Literature / Hogfather

It's the most wonderful time of the year, Hogswatchnight, when the Hogfather himself dons his red suit and climbs in his sleigh pulled by—of course—four hogs, to shower gifts across Discworld. But when the fat man goes missing, someone has to sit in. It's up to Death to take up the reins—otherwise the sun won't shine tomorrow... or ever again.

The 20th Discworld novel and the 4th in the Death theme, now becoming more like the Death-Susan theme.

Susan, Death's granddaughter, is trying to distance herself from her supernatural side by being normal (which is abnormal for the Discworld) and taking the position of governess in the Gaiter household, where she tries to instill some rationality into her young charges. Meanwhile, the Auditors' latest plan is to hire the Assassins' Guild to kill the Hogfather, the Discworld's Santa Claus analog. The task is given to Mr. Teatime, a creative but overly zealous young assassin, who has already hypothesized how to kill many anthropomorphic personifications in his spare time.

With the Hogfather out of the way, there seem to be a whole lot more minor gods and goddesses around than there used to be - and perhaps the disappearance of a tooth fairy might shed some light on the whole ordeal?

Preceded by Feet of Clay, followed by Jingo. Preceded in the Death series by Soul Music. Sort-of followed by Thief of Time, where Death and Susan do everything relevant that isn't done by Lu Tze or Lobsang. It was also the first book to be adapted by Sky One for a live action TV movie in 2006, starring David Jason as Albert and Michelle Dockery as Susan.

---

The book contains examples of:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Death's sword is noted to be so sharp that merely standing too close to it will sever the connection between body and soul. When Teatime gets ahold of this sword and returns to the real world by landing in Unseen University, he simply leaves by cutting through all the magic locks with it.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Catseye's father locked him in a cellar and beat him if he tried to get out, leaving him with a lasting fear of the dark.
  • Ma Lilywhite, considering that she is Medium Dave's greatest fear.
• An Aesop: Death delivers a straight Aesop near the end.
  Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

• All Girls Like Ponies: One of the kids visiting Death at the Maul wants a pony, despite her mother's objections that they live in a third-floor flat with no room for one. He gives it to her anyways.
• Analogy Backfire: Mr. Teatime's claim to be a security-guard's "worst nightmare" falls flat, because the guard's actual nightmares are a lot more bizarre than Teatime's threats.
  Teatime: I'm the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you stone dead.
  Guard (with relief): Oh, that one! But that one's not very -

• The Artifact: Susan is the Duchess of Sto Helit, which she inherited from her father Mort, who himself was given the job at the end of Mort. This makes her choice of occupation somewhat... unusual but it makes sense if you remember the ending of Mort and how all the Sto city states were supposed to merge together. Queen Keli is the one supposed to take care of it.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Subverted. Bilious, having only incarnated that night, is unfamiliar with most customs and keeps asking about how things like tooth fairies work. Susan gets fed up with how he keeps asking about something that would seem patently obvious on the surface, snapping at the question "where do they take the teeth after getting it from the pillow?", and Bilious believes he probably just stumbled into a silly question anyone else could easily answer. Then Susan realizes she doesn't actually know where the tooth fairies take the teeth they pick up and this is their new lead into figuring out what's going on.
• Assurance Backfire: When Hex recovers from its bout of "Bursar Disease" after Ridcully tells it it's just had a lot of dried frog pills, it declares it is now "As Sane As The Next Man". This isn't quite as reassuring as it hoped, as the Bursar himself is standing next to it at this point.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Mr. Brown's method of lockpicking is described as staring at the lock for five minutes, then picking out the exact tool he wants and opening the lock with a single twist of it.

