{"id":2016,"date":"2021-12-14T17:01:13","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T17:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2021-12-31T13:29:45","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T13:29:45","slug":"christmas-on-ganymede-by-isaac-asimov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2016","title":{"rendered":"Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Christmas on Ganymede<\/em><\/strong> by Isaac Asimov (Startling Stories<\/em>, January 1942)1<\/sup> opens with Olaf Johnson hanging decorations in the colony\u2019s dome when he and all the other men are summoned to a meeting with their boss: they learn that, thanks to Johnson, the native Ossies (who are the colony\u2019s labour force) have learned about Christmas and will go on strike unless Santa Claus visits. Johnson is nominated to be Santa.
The rest of the story sees the conversion of an anti-grav sled into a sleigh, the capture and sedation of Ganymedean spineybacks for use as reindeer, and the costuming of Johnson:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not going anywhere in this costume!\u201d he roared, gouging at the nearest eye. \u201cYou hear me?\u201d
There certainly was cause for objection. Even at his best, Olaf had never been a heartthrob. But in his present condition, he resembled a hybrid between a spinie\u2019s nightmare and a Picassian conception of a patriarch.
He wore the conventional costume of Santa. His clothes were as red as red tissue paper sewed onto his space coat could make it. The \u201cermine\u201d was as white as cotton wool, which it was. His beard, more cotton wool glued into a linen foundation, hung loosely from his ears. With that below and his oxygen nosepiece above, even the strongest were forced to avert their eyes. p. 88<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Johnson\u2019s perilous flight to the Ossies\u2019 camp is made even more dangerous when the spineys wake up en route, but he eventually gets there safely. The Ossies get Christmas tree ornaments for presents (they think the globes are \u201cSannyclaws eggs\u201d), and then demand a visit every year\u2014which to them is a seven-day revolution around Jupiter.
This is an early work by Asimov that\u2019s longer than it needs to be and whose characters are rather cartoonish (one of the prospectors\u2014sorry, colonists\u2014chews tobacco). But it\u2019s a pleasant enough piece that produced a couple of smiles.
** (Average). 5,450 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. This was published around the same time as Nightfall<\/em> and the first \u2018Foundation\u2019 stories (late 1941 to mid-1942), but was written a year or so earlier, as Asimov notes in The Early Asimov<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The success of \u201cReason\u201d didn\u2019t mean that I was to have no further rejections from Campbell.
On December 6, 1940, influenced by the season and never stopping to think that a Christmas story must sell no later than July in order to make the Christmas issue, I began \u201cChristmas on Ganymede.\u201d I submitted it to him on the twenty-third, but the holiday season did not affect his critical judgment. He rejected it.
I tried Pohl next, and, as was happening so often that year, he took it. In this case, for reasons I will describe later, the acceptance fell through. I eventually sold it the next summer (June 27, 1941, the proper time of year) to Startling Stories<\/em>, the younger, sister magazine of Thrilling Wonder Stories<\/em>.
<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov (Startling Stories, January 1942)1 opens with Olaf Johnson hanging decorations in the colony\u2019s dome when he and all the other men are summoned to a meeting with their boss: they learn that, thanks to Johnson, the native Ossies (who are the colony\u2019s labour force) have learned about Christmas and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[286],"tags":[554,17,555,287,444,12,61],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isaac-asimov","tag-554","tag-17","tag-colonised-planet","tag-isaac-asimov","tag-santa-claus","tag-short-story","tag-startling-stories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2212,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions\/2212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}