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.