• Badass Santa: Like our Santa, the Hogfather is derived from old pagan gods... just a little more literally. And then Death takes over for him. You'd better watch out...
  Have you been naughty... or nice?
• Bad Santa: Death is bad at being Santa. In a good way.
• Batman Gambit: It would have been against the rules for Death to get a human involved in his scheme, so he forbids Susan from getting involved, then pretends to be surprised when she predictably disobeys him.
• Bears Are Bad News: One of the bogeymen cooked up by Gawain and Twyla's previous nanny was bears that sneak up and devour naughty children who walk on pavement cracks. They've learned not to pick on kids when Susan is around, however.
• Beast in the Building: When Death temporarily replaces the Hogfather (the Disc's equivalent of Santa), he is advised to make a public appearance as a Mall Santa. He brings the whole sleigh along, all four enormous sleigh-pulling boars included. One pees on the stairs, much to the delight of the children.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Susan starts the book very annoyed by the power set that comes with being related to Death, and is aggressively attempting to be normal. Then she gets to the Tooth Fairy's country, where she is normal because Death doesn't exist there—and Teatime's goons get the drop on her because her powers aren't working.
• Becoming the Mask: At the start of his brief stint as the Hogfather, Death carries around a checklist of things he needs to do in order to keep belief going. At the story goes on, he gets more and more into the spirit of things, even doing things that would be antithetical to his real duties as The Grim Reaper.
• "Begone" Bribe: Foul Ol' Ron and his fellow tramps tell a restaurant owner that they'll sing (badly) for free, since it's Hogswatch. He takes the hint and gives them some food to make them go away.
• Berserk Button:
  • Death, to the Auditors' hypocritical argument at the end:
  One said, You cannot do this, there are rules!
  Yes. There are rules. But you broke them. How dare you? how dare you?
  • Banjo's mum always told him and his brother "don't hit girls", and after Teatime attacks Susan he finds out the hard way that Banjo doesn't like seeing others hit girls either.
  • Speaking of Banjo and Medium Dave's mum, saying anything bad about her is a very unwise idea if you'd like to leave the discussion in one piece.
  • Subverted as regards the pronunciation of Mr. Teatime's name - after he has repeatedly complained about this throughout the book, Susan tries to use it to put him off balance, but it doesn't work as he is merely mildly irritated by it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Death. Sure, he's Death and all, but this book shows that he cares a hell of a lot about the world, so don't mess with reality and piss him off. See Berserk Button above.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Teatime tries to invoke this, reasoning that anyone fighting Death would be seen as the good guy by default. He overestimates the terror of an animate skeleton (especially when it's just sitting in a chair eating a biscuit) and underestimates his own unsettling nature.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Done with a crowbar for extra absurdity.
• Bluebird of Happiness: Is actually a blue chicken.
• Book Ends:
  • One of the earliest scenes is Death on the ocean floor overseeing the death of a deep-sea organism that looks like a brilliant red flower when an apparently random rockfall kills it. Towards the end, he uses it as an example of the Auditors' antipathy to life to Susan:
    Death: Down in the deepest kingdoms of the sea, where there is no light, there lives a type of creature with no brain and no eyes and no mouth. It does nothing but live and put forth petals of perfect crimson where none are there to see. It is nothing but a tiny yes in the night. And yet... And yet... It has enemies who bear it a vicious, unbending malice, who wish not only for its tiny life to be over but also that it had never existed. Are you with me so far?
    Susan: Well, yes, but -
    Death: Good. Now, imagine what they think of humanity.
  • This is noted by Susan as significant in-universe because of how rarely Death speaks so emphatically (in italics).
  • Another early scene is of Lord Downey of the Assassins' Guild being bargained with by a supernatural entity that, to his dismay, entered his study without him hearing them. In one of the last scenes, the keeper of a toy shop bargains with a different such entity, also without hearing anyone enter.
  • At the beginning of the novel, Quoth the Raven is cross with the Death of Rats when he distracts him from paying a visit to a recently deceased donkey of which, the Raven says, there would be "hardly a hoof left" soon. Towards the end of the book, the Death of Rats arranges for the Raven to chance upon a fresh sheep carcass that he can have all for himself as a touching Hogswatch surprise.
• Bowdlerize: Mrs. Huggs, leader of the wassailers, revised traditional Hogswatch songs to eliminate "unwarranted coarseness", even in cases (like "The Red Rosy Hen") when it doesn't actually exist.
• Brains and Brawn: The Lilywhite brothers; Banjo is the brawn, Medium Dave is the brains.
• Brick Joke:
  • After accidentally summoning yet another would-be anthropomorphic personification, Ridcully wonders aloud where the glingleglingleglingle noise that accompanies each manifestation is coming from. Near the end of the book, he encounters the Glingle-Glingle-Glingle Fairy.
  • As Albert's trying to convince Death to let the matchstick girl's Died Happily Ever After to play out, he makes an offhand mention of angels appearing to carry her soul off to paradise. After Death defies the trope and saves her life, a pair of extremely miffed angels briefly materialize at the spot she was supposed to die. Albert throws snowballs at them.
  • "Anthill Inside". While it's entirely possible that this grew out of the concept, one certainly couldn't put it past Sir Pterry to have quite deliberately written the evolution of Hex across several novels (starting as the ant counting machine in Soul Music) and dragged it out as long as he dared for the sole purpose of making this truly groan-inducing pun.
  • Early on in the book is a footnote that brings up the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle: the entire reason for the existence of the universe is the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. Much later, Ridcully says "I thought (the universe) was run for us... Well, for the Professor of Applied Anthropics, actually, but we're allowed to tag along."
  • The Verruca Gnome notes that Jack Frost only draws ferns in frost patterns and suggests drawing big-eyed kids, little puppies, or cute kittens in a boot. Later on, it appears that Jack has mixed some of those ideas up as the frost forming on Biers' window are dogs looking out of a boot.
• Brought Down to Normal: Susan finds she can't do any of Death's tricks in the Tooth Fairy's realm. Luckily for her, neither can Death's sword.
• Call-Back: The Hogfather and the Tooth Fairy were both introduced as concepts in earlier books. Rincewind and Twoflower were seen wondering what the Tooth Fairy did with all those teeth back in The Light Fantastic.
• Chariot Pulled by Cats: Hogfather goes around bringing gifts to good children in an elegant sleigh drawn by cute little pink pigs. Or at least the sanitized modern version does; when Death covers the Hogfather's shift, he does it with a massive crude sled built out of logs and drawn by equally huge, hairy and non-housebroken boars.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • At the beginning of the book Ridcully makes an off-the-cuff remark:
  Ridcully: Get hold of something like someone's nail clippings and you've got 'em under your control. That's real old magic. Dawn of time stuff.
  • There's also Twyla's "It only kills monsters," near the beginning.
• Chekhov's Skill: Susan internally bemoans that her education has given her skills like being able to calculate the volume of a cone, but that's not quite the same as learning. She quickly deduces the scale of Teatime's plan with the Tooth Fairy's teeth by remembering the average size of baby teeth and then extrapolating that to figure out the volume of the cone of teeth laid out in the magic circle. She lampshades this by noting she doubts her teacher would have ever expected her to apply her knowledge of geometry like this.
• Children Are Innocent: Analyzes the dark side of this trope.
• Christmas Carolers: The Hogswatch Wassailers are a You Mean "Xmas" version of the trope. The Lemony Narrator says that if you could lift the scene up, there'd be an interesting assortment of chocolates or biscuits underneath.
  • And then there's the Canting Crew, who sing — or at least make vaguely festive noises — at people until they give them some money or food to go away.
• Christmas Episode: Done with a Discworld twist as various Christmas traditions are lampooned and discussed by the characters from mall Santas to stockings on the fireplace.
• Christmas Miracle: Numerous, including Death preventing a Little Matchstick Girl in progress.
  Albert: You're not allowed to do that.
  Death: The Hogfather can. The Hogfather gives presents. There's no better present than a future.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Along with Small Gods, the book in which the concept is most examined.
• Clothes for Christmas Cringe: Death, Subbing for Santa, asks Albert what he's supposed to give kids if they're on the naughty list, and is told socks or a woolly vest. He thinks it serves them right.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Ridcully mentions the time the build up of life force happened in Reaper Man.
  • Death says his taking care of humanity has something to do with the harvest, a thing he realizes in Reaper Man.
    • The fields of wheat that Death turns part of his garden into to remind himself of this are described briefly.
  • The Glingleglingleglingle Fairy offers to play "The Bells of St. Ungulant's" for Ridcully. Brutha encountered St. Ungulant in Small Gods.
  • The ear trumpet that Windle Poons carried in Moving Pictures turns up, repurposed as a part of Hex.
• Crappy Holidays: In one scene, the wizards are briefly sent into a funk where they ruminate on all the things they hate about the holidays.
• Crappy Homemade Gift: Albert recalls how as a boy he used to stare through the window of a local toy shop at a huge rocking horse on display, dreaming of owning it, although there wasn't a chance of that as his family were dirt-poor. In his stocking on Hogswatch Day, he found a little carved horse that his Dad had personally made for him... and all he could think was that it wasn't the big horse in the window.
  Death: (shocked) BUT HOW MUCH BETTER TO HAVE A TOY CARVED WITH—
  Albert: No. Only grown-ups think like that. You're a selfish little bugger when you're seven. Anyway, Dad got ratted after lunch and trod on it.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Susan worries that Death is going senile and becoming one of these. He's really more of a Kind Hearted Cat Lover, though.
• Crazy-Prepared: Teatime, to the point where when he's given an assignment to kill the Hogfather, he tells Downey that he'd already come up with a plan years ago when he was a kid, as a thought experiment, in addition to beings like the Tooth Fairy, the Soul Cake Duck, and Death himself.

• Curb-Stomp Battle: This is the only possible outcome when you piss off The Grim Reaper himself. The book does not actually describe what happens, exactly. All we know is that he was up against an army of Auditors... and then abruptly he wasn't, and those Auditors are gone now.
• Curse Cut Short: The Duck Man clamps a hand over Foul Ole Ron's mouth in time to stop him dropping an F-bomb while wassailing.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Besides the man himself, it turns out the real Tooth Fairy is also the Monster Progenitor of the bogeymen... but took up collecting teeth to protect children from malicious magic.
• Death's Hourglass: Susan discovers a side wing of her grandfather's house which holds the hourglasses of the Disc's gods and anthropomorphic personifications. There, she discovers the shattered remains of the Hogfather's hourglass. The hourglass later reassembles itself as Death restored belief in the Hogfather.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of a lot of children's literature; Susan notes the Sociopathic Hero nature of Jack and other fairy tale protagonists^note a recurring element in the series, but the book is even harsher towards very saccharine works, which are made to appeal to adults rather than children. Death, meanwhile, does this for various Hogswatch Tropes.
  • The speech Death gives about humans needing fantasy to be human is a deconstruction of the famous "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus" editorial from the Sun (which was mercilessly mocked in an earlier Susan monologue).
• Deity of Mortal Creation: When the Disc's Santa Claus analogue is killed all the leftover belief forms a variety of Odd Job Gods such as Verruca Gnome, the Eater of Socks; and Bilious, the Oh God of Hangovers.
• Deliberately Cute Child: Susan tells off one of her charges for trying this:
  Twyla: I'm afwaid of the monster in the cellar, Thusan. It's going to eat me up.
  Susan: What have I told you about trying to sound ingratiatingly cute, Twyla?
  Twyla: You said I mustn't. You said that exaggerated lisping is a hanging offence and I only do it to get attention.
• Didn't See That Coming: Teatime probably would have done just fine if he hadn't underestimated how much Banjo got upset about hitting girls.
• Didn't Think This Through: A group of Auditors become wolves to try and hunt down and kill the Hogfather. This makes them alive, rather than immortal by virtue of never being alive in the first place, and also violates the rules that would've protected them from Death.
• Disney Villain Death: Subverted twice: first, Susan actually has to kick Teatime before he falls, then he survives the fall and gets Impaled with Extreme Prejudice.
• Dissonant Serenity: Teatime is especially eerie because he is almost perpetually gleeful, even in the face of what the other characters consider utterly horrifying. Even upon actually dying, his ghost just laughs and says "you got it right!" in regards to the pronunciation of his name.
• Don't Explain the Joke:

  Death: Let's get there and sleigh them. Ho. Ho. Ho.
  Albert: Right you are, Master.
  Death: That was a pune, or play on words, Albert. I don't know if you noticed.
  Albert: I'm laughing like hell deep down, sir.

