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.