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Christmas - Festival of gifts, candles and groaning tables

By Jan-Öjvind Swahn
Information kindly provided by the Consulate General of Sweden, Vancouver

Christmas in Sweden, as in other countries, is a mixture of old and new, religious and secular, native and foreign. It includes more days off, both for schoolchildren and adults, than any other festival, and in some years the number of working days between the public holidays and weekends can be so small that, by docking a couple of days from their year's holiday, people can be off work for anything up to a fortnight. Christmas in Swedish Christmas cards is nearly always "white", with deep snow as a standing invitation to skiing, but the fact is that white Christmases are very few and far between in the southern third of the country.

At home it is the children's "Christmas calendar" and the Advent candles which first intimate the approach of Christmas. But by then the more spectacular Christmas decorations have already been glittering for a week or so in shop windows and overhead in shopping streets, and they are especially magnificent for the "shop window Sundays" of December. Christmas presents in Sweden are known as "Christmas knocks" (julklapp), a name they were given long before jultomten was thought of. What happened was that, on Christmas night, one would tiptoe up to the door of the recipient, knock hard and throw the present inside, preferably without being recognised, before quickly making off in the darkness. The point is that often the "Christmas knock" would have an ironic, indeed malicious, rhyming dedication on its wrapper. This kind of poetry lives on in the "Christmas rhymes", nowadays usually more comical than defamatory, which, during the last week or two leading up to Christmas, transform the Swedes into a nation of poets. Less lyrical - usually confined to God Jul (Merry Christmas) - are the Christmas card greetings, which, in Sweden and elsewhere, the Post Office handles by the tonne every December.

Then, just before Christmas, the home is decked out with all manner of ornaments - candlesticks, runners and wallhangings, Father Christmas figures, angels - and, after the gingersnaps have been made, perhaps a gingerbread house as well. Winter greenery such as lingonberry and pine sprigs, are all part of the scene, e.g. in the form of a garland hung on the front door. Christmas flowers are mostly red - poinsettia, tulips and begonias - but also pink, white and pale blue, as in the case of that pungently fragrant Swedish favourite, the hyacinth.

One oddity in the Nordic countries concerns the culmination of the festival, which comes on the day before Christmas - i.e. Christmas Eve - 24th December. That is when the Christmas dinner is eaten and the presents distributed. This takes place in the afternoon, but these days not until the family has watched the enormously popular Donald Duck programme on TV with the classic Walt Disney films.

Christmas food is one of the really ancient elements of Christmas, but this too is changing. Once upon a time the Christmas meal differed a great deal between coastal and inland communities, north and south, fishing and farming folk, and so on. Nowadays, with most of the raw materials coming from factories, local variations have given way to centrally orchestrated selection of manufactured or semi-manufactured products.

Pork makes up a strikingly large proportion of Christmas fare, and visitors sometimes wonder why the Swedes have to celebrate the birth of their Saviour big eating pig meat. The historical reason is that, for a long time, salt pork was the meat ration for the Swedes all the year round. Pigs were slaughtered in the autumn, when they were fattest, the pork was preserved in brine and would then have to last until the following autumn. One or two "Christmas pigs" were held over from the autumn butchering, however, and reprieved until Lucia. Christmas was the only time of the year when people could eat fresh meat, which in those days was the height of enjoyment. No such considerations apply nowadays, but so conservative are our habits, especially on festive occasions, that for many people Christmas would not be Christmas without ham, brawn and pork sausage.

Sweden does have a standard Christmas dinner, then, even though ambitious housewives try to make it more personal by including family specialties. The meal starts wit a smörgåsbord, i.e. various kinds of pickled herring, liver paste, smoked sausage etc., but with special Christmas items added, such as boiled pork sausage, pork brawn, cold roast spare ribs and pig's trotters in aspic, but above all the housewife's pride: a whole ham, flavoured with sugar and salt, boiled or roasted in the oven (and coated with egg and breadcrumbs), and served with various accompaniments, often cabbage in one form or another.

The smörgåsbord, includes "small hots", such as fried meatballs and "Jansson's Temptation". The bread is often rye bread flavoured with brewer's wort, which gives it a distinctive, sweet aroma.