• Don't Fear the Reaper: There is a debate between Teatime and Susan as to the good taste of the Sto Helit family motto Non Timetus Messor. The "death is not to be feared" theme of this trope is evident in the nature and character of the Discworld Death.^note Indeed, this theme was so central to Terry Pratchett that when he was knighted, he chose a grammatically correct Latin version of the motto Nolite timere messorem to adorn his coat of arms.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Ridcully finds a bathroom that has been boarded up, had a sign put up warning not to open the room, and the door hidden behind a bookcase. So, because this is the kind of person he is, he opens it up to see why it was closed up.
  • A recurring theme of the book, and indeed every appearance of the wizards, is that if anything appears to be Don't Touch It, You Idiot!, a wizard can be relied upon to be the Idiot Who Touches It. There's also Ridcully's investigation of how the organ is linked to the plumbing.
  • At the end of the book the mysterious bathroom is sealed up again and numerous "Do NOT enter for any reason!!" signs put up. The dwarf doing it leaves the nails slightly loose because he knows wizards, and doesn't want to make it too hard to pull them back out again next time they want to have a look.
• Double Jump: Teatime, amazingly enough.
• The Dreaded:
  • Susan's habit of walloping monsters with a poker has given her something of a reputation amongst the childhood terror crowd; she's able to get the Scissor Man to back down with just a few stern words.
  • Teatime, who the rest of the Assassins are afraid of. By the end, the rest of his gang of robbers are just as terrified of him.
• The Dreaded "Thank You" Letter: This book reveals that Ridcully was the only one who liked writing thank you letters as a boy and he compares the rest of the staff's cynical remembrances to watching men kick down a dollhouse.
• Dumbass Has a Point:
  • The Bursar suggests willow bark as a hangover cure. Willow bark contains salicin, from which aspirin was discovered.
  • Banjo is the only one to spot that something is wrong when a waiter brings drinks at a bar/dive where there aren't any waiters. It's Mr Teatime.
• Dwindling Party: The group of criminals Teatime brings along gets picked off one by one.
• Dying Candle: A long discourse parodies the last verse of Blue Öyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper, in which a window flies open, curtains billow out, and a candle flickers out in a very definitive manner. DEATH does not appear, possibly because his grand-daughter Susan knows what all these signs portend, and is bloody furious about it. If she's afraid of anything, it's that her well-ordered and relatively normal life is about to be turned upside down - again - by Grandfather. She is, therefore, disinclined to run to Him or take His hand.
• Ear Trumpet: Windle Poons' old trumpet shows up again as a way to give Hex commands.
• Eating Shoes: The meal of mud and old boots. See Supreme Chef below.
• Eldritch Location: Tooth Fairy's Castle.
• Enemies with Death: Teatime is a particularly odd case of Enemies with Death as he's the one who decided to be. Death is only one of the anthropomorphic personifications he plans how to kill, but Death himself doesn't view Teatime (or almost any human) as an enemy and the primary battle is between Teatime and Susan.
• Establishing Character Moment: Mr. Teatime is introduced having entered head assassin Lord Downey's chamber undetected through the fireplace flues. He plays with Downey's dogs while he waits to be noticed. This shows he's both a badass and has a whimsical, childlike personality. His conversation with Downey shows the other aspect of his personality.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: It's more awe and fear than love, but when Teatime insults the late Ma Lilywhite, that's apparently the last straw for Medium Dave. For the record, he immediately draws his sword and snarls, "What did you say about our mum?" the instant Teatime implies disrespect towards Ma Lilywhite, and all the while knowing full-well how dangerous Teatime is.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • The amoral Lord Downey is creeped out by how Teatime is dangerously unhinged, while nominally following the rules of the Assassin's Guild.
    Like many people with no actual morals, Lord Downey did have standards, and Teatime repelled him.
    • One of the reasons why Teatime gives even other assassins the willies is that as a rule, an assassin is supposed to keep collateral damage to an absolute minimum and to cause as little physical damage to their "client" as they can. Teatime, however, prefers creating as much of a bloodbath as possible and leave his victims mutilated and/or dismembered. Guards, servants, not even pets are safe. A good assassin takes pride in a clean kill, but Teatime takes delight in a messy one.
  • Medium Dave and the other lowlifes also have their own twisted code of conduct, and they're unsettled by Teatime's mindless ruthlessness.
• Everything Fades:
  • People who die in the Tooth Fairy's castle get teleported away. This is because the place is based on the imagination of children, who do not really grasp the concept of death or what happens after you die. Which is why Death needed Susan to go there for him — the Tooth Fairy's land is A place I cannot go.
  • As well as sustaining the being itself, Discworld belief allows for things associated with that being that couldn't physically exist to do so. For example, the Castle of Bones where the Hogfather lives is architecturally implausible at best but can exist because of belief in the Hogfather. When belief in the Hogfather drains away, entropy takes over and the Castle eventually collapses under its own weight.
• Evil Matriarch: Ma Lilywhite is dead and Teatime's crew is still more afraid of her than him.
  Mr. Brown: I knew old Ma Lilywhite back in the good old days. You think you're nasty? You think you're mean? Ma Lilywhite'd tear your ears off and spit 'em in your eye, you cocky little devil.
• Expensive Glass of Crap: In a footnote, it's mentioned that some aristocrats operate under the delusion that labeling the types of expensive alcohol in their bottles backwards will fool servants into not drinking it. It dryly notes that the servants are rarely fooled, and assume with rather more justification that their masters won't notice if the bottles are then topped up with "eniru".
  • A restaurant is mentioned to put "bicarbonate of soda in the white wine to make very expensive bubbles".
• Failed Attempt at Scaring: Late in the story, Susan finally gets to meet the Tooth Fairy herself... and is immediately suspicious because of how stereotypical the whole scene looks. Alarmed, the Tooth Fairy begins rapidly shapeshifting in an attempt to scare Susan off, becoming spiders, snakes, rats, and a few things that aren't even described in detail... but Susan is the granddaughter of Death, so she shrugs off the entire display, before grabbing the Tooth Fairy by the neck and forcing her to reveal her true form.
• False Reassurance: Teatime is fond of comments like "Don't worry, a violent death is the last thing that'll happen to you" and "Of course you will get what's coming to you". Mr Brown, when he decides he's had enough, reveals that he's noticed this tendency and isn't going to fall for it (not that it does him much good in the end).
  • Pops up regarding the rules of The Tooth Fairy's Palace. As it's explained, nobody can die in the Tooth Fairy's Palace. This doesn't mean you can't die, it just means you don't die there.
• Flatline Plotline: Inadvertently applied to Teatime, who takes a fatal fall in the Tooth Fairy's realm, only to be revived by Ridcully when he reappears on the Disc and lands in the Great Hall of UU.
• Fold the Page, Fold the Space: Alluded to, when the narration remarks that this would be the only way to explain how Death — for whom time and space are only things he'd heard described — emerges from inside a small stove.
• Foreshadowing: Susan frequently notes childish drawings like the ones found in Twyla's nursery and Banjo's book are indicated by a simplistically blue sky that only covers up a part of the drawing, crude houses, and trees and rivers with no details. The Tooth Fairy's Realm has all of those attributes, which freak out Teatime's hired goons, but they nor the audience is meant to realize why until Susan pieces together that place uses the logic of children's perception of the world so the horizon has no actual sky in it, only a blank void like how a kid would draw it.
• From Dress to Dressing: Susan does this to patch up the Hogfather's wounds after saving him from the Auditors.
• Full-Boar Action: Rooter, Gouger, Tusker and Snouter. Also the pre-human form of the Hogfather himself.
• Fun with Acronyms: Various items attached to Hex are Stealth Puns relating to computer acronyms, such as fluffy teddy bear = FTB = FTP.
