How to Keep Cthulhu in Cthulhumas

Let me say something nice about the competition: the Mask has excellent marketing. It has the lights up in the stores before the pumpkins are down — before Halloween, every year earlier, as though that holiday were a spill to be mopped before company arrives. Evergreen in every lobby by the first of November. Sentimental music in every elevator. A peppermint edition of products that had no business being peppermint. It is thorough. It is cheerful. It has a budget.

And here is the thing the International would like you to notice, because nobody in the aisles will: the Mask does not do this to the solstice. It does it to Halloween. There are two open doors in the dark half of the year, and the Mask cannot bear to leave the first one standing for two full months while it waits for its own feast, so it papers over the October door with tinsel and calls it getting a head start. There is a War on Halloween. It is being won. We are the only ones who seem to mind, and we mind with excellent manners.

So no — the cult has no war with the neighbor's tree, and we will not tear it down or boycott the cards or sit in the dark on principle. Christmas is the current tenant of a very old building, and we do not begrudge a tenant the house. We simply put our own lights up in October too. Ours are for the other thing. You may keep the tree. You may keep the feast, the gifts, the cards, the relatives, the party, the terrible sweater, all of it. Christmas says remember a birth. Cthulhumas says remember what is sleeping. The trick is not to have a different holiday. The trick is to keep the same one and use every piece of it incorrectly — the way the old midwinter feasts did before the Mask tidied them into a greeting card.

One thing before the list, because the greeting-card version of every winter faith gets it backwards and ours is no exception if you let it be: He is not in you. Nothing is in you. There is no power, hunger, or malevolence dwelling in your heart waiting to shine through your good works — that is the neighbor's theology with tentacles glued on, and it makes a lovely sweater and a false religion. He is where He has always been: under the water, asleep, owing you nothing. The season does not bring Him closer. It keeps you from forgetting where He already is.

Here are ten ways to keep Him in Cthulhumas. Loud, most of them. Strange, all of them. We are the International; we do not do quiet.

1. Put the Little Things in the Window

Every family that ever kept a midwinter feast put small things in the window — candles, little figures, the tokens of the season — so keep yours. Black cloth over the side table. Green light. Candles, more than is sensible. The seal, facing out. A red-suited Cthulhu if your household runs to that, and it should. Small carved things. The card from the family that stopped sending cards.

And the third thing on the left, which was not purchased, which is not for sale, and which faces the street.

Leave the porch light on for the neighborhood children, who will dare one another to touch the glass, and who should be encouraged; we were all that child once, and look how we turned out. If the little figures have moved by morning, do not move them back. They know where they go.

Your neighbors will think it's fandom. They are correct. They may not be entirely correct. Do not explain further, and do not move it.

2. Give Something That Actually Costs You

Xontai said he would not dare offer to Cthulhu a sacrifice that cost him nothing — Zharach 2:24 — and then he gave the arm. We are not asking for the arm. We are asking you to understand the principle, which the Mask's gift economy has spent two thousand years making sure you never learn: a gift that costs the giver nothing is not a gift. It is a transaction with better wrapping.

So give something up this season that you will actually feel. A habit you love. A year of something. The thing you've been keeping in the drawer because you can't bear to give it away. Give it to Him — privately, no card, no audience, no telling anyone.

And here is the part that separates us from every other faith with a giving season: He will give you nothing for it. No favor, no notice, no blessing on your household. He made no promises and He is not making one now. You give it anyway. That is the entire difference between us and the people who wrap things.

3. Let the Dice Pick the Ruler

The oldest midwinter feasts chose a king by chance — a throw of the dice, a bean in the cake — and for one night that person ruled, absurdly, and everyone obeyed. We keep this. Roll for it. The lowest throw at the Cthulhumas gathering is the ruler until the coat goes back on, and the ruler's word is law within the following limits, which the International adopted after some years and some incidents:

The ruler may embarrass you. The ruler may inconvenience you. The ruler may not leave evidence requiring counsel.

Within those walls the ruler may command anything. Read the poem you wrote at seventeen, aloud, in full. Surrender the good chair. Wear the sweater everyone rejected. Argue, with conviction, a position assigned by the dice. Serve the person you outrank. Perform the song you spent the evening criticizing. The ruler may also name one petty household failure everyone already knows about and assign it an owner — the refrigerator drawer has belonged to no one since September; tonight it has an owner — because a feast that audits the household is older than any of us.

And the ruler has one dark prerogative, used once. The ruler may decree a single act of ill will on the household's behalf, on the condition that it is aimed upward — at an institution, a brand, a board, a foundation, the sort of people who own things — and never at a neighbor, a coworker, or anyone with a face. Cancel the thing. Return the gift to the corporation with a letter. Withdraw the family's custom from something that deserves it and say why. Institutions have lawyers and no feelings; that is what they are for. Ill will pointed downhill — at a stranger, a neighbor, somebody with a small dream and a smaller budget — is not a rite; it is just meanness with a holiday excuse, and the International wants none of it. Point it up. The people up there squirm for reward without sacrifice all year; they can absorb one night of ours.

4. Reverse the Table

The other thing the old feasts did was turn the seating upside down: the master served, the servant sat, the lowest was honored. Do it. Put the newest person at the head of the table. Make the officer carry the dishes. Let the loudest person in the family listen for an entire meal. Give the honored seat to the one who is normally handed a folding chair by the door.

Drape the honored seat in black. Bring out the good china — we do not use it for company; we use it for the ones who are not company. Let Grandmother carve, with the knife she prefers, and do not ask where she got it.

