The Animalia Christmas Exposition begun with some of the more familiar features, as well as some new ones.
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There was the famous "ignition" of the Great Snow War, with all of the reenactment that helped explain what WWI was about. To Elly, it was greatly educational, mainly because of how WWI contributed to the Russian Revolution, as well as WWII afterward.
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The winter solstice party was not only another getting to know you dinner, but also a showcase of some well known, and less well known, winter foods. Mostly it was food that had "hot" in its name somewhere, but there were also some that were funnier than others, after a fashion.
"I'd be careful with that," said one college guy as several went over to get pretzel rods and cheese dip. "That cheese dip was made by Randal at Pi Eta Tau."
"So?" asked one of them, not really getting it.
"Apparently Randal really likes extremely spicy foods." said the guy, just as several people started yelling with the heat and guzzling Coke.
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"I still don't see why borscht is considered a holiday food." said Abby as Sarah and Malice's grandma Edna placed a pot of "holiday" borscht on the table near the other soups and stews.
"It's apparently common back in Russia." said Sarah, having remembered eating it several times when her grandparents came over for Christmas.
"It tastes like glue," said Sarah's grandpa Boris, "But I've been eating it for 60 years."
"Elly's not complaining." said Jessica, as she saw Elly eagerly filling a "bread bowl" with the cold beet stew.
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There was also a gift-wrapping class nearby to show how to wrap gifts of certain sizes, followed by placing them under Animalia's community Christmas tree. Most of them were about wrapping gift baskets, and similar oddly shaped presents, but there were also "ribbon-tying" classes, especially on how to achieve certain kinds of ribbon "art", for lack of a better term for it. But that didn't mean that there weren't funny things going on.
One of the chaperones was looking over several younger kids attempts and came across another case of "going overboard".
"Whoops." said another guy that Elly classified, in not a mean way, as the "village idiot", "Uh, ma'am, I think I just gift-wrapped my head." It wasn't entirely untrue, the box he had prepared for such an occasion had a large enough oval for him to slip it on and off his head comfortably.
Another chaperone was looking over another group of kids and was a little confused at one kids wrapped gift.
"Why did you poke holes in your gift?" she asked.
"I like to do that." said the kid, "It makes my older sister nervous."
"Oh, right. Pestering your older sister." said the chaperone.
"This one time I got some Biohazard stickers at the store..." said his friend.
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There were also requests being dropped off at Horizon's table for "conversion gifts" to be delivered for Christmas.
"So these are all friends of yours who shared the same suffering as you do?" asked the representative, writing things down.
"Yes." said Anne Cumbertin, now speaking nearly perfect English but retaining enough of her accent to make her sound "exotic", as one college frat boy called it, much to her irritation, "Their paperwork has been processed and they should be here in time for the Christmas party."
"Alright." said the representative, looking as if he was fighting off a migraine.
"What is it?" asked Janice, noticing it.
"It can be somewhat surprising of how even more intolerant some countries can be of their LGBT members than the US." said the scientist, "Officially, these people are part of an 'outreach program', but it's clear that they learned about our homosexual anonymous program and decided to send them there to 'de-program' their LGBT members."
At hearing that, one visitor began cursing in Ancient Norse under his breath while another told about a really amusing incident of instant, relevant, karma.
"I once saw some officers in Turkey try to use water cannons to disperse a Pride Parade, only for the water spray to form a perfect rainbow above the parade."
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Because of the proximity of the Great Hall to the "Western Front" of the Great Snow War, it was easy for participants/soldiers to be "evacuated" for "first aid" in the Great Hall. Even then, occasionally the odd "artillery strike would hit the side of the building, but fortunately there was no smoking pile of war debris left.