• Genius Ditz: Violet. The temp Tooth Fairy quickly takes the measure of Teatime's gang, and tells Susan about them right away — but she needs to shut down all other brain functions to remember the order of the alphabet.
• Gentle Giant: Banjo, when he's not being ordered around by a charismatic psychopath.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Medium Dave slaps Chickenwire to snap him out of it the first time he starts succumbing to his childhood fears.
• Glass Eye: Teatime has one glass eye and one really creepy non-glass eye. In the book it's nearly white; in the movie it's pale blue.
• Gift of the Magi Plot: Subverted when the Dean gives the Bursar a box for his dried frog pills. The Bursar, naturally, no longer has any to put in it... because the Dean swiped them from his room, rather than shell out any more money for a full pillbox.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The existence of anthropomorphic personifications is somewhere between this and Clap Your Hands If You Believe.
• Haute Cuisine Is Weird: The manager of an expensive Quirmian restaurant discovers the ingredients have all been replaced by mud and old boots, and explains to a bewildered waiter that this doesn't matter.
  Manager: Nobody expects it to be food. If people wanted food they'd stay at home. This is cuisine.
• Hear Me the Money: The Auditors of Reality leave a rather unusual payment when they commission the Assassin's Guild to off the eponymous holiday figure: blank discs of pure gold. The head of the guild bounces one on his desk, and the sound and bounce of the "coin" confirm its composition for him.
• The Help Helping Themselves: One footnote explains that aristocrats often label their good wine in their cellar backwards to prevent the servants from swiping it. The servants are not fooled and the aristocrats often don't notice that the booze has been topped off with "eniru".
• Hideous Hangover Cure: Whipped up for Bilious by the wizards, who mix together every single hangover cure they can think of. And since Bilious gets all of the hangovers from Bibulous, the god of wine, Bibulous gets all of the effects of the hangover cure.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: Teatime's ultimate plan is the use the power of the Tooth Fairy's realm and the teeth of children to take control of their beliefs to kill the Hogfather. He realizes that he could potentially take control of everyone's beliefs the same way.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Teatime. Part of the brilliance of his plan was that Death could do nothing directly to stop him because Death cannot go to the Tooth Fairy's country — because it is based on the imagination of children, who have no fully formed concept of death. Later when Susan confronts him there, he takes Death's sword from her and attempts to slay her with it, only to find the blade is harmless there, for much the same reason.
• How Can Santa Deliver All Those Toys?: When questions of this type start cropping up it's a sign that belief in the Hogfather is waning. The answer to how he normally does it is that things such as linear time and being physically larger than a house's flue are rules that are suspended on a temporary basis by the power of belief in order to allow it. The fact that the whole event occurs in a sort of non-time allows Albert to make a return to the world in spite of only having a few seconds left to live.
• Humanity Is Infectious:
  • While more fully explored in Thief of Time it's glimpsed at here when the Auditors become addicted to living when they take on the form of wolves to pursue the Hogfather.
  • It's a long running concept in all the Discworld books that Death has changed quite a bit from hanging around humanity for all these eons. He keeps trying, with "interesting" results, to understand humans. He started out "just doing his job" but has come to care about humans quite a bit.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Subverted. It's not humans, it's just Teatime. The kids themselves point out that a skeleton isn't really frightening when it's holding a biscuit and a teacup, and Teatime's effort to win them over falls totally flat.
  Death: The world will teach them about monsters soon enough.
  Susan: But... he was a man.
  Death: I think they know quite well what he was.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: Teatime is chosen to assassinate the Hogfather because he's already spent lots of time contemplating how to kill various gods and anthropomorphic personifications.
• Ineffectual Death Threats: A literal version when Susan tries to scare off Teatime with the threat of her grandfather coming after him. Teatime points out that everyone encounters Death eventually.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Susan spends most of the book thinking this way.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Teatime, with a poker. It only kills monsters. Hence, it ignores Death (who was standing in the way).
• Implausible Deniability: Doreen's mother insists she doesn't want the toy soldiers and model castle she just asked the Hogfather for (and received), because "She's a girl!"
• I'm Your Worst Nightmare: Parodied.
• Ironic Echo: "You were sure I was going to survive that, weren't you?" "I was ... reasonably confident."
• It's Personal: Gawain and Twyla's previous governess encouraged their belief in childhood nightmares for misbehaving children under the belief that it would improve their behaviour. Instead, it just left Susan having to directly deal with said nightmares whenever they appear to menace her charges, as per their roles. Susan is quite aggravated by the whole situation, but understands the terrors are at best a Punch-Clock Villain formed by belief, and after making certain that they won't target either kid, spends her time dissuading them of said views and making them more "sensible" about the world in her own manner. For the old governess, however, Susan fully intends to hunt her down one day.
• Kick the Dog: Most assassins prevent guard dogs from giving the alarm by drugging them if they can't just avoid them; Teatime nails them to the ceiling.
• Kids Are Cruel: A major theme of the book as it's repeatedly noted that kids actually relish a bit of violence and blood. The shoppers at the Maul cheer on the messed up Hogswatch display of figurines rearranged to be fighting each other. Susan lets Gawain and Twyla play with other kids but keeps herself out of earshot of what they're saying to each other because their playtime will only seem pleasant at first glance. Notably, Pratchett does not portray this as wholly negative and treats the matter with some ambivalence as something that happens while growing up. Only Teatime takes it to excess as a manchild by solely indulging in violence.
• Leaving Food for Santa: On the Discworld, children leave out a pork pie and a glass of sherry for the Hogfather, and a turnip for the hogs that pull his sleigh. Albert deals with the pies and sherry (particularly enthusiastically when it comes to the sherry) and one turnip (because it was apparently pork pie shaped, or at least could be mistaken for a pork pie after all that sherry). For form's sake, the Death of Rats nibbles on a pork pie and pantomimes piddling on one of the turnips.
• Left Field Description: An extremely colorful carpet is compared to a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog.
  "Long ago, someone had made [the carpet] by carefully knotting long bits of brightly colored rag into a sacking base, giving it the look of a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog."
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Death technically can't get a human involved in his scheme, and Susan desires to be normal. However, nothing in the rules says he can't tell her just enough to make her want to get involved then forbid her from doing so, knowing Susan would get involved of her own accord.
  • How Death saves the Little Match Girl: Death would normally not be able to save a life that's about to die, but because he's subbing for the Hogfather, who is allowed to give gifts, he can by giving her 'the gift of a future.'
  • Albert justifies not giving people everything they wanted with Life Isn't Fair. Death points out he's not life.
  • Under normal circumstances Death wouldn't be allowed to kill the Auditors. However, the group in front of him broke the rules by becoming wolves and directly trying to kill the Hogfather, thus he he has no obligation to follow the rules in regards to them.
• Magical Nanny: Susan's occupation during the novel. This being Susan, she's much more badass than the average Magical Nanny.
• Magitek and Magical Computer: Hex.
• Mall Santa: Death's rather... special stint as one is one of his tricks to restore faith in the Hogfather.
