It might be Christmas Day here on Earth, but for our favorite characters out among the stars, Earthly holidays are far from the only ones. After all, these hundreds of alien species have to have their own alien holidays, right? It’s not like there’s a Klingon Santa out there… any more (I’m sure we can blame that on Duras, too). Some space travelers, like the Doctor, still make time for Christmas–even if we wish they wouldn’t. But for the rest, we’ve got these, 4 alien holidays from sci-fi.

4. Radiant Solstice–Defiance

Hohoho! Don’t you want to catch me coming down your chimney at night?

What, you don’t remember this from the show? Well, good, because it’s actually from the MMO. In online games, it’s pretty common to have holiday-themed events, so it’s not a real surprise that something like this would crop up. What’s weird is that it seems to be a mixture of both Votan and human traditions, and last year the Tarrs sponsored a hunt for “9 unusual Reindeer.” Oh, yes. That is 100% real. Can’t you see Datak and Stahma doing that? It’s very in-character for them. That’s without mentioning the “Cyberclaus” outfit… I think we’re starting to see the dark side of linking a game to a TV show.

Let’s all just be thankful it stayed confined to the game, eh? The last thing Defiance needed was a riff on “It’s A Wonderful Life” featuring Nolan learning lessons about his importance while the Tarrs sighed heavily at Alak’s fascination with Human culture extending to the Christmas spirit.

3. Day of Honor–Star Trek

Apparently the Klingon Grail was easier to find than his sword was.

While the Klingons may not have a Santa, it should come as no surprise that their most important holiday would be one based around honor. We first hear of this on Voyager, where Tom tries to help B’Elanna celebrate it, so naturally we didn’t see much of it. It includes pretty much every Klingon ritual ever shown: eating the heart of a Targ, subjecting yourself to painstiks, fighting with a Bat’leth, and drinking from the grail of Kahless. One wonders why we never saw Worf celebrate it, since he’s into all of that.

Given the dating system Star Trek uses and the fact that this particular episode doesn’t even have a stardate associated with it, we can’t really say what time of year this takes place, but it clearly occupies a similar role in the religion surrounding Kahless to Easter or Christmas.

2. Days of G’Quan–Babylon 5

Meditating and fasting, like all the best holidays.

G’Quan was a prophet on the Narn homeworld, a leader against the Shadows over a thousand years before the time B5 is set. A religion cropped up around him and his alleged autobiography, the Book of G’Quan. Its holiest holiday is the “Days of G’Quan,” a series of festivals that occur once a year on the Narn homeworld. The festivities culminate in the consumption of the G’Quan Eth leaf, a rare plant, right at the time first sunlight strikes the peak of G’Quan Mountain (and I’m starting to think G’Quan would be great friends with Rassilon).

As you can imagine, that’s pretty tricky even living on the same planet but in a different time zone, much less living on a completely different planet, or on a space station like Babylon 5. It seems to take place around May, or at least it did the one time we saw G’Kar practicing it, but since the length of a year on the Narn Homeworld could easily be longer or shorter than ours, a distinction like that is rather meaningless.

1. Life Day–Star Wars

Chewbacca-sized robes have to be really expensive.

Oh yes, it’s that time of year again. That glorious Star Wars Holiday Special gave us the Wookiee festival of Life Day, which is about as close an analog to Christmas as anything on this list. How exactly you celebrate Life Day is never really clear, except that you need to be with your family and do Christmas-like stuff. What you do with them, be it watching instructional videos or cooking shows or space erotica, is up to you (and yes, all those things inexplicably happened). It’s only celebrated every three years, which is still too often.

Thankfully, what with all the resetting of the Canon that Disney did, we don’t have to worry about it any more. If you really want to commemorate Life Day this year, go see The Force Awakens instead.

That’s all for this week. It’s hard to make time to write these around Christmas, you know? If you can think of any other sci-fi or alien holidays, feel free to mention them in the comments. If you enjoy the article, share it!