Collection of Heart Warming Hearth's Warmings

by SwordTune

Foreword

If I have learned anything from my work this year, it is the true breadth of acceptance. For the old, the new, the outdated, and the ahead-of-their-time stories, I have let myself accept them all.

The number of generations who have celebrated the holidays is beyond astonishing. In writing this year's compilation of iconic holiday stories the biggest challenge was finding the right words. Ponies and their traditions change over time. Ever since the first Hearth's Warming celebration, the folktales we have considered iconic and steadfast are anything but.

So, to enjoy the holiday in its entirety I needed to find as many different traditional folktales as I could. I did not want to write another "Collection of Manehattan Hearth's Warming Stories" to put my book at the top of the metropolitan charts. These are pieces of Equestria's traditions, all of them.

In Equestria's modern society, that may be hard to understand. Our culture's education is built to adhere to objective truths where there are right and wrong answers to every problem; black and white, with little grey in between. Most recently, the phenomenon of the School of Friendship has brought the functional unit of society, our interpersonal relationships, to the desks of students with multiple-choice tests and essay prompts.

With all of this focus on right and wrong, it's become easier and easier to cast others in a different light. If a tradition is different, then it's not the right one, then it must be wrong; that is the usual thought process when someone can't accept some pony else's traditions.

And it's not just when we encounter differences between different locales. Different generations of ponies have their own contexts to how they first learned Equestrian tradition. Over the centuries, this proud nation has picked up and left behind practices that would now be considered no longer socially acceptable.

Many folk songs and folktales speak about the Two Sisters with an almost cult-like reverence, despite their efforts to appear as one with their ponies and their state. Among the youth of this country, it has become inappropriate to celebrate a past that the princesses want to leave behind.

But tradition is tradition, and come the winter holidays, many still sing the reverential songs, even if they know full well the values of the original singers have been absent for upwards of five hundred years.

So I ask you to let me show you the true spirit of acceptance and read along. Read to your family and your friends. Read to yourself and appreciate that, no matter what the stories may be, millions across every mile of the surface we call Equestria happily gather, wherever and however they can, to celebrate the same annual phenomenon called Hearth's Warming.

Sincerely, from my cosy desk in Trottingham to yours. Wherever it may be.
~Historia Writ

Comments

[SwordTune]

9380718
Uh, excuse me? I don't understand what you mean.