• The Man Behind the Curtain: The Tooth Fairy.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Auditors are the... uh... entities behind Teatime's Hogfather-assassination contract.
• Master of Unlocking: Mr Brown is one. By his own admission, he can unlock all human-made locks and most dwarf-made locks. However, he fails to open the final door in the Tooth-Fairy's castle.
• Meaningful Name: In Scots, to banjo someone means to knock them down or assault them.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name:
  Death: If I had a first name, 'Duty' would be my middle name.
• Metaphorically True: Susan refuses to believe that the sun wouldn't have come up if they had failed to restore the Hogfather. Death insists that it would not have:
  Death: A mere ball of glowing gas would have illuminated the world.
  • He then goes on to explain why this is, in fact, an important distinction.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher: The Cheerful Fairy resembles one.
• Mistaken Death Confirmation: Susan and Teatime fight each other in the Tooth Fairy's country, which culminates in Teatime being flung from a high ledge. Susan watches the assassin fall and disappear when he hits the bottom, a sure sign of death in the Tooth Fairy's country as it's based on the beliefs of children, and children don't understand death. She then carries on with her mission, not worrying about Teatime anymore. However, those who die there turn up again in Discworld, and unfortunately, Teatime returns in the middle of the Unseen University's banquet, apparently in good enough shape that a single slap from Ridcully is all it takes to resuscitate him.
• Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold: The Tooth Fairy/Bogey Man.
• Mobile Menace: The Scissor Man is briefly glimpsed on the far staircase, then moments later it's standing directly behind Susan.
• Monster Progenitor: The Bogeyman, who was born from the primitive man's fear of the darkness and what hid within it. After humans mastered fire, other Bogeymen were born, lurking in the shadows cast by fire, but never knowing the primordial darkness that spawned their ancestor.
• Motivational Lie:
  • Teatime tries to get Banjo to attack Susan by telling him that Susan hurt the Tooth Fairy.
  • Death telling Susan that the sun won't come up if the Hogfather dies can be seen as this or Metaphorically True mixed with a very careful use of Exact Words.
• Mythology Gag: The Sock Eater may qualify as one, as this little elephant-like creature bears a close resemblance to one of the weird animals that a young Terry Pratchett illustrated for his very first novel, The Carpet People.
• Mythopoeia: A major theme in this novel is the ability to bring deities into existence for a specific task. Teatime tries to destroy the Hogfather by making people stop believing in him, while Death has to fill in for him to restore that belief. Susan points out at the end of the novel that people believed in the Hogfather so that the sun would come up, which makes no sense as nature dictates the sun will always come up, but Death points out that believing in anything, no matter how stupid or needless, is an integral part of humanity.
  • The excess belief caused by the Hogfather's absence causes minor deities to come into existence. Missing socks/towels are eaten/stolen by Towel Wasps and the Eater of Socks.
  • The Dean tries to wish for a deity to bring him sacks of money, but since he actually doesn't get any sacks of money it doesn't work.
• Neck Lift: It's mentioned that one of the reasons Banjo's considered a valuable team member despite his intellectual shortcomings is his ability to neck-lift up to four men at a time (two per hand).
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The Tooth Fairy's intention in gathering all the teeth was to protect them from use in Sympathetic Magic. Instead, it makes it all the easier for Teatime and his gang to get their hands on an incredible number of them all at once.
  • Susan manages to knock Teatime off a balcony and he lands hard enough that he vanishes out of the Tooth Fairy's realm, suggesting that she's actually killed the Big Bad outright ... but a well-meaning Ridcully resuscitates him, even knowing the man was armed and dressed like an Assassin on his university's property.
• Noble Demon: The Tooth Fairy/Bogey Man.
• No Kill like Overkill: Teatime's Ax-Crazy nature is revealed from the description of him doing this in the course of an assassination. He did everything by the book, including using a mirror to check whether the inhumed was breathing. That the victim's head was, at this time, several feet away from his body apparently did not enter into Teatime's mind as relevant. Or excessive.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The exact side-effects of the hangover cure. Sadly, that scene did not make it into the movie.
  • The incident which prompted Ridcully to close down the forbidden bathroom at the end of the book. It appears to have involved the 'afterburner' on the organ. Precisely why the organ needed an afterburner, given that this is normally the component of a jet engine, is a noodle incident in itself - though the fact that said organ was designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson probably had something to do with it.
  • The full extent of the gory details of Teatime's assassination of Sir George are not revealed, but given that we do learn that Sir George himself was decapitated and that the family dog was nailed to the ceiling, that's probably for the best.
• No One Could Survive That!: Mr Teatime's fall from the top of the tower. He even disappeared afterward, like the other corpses. Because death is unreal in the Tooth Fairy's world, and he ends up foolishly resuscitated by the wizards.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Death explains to Susan that believing in fairytales and legends is more similar to believing in ideals than anyone can see or probably admit, and that belief can provide strength to people to keep going.
• Not His Sled: Death achieves this In-Universe with the Disc's version of "The Little Match Girl". He becomes absolutely furious when he is told that the Match Girl's death would somehow be an inspirational story for the holidays, and instead, in his capacity as the Hogfather, he sees that she gets some shelter and a warm meal.
• Not What I Signed on For: One henchman's response when he finds out Teatime plans to kill the Hogfather.
• Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: Susan mentions 'an obnoxious prayer for some god to come and take their souls away if they die before they wake up' as one of the reasons she hates the previous nanny of the kids she looks after.
• Oblivious to Love: The Cheerful Fairy seems to have absolutely no idea the Senior Wrangler has a thing for her. Of course, it seems to only be the result of him being hit by a cherub-like fairy.
• Odd Job Gods:
  • Bilious, the Oh God of Hangovers becomes one by the end, as he decides to ditch his original title in favor of claiming to be a god who takes up other gods' jobs. Susan decides that he can probably make it work since Violet seems to genuinely believe him.
  • The Hogfather himself could qualify. He started out as a pagan blood sacrifice, and is now tasked with delivering presents to children. "Industrial retraining", as Quoth puts it.
• Old Magic: Sympathetic Magic is considered "so old it hardly counts as magic anymore", and every witch and wizard knows well the importance of destroying hair and nail clippings so that they can't be misused. Likewise, the Tooth Fairy collects the teeth of children specifically so that they can't be used for such magic. Unfortunately, this only makes the Tooth Fairy's castle a major target for someone wishing to control all the world's children at once.
• One Bad Mother: Ma Lilywhite, and then some.
• Only Sane Man: Medium Dave is inexplicably the only one of the thieves who doesn't become childlike under the Tooth Fairy's influence (Banjo also didn't become childlike, but unlike Medium Dave that has the explanation that Banjo already was a child at heart before they entered the place). Until the phantom of his mother appears.
• Peeve Goblins: The beings brought to life from popular belief after the Hogfather vanishes including several created from unformalized belief in the presence of small, mischievous entities responsible for everyday annoyances. These include the Verruca Gnome, who goes around handing people unsightly foot warts; the Hair Loss Fairy; the Eater of Socks, an elephant-like being who consumes socks and leaves their twins unpaired in the wash; the birdlike Stealer of Pencils; and the God of Indigestion.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Death is expected to leave a pitance for an impoverished family instead of all the gifts asked of him. He instead leaves everything they ask for, seeing the disparity between the rich and poor as unfair. As Death he doesn't discriminate, and neither as the Hogfather.
