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Saegen Cultural Artifacts
A collection of Saegen cultural miscellany
Courtship & Marriage
Northerners in general are a lot less touchy in their shows of affection than the South. They're more about subtle glances, licking your lips, brushing hands, and finding excuses to touch. Unfortunately, this isn't very friendly to those who struggle with this kind of subtle language.
Thankfully, the Saegen are more open than the Thuilleans, who will tell it to you straight at a certain point. Writing and singing songs for those you love is a very common Saegen tradition (though it's seen as "common" in Thuille and is only for those already in relationships) The Saegen inherited this from the selkies, who sing, fight, and throw seaweed at their intended.​
For marriage, the Saegen have a hand-tying ceremony and dance combination. At the end, someone carries someone over a doorframe into the new home. More of this anon.​
Marriages are mostly about dictating who gets your stuff when you die and are a chance to flex on your neighbors with a party. They're basically legal affairs with some ceremony attached to them. You're not technically supposed to have kids (and therefore, sex) before marriage because then they won't get your stuff if you die.
Saegen Children's Drawings
Saegen children's drawings are inspired by wooden peg dolls. The peg dolls have hair, feet, and painted eyes, but no mouths or noses. Their clothes are either wrapped on, painted, or both - with the belt being the most prominent feature. Children do not have universal access to drawings in an official capacity but drawing in the dirt or carving into trees is more widely available.
The Calendar
The North divides the year into four seasons, 30 day months (3 per season) (6 days to a week, 5 weeks to a month) and 6 days at the end of the year which do not belong to any month, one for each god and the last day for all of them--Yuletide and the Winter Solstice. That is the new year. Every 4 years, the first 4 days of Winter are "given up to the gods" and the Calendar jumps to the 4th of Winter.
Nouveau Thuille has declared it to be the year 412 DE (412th year of the Deplan d'Eime d'Thuille aka. Destruction of the Empire). Before that is known as AR (Aivina Roi, before the king).
Saegenheim officially also denotes a time "two thousand years ago" as being the era when the gods walked the earth and Saegenheim selkie songs and fiction is set in these days with actual years, but whether these dates hold any actual meaning is up for scholarly debate.