Holidays — Tag Meaning
The general celebration tag covering any holiday setting, used when a fic spans several festivities or when the specific occasion doesn't have its own tag worth reaching for. Holiday fic as a genre trades on heightened emotion: travel, family obligation, traditions kept or broken, and the loneliness or belonging the calendar enforces.
What to Expect From "Holidays" Fics
Festive framing around the real story — which is almost always about who you spend the day with.
How to find Holidays fics on AO3
On AO3, click any tag to see every work that uses it, then refine with the "Filters" sidebar — combine it with your fandom or ship, set a rating, or exclude tags you don't want. See our AO3 filtering guide for the full walkthrough.
Browse "Holidays" works on AO3Popular Fics Tagged "Holidays"
Real examples from AO3's most-kudosed works:
Related Tags
Christmas
Marks fics set during the Christmas season, from religious observance to purely secular tinsel-and-cocoa festivity. Fandom produces an enormous December surge of these — advent calendars of daily fics, gift exchanges, and holiday-themed events — and the season's themes of homecoming and generosity shape most of the storytelling.
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Thanksgiving
Gathers the cast around an American Thanksgiving table — biological family with all its landmines, or the found-family Friendsgiving that fandom prefers, where everyone brings a dish and nobody brings judgment. Turkey disasters and the fake-dating-for-the-relatives scenario are seasonal staples.
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New Year's Eve
Builds the fic toward midnight: parties, champagne, resolutions, and the countdown as a romantic deadline. The midnight kiss is the tag's gravitational center — who you're standing next to when the year turns matters enormously in fanfic physics — and the holiday's themes of endings and fresh starts suit reconciliation arcs perfectly.
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Halloween
Covers fics set on or around October 31st: costume parties, haunted house dares, trick-or-treating with kids in tow, and pumpkin carving competitions taken far too seriously. Authors use costumes as plot devices — anonymity, revealing choices, couples' costumes worn by people who aren't couples yet — and some let actual ghosts crash the party.
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More Settings & Events Tags
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