  • When Death is called to reap the soul of the Little Match Girl — a manifestation of the story used as an example to those not well-off, but more well-off than her — Death forgoes his main duties and invokes his temporary duties by rescuing her.
• Pig Man: The Hogfather himself has elements of this.
• Poorly Lit Pareidolia: Chickenwire's childhood fear was a wardrobe that, in the dark, looked as if it had a face.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: After Death and Susan resolve the matter of the Hogfather by undoing the magic controlling the teeth and keep the primal Hogfather safe from the Auditors, Death drops her off at the Gaiter residence, only to find a Not Quite Dead Teatime in the nursery. Nobody besides Teatime actually takes this too seriously as Death was more curious to see what Susan does, Gawain and Twyla are thoroughly unimpressed by Teatime's attempt to puff himself up as the hero who will slay a bogeyman, and Susan is so taken in by their nonchalance that she starts swinging the kettle in her hand absentmindedly, which Teatime reprimands her for.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Now there remains one final question. Have you been naughty... or nice? Ho. Ho. Ho.
  • Susan gets one too: "Hi, inner child. I'm the inner babysitter."
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Jonathan Teatime pronounces his last name for someone ("Te-ah-tim-eh") in his first appearance. It gets mispronounced throughout the book, which he finds a bit annoying. Death is the only one who gets it right without a need for correction, which Teatime is delighted by.
• Pseudo-Santa: The Hogfather, the hog-themed Discworld equivalent of Santa who went through considerable in-universe Disneyfication over the ages. Initially starting off in the distant past as a winter death-and-renewal deity placated by bonfires and ritual sacrifices, he later changed into a gift giver who brought people pork products (or bags of bloody bones to naughty children) and eventually toys and treats in the modern day. His sleigh was originally pulled by wild boars but is now pulled by cute domestic pigs.
• Psycho for Hire: Teatime. He enjoys killing people, often in extremely messy, brutal ways, and was already contemplating killing Death, the Hogfather, and other Anthropomorphic Personifications long before being tasked with killing one.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Banjo and, in a different way, Teatime. Teatime is mostly psychopath, while Banjo is mostly man-child.
• The Pursuing Nightmare: Mr Teatime's heist crew find out the hard way that the Tooth Fairy's Castle defends itself by conjuring up manifestations of their own worst childhood dreams. At least two of the party are chased down by their respective monsters, and one is so left terrified during the pursuit that he loses his footing on the spiral staircase and falls to his death. On the upside, they can't actually die in the Castle, as it's a mystical realm based on the imagination of children, so death has no meaning there... but on the downside, that just means that the victims are teleported back to reality, where they promptly die from their injuries anyway.
• Real Dreams are Weirder: The Tooth Fairy's guards take Teatime's declaration of "I'm your worst nightmare!" entirely too literally.
• Relieving the Reaper: Inverted — the Hogfather, the Disc's Santa-equivalent, goes missing, and Death ends up holding down his job until he can be found.
• Religious Robot: Hex is told to believe in the Hogfather. He does so.
• Reset Button: Near the beginning, Ponder successfully cures the Bursar of his insanity by having him talk with Hex (though at the cost of temporarily driving Hex mad in turn). At the end, the Bursar goes mad again after Mr Teatime materialises on top of the dinner table and a wild swipe of Death's sword slices through the fork in the Bursar's hand.
  • This is also a form of Book Ends, as the Bursar originally went mad because of a different 'unfortunate incident at dinner': Windle Poons shambling into the Great Hall as a zombie in Reaper Man.
• Retroactive Wish: When the wizards work out that the various minor fairies are spontaneously forming when people mention their function, the Dean quickly jumps in with "What, like the 'Give the Dean a Huge Bag of Money Goblin'?" It doesn't work because a) wishful thinking is a far cry from belief and b) people lose socks all the time, but aren't generally given random bags of money.
• Reverse Psychology: It would be against the rules for Death to involve a human in the matter. This is why he specifically told her not to get involved.
• Rule of Cool: Death comments that he added the sparks and the glow when the poker goes through him harmlessly because he felt it was 'appropriate'.
• Saving Christmas: The book sees the Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus) assassinated (for want of a better word, since the Hogfather is a sort of immortal quasi-deity), and Death forced to stand in for him. Meanwhile, Death's granddaughter Susan (it's a long story) tries to find out what happened to the Hogfather and fix things. This being Discworld, it gives a philosophical reason why the celebration needs to be saved, goes over some of the origin myths behind it, and visits several other classic Christmas tales in a very tongue-in-cheek way.
• Scholarship Student: Teatime is one of several mentioned in the series who are these for the Assassin's Guild.
• Screw the Rules, They're Not Real!: Jonathan Teatime is a terror amongst the Assassin's Guild because he approaches all of his assignments with an "extreme prejudice" mentality (read: Leave No Survivors, in the goriest fashion possible) instead of following the Guild's rules (read: we kill the people you pay us to kill and no more, and there's people we won't kill no matter what).
• Self-Made Orphan: Teatime provides the page quote.
  Lord Downey: We took pity on him because he lost both parents at an early age. I think, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.
• Sentimental Homemade Toy: Subverted — when Albert says he'd gotten a hand-carved wooden horse from his father instead of the huge store-bought rocking horse on Hogswatchnight, Death think it was a heartwarming moment. Albert retorts that the moment was A) lost on the greedy little bugger he was like most seven year-olds and B) ruined by his dad getting drunk and accidentally stepping on the toy.
• Series Continuity Error: When Susan finds Death's notes, she recognises them instantly because "No one else Susan had ever met had handwriting with serifs". But in Mort we're told that Mort had expected Death's handwriting to look like that, but instead he'd read a book about what your handwriting says about your personality, and chosen the most "normal" one.
• Shaped Like Itself: Ridcully asks the Senior Wrangler why the University hangs up mistletoe during Hogswatch when they have no female students nor female employees working that night. The Wrangler hastily explains that it's symbolic because the green symbolizes leaves and the white symbolizes berries. Ridcully notes that taken at face value, this means mistletoe is symbolic of mistletoe, a statement either incredibly deep or a load of utter nonsense.
• Shapeshifter Showoff Session: Late in the novel, Susan finally meets the Tooth Fairy, here taking the form of a sweet little old lady... and is immediately suspicious because the scene appears to incorporate way too many cliched elements. Trying to force Susan to back off, the Tooth Fairy begins rapidly cycling through different shapes in an attempt to intimidate Susan into submission - only for Susan to No-Sell them one by one, eventually forcing the Tooth Fairy to assume her true form. Namely that of the first Bogeyman.
• Shoot the Dangerous Minion: Downey seriously considers having Teatime killed for a) violating Guild standards and b) being good enough to sneak into Downey's own office unnoticed.
• Shout-Out:
  • The wardrobe from one of the thugs' bad childhood memories swallows them up — Violet and Bilious discuss the fact that wardrobes have been known to transport people to magical lands, but his destination is unlikely to be pleasant.
  • A wizard runs a thaumometer (a glass cube) over a dead body.
  • A double Shout-Out: one footnote discusses a bowdlerization of a folk song "The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day" (the implication being that it was originally "cock" rather than "hen") and concludes that "Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird." This refers both to an apocryphal quotation attributed to Sigmund Freud "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", and to a jazz song by Emett "Babe" Wallace titled "A Chicken Ain't Nothing but a Bird". Not to be confused with Ivor Biggun's Has Anybody Seen My Cock.
  • Susan swore to beat herself to death with her own umbrella if she caught herself dancing on rooftops with the chimneysweeps.
