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12/25/24: I had to buy the ebook because I forgot to grab my paperback to bring with me to India, and let me tell you the crappy formatting almost ruined the experience. What angers me is publishers taking advantage of their authors' backlists, putting them in ebook format so they can make more money, but not doing basic cleanup on the text. This is particularly important for a Discworld book, which has no chaptering; there were huge blank spaces and a couple of missed section breaks and some punctuation that altered the meaning of the story. I am trying to regain my holiday cheer, but somehow seeing this book, which has so much to say about why people believe and the commercialization of holidays, treated as a commodity seems particularly wrong.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

12/23/22: Missed reading this last year, made up for it with the new audio production. I don't know what more I can say than I've said before. This is still near the top of my holiday reading list. I loved sharing it with my husband this year.

12/22/20: I don't actually know how many times I've read this, but enough that I didn't expect to be surprised by it. But Susan and Death's conversation about humans learning to believe the little lies (i.e. the Hogfather bringing presents to all the good little boys and girls) so they can believe the big lies (i.e. justice, mercy, love) really struck me this time. Death says, in essence, that those things exist nowhere in the universe in any concrete way, and yet humans insist on believing them--and Susan replies that if they don't believe, what's the point? I kind of like the idea of humanity being a function of all of us telling the universe where it can get off.

12/9/19: Not much to add this year, except I laughed a lot and disturbed my husband, who was also reading but whose book wasn't as good as mine. Ho. Ho. Ho.

12/23/18: It never ceases to amaze me how well Terry Pratchett, an atheist, understood the nature of belief, of how belief is a peculiarly human characteristic and what it means that humans need things to believe in, for good or ill. Hogfather is one of my favorite Christmas books, and I try to re-read it every couple of years at this season. This time, I particularly loved the computer Hex's transformation into a believer in the Hogfather, and how that made it just as entitled to a relationship with that god/anthropomorphic personification/demiurge as any human child. I also love Susan's relationship with her grandfather Death, and how Death both fully understands human nature (in the way he gets Susan involved in the Hogfather's disappearance) and really, really doesn't (in practically everything else.)

Two scenes come to mind when I think of what this book says about the Christmas season. One is the "Good King Wenceslas" scene, where Death interrupts a king giving his leftovers to a proud, poor man who never asked nobody for nothing. Death's well-made point is that the king gave of his abundance not because he cared for the man, but because it made him feel good to receive gratitude. I have been in the position of receiving well-meant but humiliating charity, and it's made me conscious of my own motives--giving is all very well, but where am I the other 364 days of the year?

The second is the "Little Match Girl" scene (this book is heavily populated with references to familiar Christmas stories) in which Death intervenes to keep the little girl alive rather than let her die to be a heartwarming tale for the more fortunate to remember and be grateful they aren't a frozen child dead in the snow. I don't like Christmas stories whose purpose is solely to tug at the heartstrings, to evoke emotion on the back of other people's tragedies, and the image of Pixie Albert pelting the angels with snowballs makes me laugh.

12/24/16: I love this book. The interactions between Death and his granddaughter Susan are perfect. It's something I re-read every year, a reminder of all the symbolism behind the waning of the year. And there's so much going on in this book: the wizards and their investigation of why there's suddenly a Verruca Gnome and a Cheerful Fairy wandering the halls of Unseen University, the horribly creepy Teatime and his clever but simple plan to "inhume" the Hogfather, Death's scramble to keep the sun rising, and Susan, caught up once again in her grandfather's plan. The Auditors are probably my favorite of Pratchett's villains, because they are so antithetical to life in all its shapes, and yet are torn by the same impulses to become individuals that humans are. It's a marvelous story, with a deeper meaning beneath the humor of the surface: Remember the poker.