Advent, Christmas Trees, and the Jultomten

Then as we get a little closer to Christmas, in the fall, they had a byk or 

big washing day like I’ve described before. When we got closer to Christmas, we had to do the Christmas cleaning. They had to clean cupboards and everything had to be scrubbed and clean. Even in the barn, they swept special for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, all the animals had an extra portion of food of some kind, mostly probably crushed oats. In the fall, we always saved some bundles of oats. When it was near Christmas, we’d put them up on stakes in several places in the yard. That was the Christmas treat for the birds.

We celebrated Advent. They would hang an Advent star in the window, and they had candleholders with four or five candles in them. After the electric light came, then it was popular to have these wooden sets of lights that looked like a triangle. We had that same kind of triangle shape on candleholders too. The thing with the electric ones was that they could have them on all the time as opposed to candles which you only had lit when you were sitting right there watching.

One of the last things done when we got very close to Christmas was Dad used to go out and cut the Christmas tree. Henrik usually got to go along. They would cut about three trees and bring them home, and then we had to go out and inspect them. Mama would choose which one she wanted in the house. The other two were put out in the yard. We never decorated the Christmas tree until the day before. When we were real little, they’d put us to bed and when we got up on Christmas morning, the tree was

decorated. They told us that Jultomten had decorated the tree for us. I suppose having six little kids help decorate the tree seemed like too much. When I was a little kid we had real candles in the Christmas tree. You can imagine how dangerous that was. There was more than one tree that burst into flames that I knew of. One of the decorations that we had were glass birds that had a clip under their feet and the clip could hold onto a branch on the tree.  I found some like those several years ago and Elizabeth uses them on her tree now. Another decoration we always had was there were always flags on the tree, Swedish flags of course. I still have a short string of Christmas tree flags that belonged to my Dad.

When I was a kid, we used to have a Santa Claus or jul tomten. They had a full costume with a mask and hat and clothes. When we got a little ornery or didn’t get along too good, soon there would be the jul tomten face at the window. I learned later that that was Ragnar. He would go and get the mask and put it on and Oh would we be good for the rest of the evening. When I was little, jul tomten was Farfar. When Brita was getting big, Farfar stumbled and tripped and tore the pants at the knee.  Brita saw that it was Farfar’s pants underneath and said, “Now I know it’s Farfar.” Us little kids, I think, still believed it. One time Sara took me along upstairs to the attic. She said she wanted to know what was in the box up in the rafters up there. We piled up boxes and she climbed up there and got that box down. In it we found the Santa Claus costume. “I knew it! I knew it!” she said. “They’ve been fooling us all this time!” And I was kind of disappointed with the adults too for not telling us the truth. Of course, it was all in fun.

 Thorbjörn and Ingalena
I think Thorbjörn must be four or five here :)

Then later, it wasn’t so fun exactly. When Sara had a boy, Thorbjörn, he was scared of jultomten. He would scream and scream, so then, after a few years, we didn’t have a jultomten. Papa forbid it. He said, “We’re not here to scare kids at Christmas.” Well, then one time when Thorbjörn was about 5 years old or so, I was over at Sara’s house helping her before Christmas. Sara’s mother and father in law lived on the second floor. They were up cleaning closets. I was in Sara’s kitchen down below, and here came Thorbjörn. He had found the Santa Claus mask up in a closet. He ran over to the kitchen woodstove and stuck the mask in there and burned it up. He looked over at me with such a look of triumph that I couldn’t scold him for touching the stove.

Lutefisk for Christmas

Mom loved Christmas :) This is her in 2011, joining in on the Christmas Eve Nerf gun battle :)

I think now I’ll describe how we celebrated Christmas in Kjettestorp when I was a kid. Christmas was the biggest holiday that we celebrated. Preparations started way before December. Making the Julost or Christmas cheese was the first part of Christmas preparations and that was done in late July or August like I described before. They used the bigger cheese molds for the Julost. It was usually the biggest cheese they made that year, and the Christmas cheese was called that from beginning.

There were some meat dishes that they really only made at Christmas. They used to make two different kinds of sylta. One was calf sylta. That was made with ground veal. They mixed in gelatin and you sliced it and ate it cold with red beets.  Oh that was good! The other kind was called pressylta. It was made in a big mold, like a cheese mold and you had a cheesecloth in there. Then they layered different pieces of meat. It was often made of the less-desirable cuts of meat because they didn’t have to be big pieces. They put in lots of different kinds in this mold. This kind was also very good, but the other was my favorite.