    • Amusingly, as a nanny, Susan is a lot more like the Mary Poppins character in the original books.
  • When Teatime falls onto the table in the Unseen University, one of the wizards comments with something along the lines of, "But I didn't even eat any of that salmon mousse."
  • Another Python reference: When Susan drags the unconscious and extremely ill Bilious to Unseen University and explains that "He's not dead, he's just resting."
  • There's this exchange, between Death and Albert: "It is Hogswatch, and people die on the streets. People feast behind lighted windows and other people have no homes. Is this fair?" "Well, of course, that’s the big issue—". The Big Issue is a UK homelessness charity. This may also be a nod to Sydney Carter's Anti-Christmas Song "Standing in the Rain".
  • A group of criminals is trying to break through a door with seven locks in a tower at Christmas/Hogswatch? The leader of the group is killed by falling from a great height? That sounds like a certain greatest Christmas film of all time.
  • Ridcully temporarily fixing Hex by typing in 'LOTSOFDRYEDFRORGPILLS' is probably a reference to early computer viruses and proto-viruses like Cookie Monster, which could be temporarily dismissed by typing in (for example) 'cookie'.
  • The subversion of Sentimental Homemade Toy above recalls Inherit the Wind, which was a subversion in the opposite direction ... Henry Drummond actually got the fancy rocking-horse for Christmas, only to discover it was pretty paint over rotten wood that broke the first time he tried to ride it. So Albert may have been doomed either way.
• Skip of Innocence: Twyla and her brother Gawain do this as part of their Deliberately Cute Child personae. Susan isn't fooled, saying "real children don't go hoppity-skippity unless they're on drugs".
• Slasher Smile: Mr. Teatime.
• Stable Time Loop: The toy horse Albert wanted when he was a child that was bought by someone else was Death going back in time and buying it for him. D'awwww.
• Stock Object Colors: Discussed when Susan and the Oh God end up in the Tooth Fairy's country, which resembles a child's drawing. Susan realizes what it is because (among other simplifications) the water in the creek is blue, the treetrunks are plain brown, and the apples are bright red... even though creeks are usually transparent, treetrunks have a whole range of colors from brown to grey to green, and only some apples are red. But children draw brown treetrunks, blue water, and red apples, because that's what they "know" they're supposed to be.
• Stop Worshipping Me: The Oh God of Hangovers doesn't seem too happy that he was created due to prayers from hungover people until his hangover gets sent to the god of wine instead of him.
• Subbing for Santa: Death is a very creepy stand-in for the Hogfather. He does a pretty good job, though, considering what he had to work with.
  Death (to an undercover Nobby Nobbs): And have you been a good bo... a good dwa... a good gno... a good individual?
• Supreme Chef: The manager of the restaurant in Ankh-Morpork, a former chef, is able to make meals out of mud and old boots (after Death steals his food stocks to feed the beggars) by a combination of skill and 'headology' (people will eat anything in a fancy restaurant if the menu is in French... Er, Quirmian). In Nanny Ogg's Cookbook it's noted that mud and old boots-based cuisine eventually caught on across the city's posh restaurants.
• Sympathetic Magic: Teatime's plan is entirely based around this; by breaking into the country of the Tooth Fairy and stealing teeth from every child on the Discworld, he can force the children to stop believing in the Hogfather, causing him to cease to exist.
• Take That!: Has a very vicious one towards Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl".
  • Also thoroughly deconstructs the story of Good King Wenceslas. Admittedly, the King was more of a jerkass than actually evil, but the point still stands; spontaneous charity on one day does not make up for neglect in the rest of the year, and also that forcing (inappropriate) charity on people who don't want it just to make yourself feel better is just as bad.
  • He names, explains, and then thoroughly takes apart the Anthropic Principle. Twice. In a single footnote.
• Tempting Fate:
  • At the very beginning, Ridcully is opening a door with a sign that says, "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door." Why? "To see why they wanted it shut, of course." A footnote lets us know that this tells us just about all we need to know about human civilization. At least, the parts of it that are either underwater, fenced off, or still smoking.
  • At the end, when Ridcully shuts the room up again, the caretaker doesn't hammer the nails in too hard, so they'll come out easy next time.
  • Wizards being wizards, when someone realizes that magical beings are popping into existence when people think of them, the Faculty start saying that "Just because you think of {insert critter here} doesn't make it appear!" Cue appearance of the Eater of Socks.
• Tomboy: The first child who Death meets in the Hogfather's Grotto is a little girl. Her mother wants her to get girly things like dolls and dresses, but once she realizes Death might actually give her what she wants, she quickly asks for a large set of army men and a sword. Death gives her both, but turns the sword to wood at the mother's protests.
• Tongue on the Flagpole: While not using the tongue, this trope is mentioned. Albert reminisces about a toy horse he wanted as a kid. "I must have spent hours staring at it with my nose pressed against the glass, until someone heard my cries and unfroze me."
• Too Dumb to Live: A quite literal application of the trope: The Auditors. They pushed DEATH'S Berserk Button while they were in mortal form.
• Transforming Conforming: After Teatime's attempt at killing the Hogfather is thwarted by Susan, the Auditors — who had been untouchable by Death — transform into dogs to kill the deity directly. However, this comes with one fatal mistake, as they are now living beings and therefore within Death's jurisdiction, resulting in him taking the Auditors out in one fell swoop.
• True Meaning of Christmas: Parodied. Death resolves to teach people the real meaning of Hogswatch. Albert then lists the more unpleasant (e.g. sacrificial pigs and loads of blood) aspects of pagan winter festivals until Death decides to teach people the unreal meaning of Hogswatch.
• The Upper Crass: Susan works as a governess for a Nouveau Riche couple despite being the Duchess of Sto-Helit (and her father having been awarded the dukedom for personally saving the life of the queen) and therefore ranking higher than just about everyone except maybe one or two people in Anhk-Morpork. The disconnect between a duchess working as a servant causes a severe crisis for the socially-conscious wife who is constantly trying to move to the upper classes by reading books on etiquette. When Mrs. Gaiter had tremulously asked her how one addressed the second cousin of a queen, Susan had responded without thinking 'We called him Jamie, usually,' and Mrs. Gaiter had had to go and have a headache in her room.
• Urban Legends: The source of some of the sprites coming into existence from the Hogfather's belief.
• Villainous Demotivator: Teatime's not very good at making friends.
• White-Tailed Reindeer: Or the equivalent. The Hogfather's sleigh is naturally pulled by boars, not reindeer, but the Grotto in Chumley's features papier-mache figures of adorable pink piggies.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Susan notes Gawain and Twyla as this. Death comments that Gawain being named to be a fighter shall be a self-fulfilling prophecy, implying there will be bullying in his future.
• World of Pun:
  • Hex has a lot of computer puns, stealth and otherwise — sheep skulls (RAM), small religious pictures (icons), an 'Anthill Inside' sticker (Intel Inside), a mouse and so on. It is said that he's basically building himself off the ideas of computers from Earth.
  • There's the "Oh God of Hangovers" — not a god, or the god, but Oh, GOD of Hangovers.
• Would Hit a Girl: Teatime.
  Teatime: Do away with them.
  Chickenwire: One of them's a girl, sir.
  Teatime: Then do away with them politely.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Banjo Lilywhite.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Everyone Teatime ever meets. It is curiously binary; if you are not helping him anymore, you are effectively dead. The only thing you can do is run out the clock. Mr. Brown is Genre Savvy enough to defy this, but Banjo kills him anyway. Teatime lets Sidney go because he was distracted, but the poor wizard still doesn't get out of the Tooth Fairy World alive.
• You Mean "Xmas": Hogswatchnight. It combines Christmas, New Year's Eve/Day, and the Winter Solstice all together into one holiday for the Discworld.