In tradition-loving homes, the smörgåsbord is followed by lutfisk, i.e. dried ling or sathe, which has been alternately soaked in water and lye to make it round and tender again. This is a relic of the medieval Christmas fast, a meatless fortnight at a time of year when fresh fish was hard to come by. The Reformation, strictly speaking, made lutfisk redundant, but at that time it had become such an integral part of Christmas that the custom is still being kept up today, 450 years later, though quite a few people detest it. Lutfisk is usually eaten with a white sauce and/or melted butter and, on the plate, is generously seasoned with salt, allspice and white or black pepper.

For desert there is often boiled rice pudding ("rice porridge"), served for example with warm milk and cinnamon. In the old days, porridge was the principal Christmas dish in many homes, because it was easy to make in large quantities. Today, consequently, the rice pudding is accompanied by various rituals. For example, before helping oneself or on finding the "hidden" almond in the rice pudding, one has to come up with a "porridge rhyme". Tradition provides standard rhymes for the unpoetic.

Christmas fare nowadays must also be said to include the gingersnaps ("pepper cakes" in Swedish, though the pepper is a thing of the past) which are usually made in heart shapes or as profiles of the attributes of Christmas - the Christmas tree, the pig and the he-goat.

Christmas tree and manger are among the more recent customs of Christmas. They were both imported from Germany. The Christmas tree was adopted, by the upper classes, in the mid-18th century, but only percolated down to working class homes and farmhouses at the turn of last century. Being typical of Lutheran Christmas celebrations, it encountered no opposition and quickly became a church decoration as well. Mangers, on the other hand, were banned from churches for a long time. On the Continent they are looked on as typically Catholic, an attitude which was shared by the Swedish clergy. But once a bold and well-known clergyman had ventured, in the 1920s, to build a manger in his city parish church, the ice was broken and today the manger is a regular feature in churches during Advent. But mangers are often to be seen, on a smaller scale, in hospitals, day nurseries and private homes as well.

Jultomten is the Swedish version of the figure who, in most European countries, gives the children their Christmas presents: St Nicholas. Before he came to Sweden, the task of handing out presents was performed by the Christmas goat, but in the 1870s the old saint became so well known in Sweden, through the influx of German Christmas decorations, that he could no longer be resisted. He quickly eliminated the Christmas goat from the Yuletide awareness of the Swedes, for in this country he acquired a new name, borrowed from a figure of Swedish rural superstition. Tomten - the brownie or lubberfiend - was a dwarfish guardian of the farm, not particularly associated with Christmas or Christmas gifts, except that a bowl of porridge would be put out for him on Christmas night. But after a well-known artist, Jenny Nyström had, in thousands of Christmas pictures from the 1880s onwards, given jultomten a Swedish profile of his own, tying in with the notional appearance of tomten, he quckly became the paramount symbol of the Swedish Christmas. There is one difference between the Swedish jultomten and his Continental colleagues: whereas the latter, in the sensory world, are mainly confined to department stores and Christmas shopping malls, in Sweden an adult member of the family or a "chartered" neighbour dresses up as tomten and tries to make himself (or herself) unrecognizable to the children when, with his sack over his shoulder, he bangs on the door and asks the customary opening question: "Are there any good children here?"

The Christmas goat is a typical Swedish Christmas decoration, usually made of straw. It is the oldest Christmas symbol the Swedes have, descended probably from the figure of the devil which was included in the St Nicholas revels put on by schools in the Middle Ages. Later he became the leading character in an odd little Christmas play which young people would perform as they did the rounds of homesteads, collecting food and drink for their dancing festivities at Christmas time. Then in the 18th century, wearing a goat mask, he was entrusted with the distribution of Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, but for the past 100 years, following the usurpation of that task by jultomten, he has survived in a purely ornamental capacity.

Julottan, meaning the early morning service on Christmas Day, is a relic of the nocturnal Christmas devotions of the Middle Ages, which the Reformation cut down to just one service. This used to take place very early indeed, but seven o'clock is now a normal time for it. It was a very romantic sight in the days when people traveled to church in horse-drawn sleighs with blazing pitch pine torches which, on their arrival, were gathered into a great bonfire at the church gate. Even today, a Swedish country church lit up entirely with candles is a poignant scene not easily forgotten.

Advent • Lucia • New Year • Twelfth Night and Hilarymas

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