Fish drying on a wooden rack in Norway.

Then there’s the lutefisk. Lutefisk had to be put in lut before Annandagan. That was the 9^th of December and that was the last possible day to start the lutefisk. It had to be put in lye—how long I don’t know. I was too little to help with that. Then after it had been in the lye the right amount of time, it had to be watered out and that took several days too. It was a long process. Many people have asked me what lutefisk really is. The fish was called långa in Swedish. It is

A Långa!

a cold salt water fish. I think it is a kind of cod. They catch it up along the coast of Norway and in the North Sea. Then they sun dry it. Along the coast of Norway and down the coast of Bohuslän in Sweden they would have long tall racks – high as a house. They would cut the head off and clean the fish and then hang the pieces of fish on these racks. They’d leave

Our Christmas Lutefisk

the tail attached and that was how the fish would hang over the rail. The sun was hot against the cliffs there and there was always a breeze from the sea. When I was small, when we got the lutefisk, it was so hard and dried that you thought it was made of wood.   By the time I was old enough to help cook the lutefisk, though, we bought it frozen like we do today. I don’t know how much of this drying is still done. I think you can still buy the dried if you want to do your own lutefisk but most people buy it frozen.

When Fredrick Carlson came to visit

I found these three pictures of Fredrick
and Mom in one of Mom's albums and
I'm guessing they were taken during the
time she's describing here, but they're
not labeled so I don't know for sure.

"The next company we had from America was Fredrick Carlson.  Mama had a letter from Fred and Ruby Carlson in Minnesota, and they said their son Fredrick was in Germany doing his military training. They had sent him money, so he could travel up to Sweden and see if he could find us. I went into Rune Davidson and borrowed his English books. He was in high school at the time. On Sunday, I sat reading in those books trying to memorize some more words. Just then, Sara and Ingemar came home. When they heard the story, they said, “You’re sitting there reading like you think he’s coming tomorrow!” I said, “Well, it doesn’t say in the letter when exactly he’s coming.”

It happened that the next day, they called from the railroad station and said they had an American boy standing there. He didn’t speak any Swedish, and they didn’t have anybody at the station who spoke English, but he had a note with Mama’s name and address on it. “What shall we do with him?” Well, Dad wasn’t home, so she asked them to call a taxi and have it bring him up to Kjettestorp. So they did and here came this taxicab and stopped in front of the barn.  Fredrick stepped out, and I was sent out to meet him. I asked him years later, “What did I say when I met you at the gate?” He answered, “Welcome to Sweden!” So we agreed that I had done pretty good. I was the one to try to entertain Fredrick because I spoke more English than anyone else.

Vet någon om dom här är Karin's flickor?

We walked to Grönede, so he could see what that looked like. We visited with Morbror Nisse. He had a lot of guns and Morbror Nisse was a master shot and had won a lot of competitions. Fredrick understood guns so that was something they could communicate about. Then we had all the cousins come to Kjettestorp. Axel spoke some English so that was good. They could visit. Axel’s sister Karin came with her little girls, and one of those girls came up to Fredrick and asked, “Vad säger kor i Amerika?” (“What do cows say in America?”) Axel translated and Fredrick said, “Moooo!” The little girl said, “Kanske kor är klokare än folk om pratar alla dom samma språk!” (“Maybe cows are smarter than people if they speak the same language!”)

The Dala Cow Picture is just for fun :)

Well, I had started to talk about going to America before Fredrick came but my Dad was never very much in favor of it. They always thought of the Titanic. Well, one day we took Fredrick to his grandfather’s birthplace, and we stood there looking at the farm where all of those people had come from, eight siblings and only two of them in Sweden, all the others in Minnesota and they were all born in this little place in the parish of Vist. We had called Moster Maria, and she brought along her daughter Maj and Maj spoke some English. We asked the people in the house if we could be on their lawn and so we had a picnic there in this place. After we ate Fredrick stood there looking around the place where his grandfather had been born, and tears started to

Fredrick and Mom :)

trickle down his cheeks, and he said, “If my Dad ever comes to Sweden, please take him to this place.” When Dad saw this and heard what he had said, Dad said, “Well, these Americans do seem to be good people. I guess it would be ok, Gun, if you went to America.”

