A Very Honeytrap Christmas (Eve)

[osprey_archer]

I've been away all weekend visiting friends, but nonetheless I come bearing your weekly dose of Honeytrap! This week is a follow-up to last week's huddling for warmth scene: after all these lengthy descriptions of Christmases of Yore, Daniel decides that the only possible thing to do is to invite Gennady to come along for a family Christmas, because after all it's not like he has any Christmas plans lined up or possibly even celebrates Christmas.

Thus Gennady becomes a guest in a Real American House. This gives him complicated feelings.

So here you go! Home for Christmas.

Comments

[ancientreader]

That passage is brilliant. Gennady's emotions remind me v. strongly of my Polish relatives' when we visited them back in the 1970s and early 1980s -- especially their emotions in response to me, as I see in retrospect, because I was young enough to behave with tactless, innocent bountifulness. Damn, this book is going to be a knockout.

[osprey_archer]

I'm glad it rings true to you! I've read a number of memoirs and the two-pronged Soviet attitude toward America really struck me, the mixture of admiration and resentment. It's so different than the attitude toward the Soviet Union in Cold War America.

It strikes me that the American attempts to basically dazzle the Soviet Union into submission with displays of consumer goods were perhaps naive: most humans don't just lie down and die when they're impressed, it's natural to start touting one's own achievements: "Yeah, well, Sputnik! So there!"