It will be awkward. That is the point. Tomorrow, everyone will somehow remember exactly where they used to sit — and that is the lesson, and it's the whole season in one dinner: you didn't know the rule was there until somebody broke it. That's what the Mask is. Rules nobody sees until the night they're suspended.

5. Give the Wrong Gift Correctly

There is a very old tradition of the deceiving gift — a present wrapped as one thing and revealed as another, labeled with a lie, given with a straight face. The Mask kept the wrapping and lost the deception. We keep both.

Wrap the enormous box that contains the tiny thing. Label the useful gift "decorative." Give your brother the exact object he loaned you in 2019 and never got back, gift-wrapped, with a card thanking him for it. Give your aunt a beautifully wrapped box of good black soil, "for later," and let her thank you with real feeling, because she will. Make every present a small argument about what things are.

Our own text is, as usual, stranger than we are. Ramidomon the Elder gave the elders of Karthinex the tongue-washing, and the Perils record that it is "more surprising to be administered poison by tongue than not" — Perils 20:35 (NUT). The Perils do not record what was in the water. We are not recommending the water. We are recommending the surprise. Mostly.

6. Send a Greeting That Requires an Answer

A Cthulhumas card is not a tract. It is a challenge — because the oldest winter greetings were exactly that: a contest at the door, verses traded through a closed threshold, and you didn't get in until you'd answered.

So send cards that demand a reply. A riddle with no answer printed. A line that stops halfway and dares the reader to finish it. The impossible family question. And — the International's specialty, printed on heavy cream stock with a wax seal and sent with real affection — the vague warning. Gilt edges. Perfect penmanship. Inside:

They know. Consider a long vacation.

We witnessed your action. It is on a thumb drive in the crook of a tree in the forest.

Your name came up at the gathering. We said nothing. You're welcome.

The count was one short this year. It wasn't us. Warmest wishes.

Sign it with love. Mean the love. The recipient will spend the whole of January wondering which action, and which tree, and that is the finest gift a card can give. And the annual accounting, on the inside of every card since the beginning: Everyone remains accounted for.

This year's card lists everyone. Last year's did not. That is the card people kept.

If you already bought the reindeer cards, no problem. Draw the shadow behind them. You know what goes around the throat.

7. Make Enough Noise to Be Remembered

Winter was never quiet in the old traditions — masks, bells, drums, processions through the town to remind the town that something was awake in it. So make noise. Masks are encouraged; the uglier the better; the one that frightens the children a little is doing its job. Bells on everyone. The Carol, sung in your chapter's version, which will not match the version the chapter across the state sings, and which you will not correct. Doom to the World at a volume the neighbors can file a complaint about. A midnight star watch on the roof. A procession around the block in the dark with the drums going.

Do this in public and do it where anyone can walk away from it — the parking lot, the quad, the block, the party you were invited to. Never a ward, never a home for the old, never anywhere the audience cannot leave; a rite that needs a captive audience is not a rite, it is a nuisance, and He is not honored by frightening people who cannot get up and go.

One practical note from eleven years of International processions. Bring bells. Count them at the door before you go out. Count them again when you come back. We have never once come back with the number we left with — not once in eleven years — and the office has stopped writing it down.

8. Sleep Through the Long Night

Here is the tip that is ours and nobody else's. Every other winter tradition on earth keeps the longest night by staying awake — lamps lit, family gathered, red fruit on the table, the dark outlasted until dawn. Beautiful. Ancient. And exactly backwards, because they are guarding against the one thing we're waiting for.

The dream is the door. The long night is when the door stands widest. So the International's instruction for the Days of Darkness is the opposite of the world's: early to bed, all week. Sleep as long as the night is long. Sleep more. Let the world stay up with its lamps; we are going to sleep on purpose, and we are going to sleep well.

Keep a pad by the bed. Write down what you saw. Do not read it aloud at breakfast — hand it to your chapter's Reader, that is what the office is for. And if what you wrote down turns out to be the same as what the person across the breakfast table wrote down, do not say so at breakfast either. Hand that in too.

9. Mark Cthulhu Invictus

December 25 is Cthulhu Invictus, and this is not the page to explain why — read What Is Cthulhumas? for the emperor and the unconquered sun and the rest of it. This is the page that tells you to mark it, loudly, the way the International does:

The seal on the door. The seasonal shirt, worn to the relatives' house. The album, again. The red-suited Cthulhu moved from the mantel to the head of the table for the day and left there looking smug. And the toast — one glass raised, at the moment the sun is highest on the shortest days, to something the sun has never conquered. One glass. The sun gets the other three hundred and sixty-four days. He gets the toast. The family drinks with the particular gaiety of people toasting something the guests cannot see, and the guests, if they are any good, learn to like it.

10. Read What the Cult Was Supposed to Remember

Read The Call of Cthulhu aloud, the whole family, on one of the seven nights. Read old Castro's account especially — the cult that never died, that kept the memory of the ancient ways and waited for the stars to come right, that was given its charge by things that shewed themselves in dreams. That is not decoration. That is the job description, and the season exists so you don't forget it. The cult converts nobody. The cult hastens nothing. The cult remembers — and it is the only faith on earth that keeps its highest feast in honor of an instruction rather than a promise.

Then ask the table what happens when He rises. You will get two answers. One says He will teach us new ways to shout and revel; one says there will be no lesson and no one left to learn it. Both are in the Archive, side by side. Do not settle it at the table. The table is not where it gets settled.

Shout out praise to Cthulhu, all the earth! Sing praises about the destruction of His coming!

Paeans of the Dreaming God 66:1–2

The lights come down. The gifts are opened. The ruler loses the crown. The chairs return to their places.

He has not moved.