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Christmas Spirit 
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New Year - Festive round, resolutions and visions for the future By Jan-Öjvind Swahn New Year celebrations in Sweden are much the same as in other countries, but they are very different from Christmas. Whereas on a Christmas evening the streets are more or less deserted, on New Year's Eve they are thronged with people. Christmas is the festival of the home and the nuclear family. New Year is celebrated with friends and acquaintances, at home or in a restaurant, and elated crowds can be seen moving from one disco to another. Whereas the food and drink of Christmas are old-fashioned and agrarian, at New Year people try to be as sophisticated as they can afford - with champgne or sparkling wines bubbling in their glasses and lobster or shellfish pâté resplendent on their plates. At the stroke of midnight they throw streamers, tootle trumpets, blow out paper serpents and let off fireworks from balconies or gardens - and then they go all sentimental, recalling the past year and making resolutions for the new one. Noise is an integral part of the occasion, but the "New Year Bangers" of the past ages, from shotguns and pistols, were intended to ward off witchcraft. New Year celebrations have to a great extent been fashioned by radio and television. While radio was paramount, people always listened reverently to a famous actor reciting Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ring out, Wild Bells" and to the bells of all Sweden's cathedrals ringing in the New Year. Nowadays many people watch television, where an attempt is made to infuse a modicum of reflection in between the sketches and feature films. But one can still come across a more old-fashioned way of seeing the New Year in (a custom which was not all that common in days gone by). This includes, for example, fortune-telling games like pouring molten lead in water and deducing, from the shapes thus formed, what the New Year will bring. Advent • Lucia • Christmas • Twelfth Night and Hilarymas [ Back to index ] |
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