it, sometimes it was kludged together somehow. The idea was usually the result of a family conference, occasionally one person’s brainstorm. Some of them have been pretty good, if I do say so myself, and I keep meaning to put a gallery of them up on the web, but I always felt as if, as a writer, I should be writing something more substantial than a mere card. I mean, John M. Ford wrote “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” as a Christmas card, and I’ve gotten stories in cards, or as cards, from various other writers, ranging from short-shorts to an entire novel, so I felt I should be doing something along those lines. Coming up with a good idea for a Christmas story isn’t that easy, though, and so far I’ve only done it once. This was the result.

And yes, this is an official Ethshar story. It’s in continuity, as they say in comics. It is not necessarily, however, the real Santa Claus who appears.