Thor and Alma Johnson visit Sweden

Alma and Thor sitting in front of Kjettestorp

"The next Americans to come and visit were Thor and Alma Johnson. Thor was my Dad’s first cousin. The two sisters, Anna Lovisa and Helena Sofia, both

The cousins, Thor Boberg and 

Thor Johnson

named sons Thor, one in America and one in Sweden.  Anna Lovisa married a man whose last name was Johnson. I can’t remember his first name now.  Well, Anna Lovisa and Mr. Johnson had several kids, among them was Vivian who had a son Fancher whose daughter Susie is still in town here. She and her family have been a special connection through the years. And then there was Thor whose daughters are Bubs Olson and Marge Paulson, my American sisters. Bubs’ sons are Gary and Brad, and we’ve had lots of fun with them and their families through the years.  

Well back to Sweden. It must’ve been in the late 50s when Thor and Alma came. They stayed with us for a while, and they were a lot of fun. Thor was determined that I should come and visit them. He said he would pay my travel even but I was too independent for that. I wanted to go to America, but I wanted to pay my own way.

Thor, Ingemar, Sara, Elin and Alma

We had a lot of fun with Thor and Alma when they visited us in Sweden. Thor’s mother, of course, had come from Grönede but Alma’s parents had come from Småland. Kjettestorp isn’t very far from Småland, so we decided to take them down there to visit a relative. Dad was driving and I went along. To pass the time in the car, Thor wanted me to sing something, so I sang “Smålandssången,” the song of the county of Småland. Some of the words are “Röd lyser stugan bak hängbjörkens slöja, känner du hemmet från barndomens dar.” (“Red shines the cottage underneath of the birches, do you remember your childhood home?”) Well, Thor liked that but then I thought of “Flickorna i Småland,” “The Girls from Småland.” And oh, that one he really liked.  I had to sing it over and over again because Thor wanted to learn it so he could sing it when he came home.

Alma with Gunilla, Christina and Birgitta,
Brita and Henrik's girls

Well, before they left, all of Dad’s cousins were invited to Kjettestorp to meet their American cousins and you know how it can be with big family gatherings. You can see what differences there are even between family members, and sometimes they can be funny. We were cooking dinner. Sara and I were the chief cooks. Brita and Margaretha did all the other work, serving and such things. Thorbjörn, Birgitta and Ingalena were the biggest kids, and they were going to look after the little kids, and they decided that they were going to let Kjell-Egon, Farbror Folke and Greta’s son, decide what to play. Ingalena came in and said to Sara that Kjell-Egon decided that Ingalena and Birgitta were going to be two women who sat in a café, and Kjell-Egon was going to be a drunk man who came in and bothered them. Then Thorbjörn was supposed to be a policeman who came in and arrested this drunk. Sara said, “As much as you know, if Folke and Greta hear that then our kids will be blamed for it.” She went out to try and find something else for them to play. The difficulty was that Kjell-Egon was never allowed to play with other children except when he went to school so he didn’t know any of the little games kids played. He didn’t know Hoppa Hage, hopscotch, and he

didn’t know how to just play catch, but Sara found something else for them to play and came back in the kitchen, and she and I got the giggles.

Elin, Ingalena, Alma, Sara, Ingemar, Thor and Thorbjörn

The color photos in this post were taken by the Kingsburg Thor and developed as slides.

I found them in amongst Mom and Dad's slides while playing with a slide scanner :)

Then in the afternoon, it was sunny and warm and all the kids kicked their shoes off and ran barefoot but Greta said that Kjell-Egon was not allowed to go barefoot. Finally she gave in a little and let him run in his socks. Mama said, “I’d much rather wash a kid’s feet than his socks!”

Then later on that night, we were going to watch a movie Thor had taken of the family in America to show the cousins in Sweden. It showed his brothers and sisters and their families and, of course, his own family. When it was time to show this movie, all the other kids sat on the floor but being strict Pentecostal, Farbror Folke said Kjell-Egon could not see a movie, so he took him outside. Greta, though, stayed in. Thor tried to say that it was just family but Farbror Folke said it’s a moving picture and he couldn’t look at it. We couldn’t help but wonder if it was such a sin for the boy to watch a movie, why did she stay in? And we had a hard time not giggling then.

That day ended in a big sort of slumber party. Most of the family stayed overnight, so there were people sleeping in every room, on the floors and in all the beds. It was great fun."