---

The TV adaptation contains examples of:

• Adaptational Attractiveness: Nobby Nobbs. Mind you, making him look anything like described in the books would require heavy-duty CGI, enough makeup to cover the actor, a full-body suit, or hiring a chimpanzee and dubbing in his lines. This somewhat ruins the joke in which Death is unable to discern Nobby's species, eventually calling him an "individual", because he's pretty clearly human onscreen.
• Adaptational Heroism: It removes any of the creep and contempt that Susan felt about the First Bogeyman. The book makes it clear that It disgusts her, but in the film, It's just portrayed as very old, kind and tired, and Susan comforts It that by promising she'll ensure that the teeth will remain protected. It nods in gratitude and dies in peace.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: While he has occasionally played villains in the past, David Jason generally plays likable characters and casting him as Albert has turned the Jerk With A Heartof Jerk (with a conscience) to a standard Old Retainer.
• Adaptation Distillation: The adaptation shows all the events as they happen chronologically, even those that Susan (and through her, the readers) does not learn about until almost the very end of the book (most notable are the relation between the Tooth Fairy's realm and children's drawings, how death is treated in the Tooth Fairy's realm, the outright spelling-out of Teatime's plan for the teeth starting with punching Banjo, and the no-longer-behind-the-scenes nature of Death's decision to impersonate the Hogfather).
  Death: You might think I hadn't thought of that, but I couldn't possibly comment.
• Adapted Out:
  • The Librarian never appears, probably because writing about an orangutan playing an organ is much more feasible than filming it.
  • The Canting Crew subplot is also completely written out, as they don't really add anything to the story other than comic relief.
  • The plot point of Bibulous, God of Wine, his link to Bilious, and the side effects of the Hideous Hangover Cure didn't make it in, either. Not showing it could be explained by it being a deliberate Noodle Incident that couldn't possibly be matched by reality, but they didn't even mention it.
• Behind the Black: Teatime takes Offscreen Teleportation to the max, with one cut having characters looking right at him and then the next having him coming completely out of nowhere to push Medium Dave against a wall. In the final scene too. How the hell did he get behind Death?
  • Flash Step.
• Carpet-Rolled Corpse: Kidnapped Violet is transported this way by Teatime's hired thugs.
• Coconut Superpowers: The Scissor Man never appearing on screen is a big one, as are the quick cuts away while magic is being performed.
• Composite Character: The Wizard character was given Peachy the thief's fear for the movie, and Catseye's fear was likewise ascribed to Mr. Brown, albeit without its backstory.^note Peachy and Catseye themselves were written out, as they were basically just two more mooks to get killed by the castle, without adding anything to the story.
• Continuity Nod: The back of the Dean's robe reads "Born to Rune".
• Creator Cameo: Terry Pratchett appears as the toymaker at the very end.
• The Dreaded: Even blind drunk and not a care for the mother of hangovers in the morning, the Hogfather's little elf helper takes one look at Death and runs away screaming.
  • Banjo and Medium Dave's mother. That's all you need to know.
• Driving a Desk: Binky's flying scenes.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Of deaths inside the castle, Mr. Brown is thrown down a large number of stairs, Medium Dave simply fades from existence after being hit by a light projection of his mother, and a third dies apparently of fright after being pulled into a wardrobe that scared him as a child. But Sidney? The Woobie wizard of the group with a penchant for sucking his thumb when frightened? The last we see of him is him sobbing in fear as the silhouette of the Scissor Man is cutting closer and closer to his head. And he had been lucky enough before to 'outlive his usefulness' minutes earlier and Teatime actually let him leave without trying to kill him.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In any scene with Albert, he'll be doing mild slapstick while other characters are talking.
  • During the final confrontation, while Teatime is threatening Susan with Death's sword, Death is awkwardly holding a cookie he'd picked up and hadn't gotten to eat. He even glances down at it a couple times, as if he's wondering if he could get away with eating it when nobody's looking.

• I Have Your Wife: Teatime tracks down Susan's workplace and holds her at swordpoint, finding her offering her grandfather a cup of tea. Death remains calm as Teatime says softly that he knows killing Death would be complicated, but Susan is very mortal. He receives a mutual Death Glare from both of them, because Susan warned Teatime that Death is very singleminded about those that threaten his family.
• Informed Attribute: Despite Nobby Nobbs' Adaptational Attractiveness, Death still acts like he can't tell what species he belongs to.
• Instant Soprano: Ridcully's off-screen encounter with the "Old Faithful" setting in Bloody Stupid Johnson's bathtub has him talking like this.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We never actually see the Scissor Man, but we do get treated to a shadow moments before it killed Sidney in a nightmarishly Family-Unfriendly Death.
• Not What It Looks Like: Uttered by the kid's father when the kids catch him pretending to be the Hogfather.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Mr. Teatime does this all the time.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: All scenes with The Librarian are absent from the film, presumably because it's a lot easier to write about orangutans playing pipe organs than it is trying to film it. The same probably applies to the fact that the Tooth Fairy's castle was supposed to have no shadows (and, as mentioned above, Nobby's Adaptational Attractiveness).
• "Psycho" Strings: Used as a leitmotif for Teatime.
• Running Gag: Albert never getting to smoke a cigarette.^note He finally gets to light up in his final scene, at which point he decides it tastes terrible and tosses it away.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Albert sees Death bring the poor little match girl back to life and carry her off to some decent people.
  Albert: That's it, I've had enough of this pixie lark.
• Shout-Out: The noble music which plays when Bilious is being sobered up is Men of Harlech, but is also known to some university students, current and former, as The Alcoholics' Anthem. Also doubles as an Actor Allusion, given that Rhodri Meilir is very Welsh.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The sweet music playing as Teatime threatens Susan with the sword at the very end.
• Special Occasions Are Magic: Death's manservant Albert rarely if ever returns to the real world, because when he does his lifetimer starts trickling again. On Hogswatchnight, he helps out with Death Subbing for Santa, explaining that tonight it doesn't apply to him due to the time distortion needed to distribute gifts to all the children in the world.
• Spoofs "R" Us: The toyshop with the rocking horse is named in the TV adaptation as Toys Is Me (proprietor Joshua Isme).
• Take Our Word for It: The Scissor Man doesn't appear on screen.
• Woken Up at an Ungodly Hour: Invoked when Susan complains that Death put noisy toys into the stockings of the children she's looking after. He responds that there has to be something in the stocking that makes a noise, "otherwise, what is 4:30 AM for?"
• Xylophones for Walking Bones: Susan Sto Helit recalls a visit to her grandfather as a child. She asked for a xylophone: her grandfather took his robe off and gave her two little hammers. It began to dawn on her that there was something odd about your grandfather being an animated skeleton, as Death is usually depicted.

---

Now there remains one final question. Have you been naughty... or nice? Ho... Ho... Ho!