Peeve: Ramadan
Just read a nice little Harlan Ellison story ("Incognita, Inc.") in Ellen and Terri's Year's Best Fantasy & Horror that was originally published in the United Airlines in-flight magazine Hemispheres. But I'm not here to talk about the story (which I rather liked, especially the ending); I'm here to nitpick about a tiny point in it. This is at least the second, and I think the third or fifth, story I've encountered recently which strongly implies that Ramadan is in December. In this story, it's just a phrase (so I really am nitpicking here): it suggests that there's a time of year, "holidaytime," when Chanukah, Ramadan, and Christmas all take place (and that this has been true for sixty-some years). Bonus points for cultural diversity, but those points are partly canceled out for not noticing that the Islamic calendar is a lunar one, and that the day Ramadan starts shifts backward in the Gregorian calendar by about 10-12 days each year, taking roughly 36 years to precess through the entire Gregorian calendar. (Note, btw, that Ramadan is not a single day; it's an entire month, something else that some stories (though not necessarily this one) seem to be unclear about.) This mistake is probably due to the fact that Ramadan has started during January, then December, and now November since '94 or so; if you think of "holidaytime" as stretching from early December through the end of January, then sure, Ramadan overlaps with that period in about a quarter of all years. (Specifically, in those years in which it starts in early November through late January, which is three out of the twelve months it can start in.)
This reminds me, obliquely, that I've been meaning to note that it's kinda ironic that we at SH have now published two Christmas stories (albeit fairly nonsectarian ones), given that I don't think any of us fiction editors are practicing Christians. (Though I'm not certain of that.) I was going to suggest that people send us Hanukkah stories, but Hanukkah never used to be a major Jewish holiday; it became one in the US more or less out of self-defense, as I understand it. But we almost never see Ramadan stories, or Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur stories, or Passover stories, or Solstice stories, or stories that have much to do with Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, or any other religion. I'm sure this is partly because of science fiction's traditional hostility toward religion; we don't see all that many Christmas stories, either, and we weren't planning to run one this year 'til Madeleine's showed up. And I'm sure it's partly because Christianity (in various flavors) is still the dominant religion in the U.S., and we're still a largely American magazine (much as we'd like to be more international), and speculative fiction readers and writers (at least in the US) are still more likely to come from middle-class European-ancestry backgrounds than other backgrounds. But still, I'd be happy to see some good stories centered around religions other than Christianity.
(I may well be forgetting some that we've received and even some that we've printed; I haven't gone and checked our archives on this. But I'd still be happy to see more.)