Julotta and Dancing Around the Christmas Tree

"The trip to julotta."
This is an Ilon Wikland illustration for Astrid Lindgren's Jul i Bullerbyn. 

We had to go to bed kind of early on Christmas Eve because in the morning, on Christmas Day, we had to get up at 3 o’clock so we could go to julotta. Julotta was something special too. The service started first thing in the morning on Christmas day.  Before we left, everybody got some hot chocolate and sandwiches. I guess the grown-ups maybe drank coffee. Then we got all bundled up in regular outdoor coats, and on top of that we something they called overcoats. They were thick big coats because it was cold to sit in a sled for an hour. Then we piled into the sled and wrapped up in lap robes. Those lap robes had wool on the inside. Margaretha and Lennart went in front with Mama and Papa. Mama probably held Lennart on her lap, so he could get under the lap robe and get some warmth from being next to her. The rest of us sat down in the bottom of the sled. We sometimes crawled down underneath the lap robes and got warm. We had to get to church an hour ahead of when the service started if we wanted to be able to all sit together as a family. The church was always full to the brim. They had to put in extra chairs. Everybody around, even those who otherwise had nothing to do with church, everyone came to julotta. There was only candlelight at julotta. In Sweden, it’s called levandelus, living light. I think that’s a real good name for it because candles do look more alive than electric lights do. At the start of julotta, the organist who had a beautiful tenor voice would sing, “O Helge Natt” (“O Holy Night”). Then everyone stood up and sang, “Vår hälsad sköna morgonstund” (“We greet you beautiful morning”). I’d often get shivers down my spine. I thought it was so beautiful. Of course, there was other extra music too.

From right to left: Mom, Sara, Margaretha, and 
Maja Karlsson, the girl who had the Christmas 

Well, we had fun going home from julotta too. It was a tradition to have sort of a race home against the Anderssons i Mellangården—The saying was that whoever made it home first after julotta would get their harvest in first next fall. Well, one year Dad had a new horse called Mandel, and Mandel was such a runner. He loved to run, so Dad thought he was going to win that year. Going home, as usual we had the horses up at Samuelson’s, so we walked up there. When we were getting in the sled at Samuelson’s, the Anderssons went by, Henning and Tant Anna and Lydia and Farbror Andersson. You can imagine how they waved going by us, thinking they were going to win. Well, that year Dad had Mandel, and he pulled a little trick too. We took a short cut across the lake. It had been really cold that year before Christmas, so the lake was frozen solid. So it turned out that as we were getting out of the sled by our barn, here came the Anderssons thinking they were first home, but really we had won. Oh how us kids giggled and thought that was fun. And Henning said, “How did you do that?!” Dad smiled and told them.

Sara Boberg Bäck

Well, after julotta, on Christmas Day, all we did was eat and take care of the animals. It was a really holy day, so there was no big play or making noise. You stayed inside and you kept still. There were two days in the year like this: Christmas Day and Good Friday. In Swedish, Good Friday is called Long Friday and when I was a kid I thought that was a good name for it. It seemed to be the longest day, like it would never end. At least on Christmas, we still had good food and you had some kind of presents to look at.

The next day then was the Second Day of Christmas when we celebrated Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. There was a church service that day too, but when we were little kids, we didn’t usually go. We went when we were older. That was a time to visit relatives or neighbors. Somebody always had a party to go to that day.

Then we also celebrated Trettondagjul or thirteen days after Christmas. That was also a holiday. After that then, kids sometimes had parties. They were called julgransrisning. You took all the decorations off the Christmas tree. Maja Karlsson always had a big Christmas party, a Julgransrisning, they used to call it. It was like a final party for the Christmas tree. They would hang baskets made of paper with candy or nuts in them. Her parents had the store, so they had those kinds of things available. Even oranges. All us kids and more, they had quite a few kids invited. We had refreshments with cookies and all good things. Sometimes the kids came from Herrefall and they had so far to walk so their mother came with them. Tant Ädla was such a good singer; it was so much fun when she came. We would dance around the Christmas tree, and she was running around and singing. Then we could pick down one basket of each kind and take home. That party was one of the highlights of the Christmas season as far as we were concerned.

Left to right -- Maja Karlsson, Mom, Margaretha, Sara, (I don't know! Hjälp!) and Lennart

When Christmas Presents Were Sleds and Skiis

I think this is Mom and one of the Florman girls on a spark on the road up to Kjettestorp.

One Christmas Eve, I remember the door opened, and a paper tag was thrown in attached to a string. The tag was addressed to Henrik, and it said to pull the string. He pulled and pulled and pulled, and eventually in came a special sled that Morbror Kalle had made. It was a copy of those that they had in the forest in wintertime. There was a front sled and a back sled and they were attached with a chain in-between and that’s what they put logs on to bring them back up to the house. They could make the chain longer or shorter depending on what the logs looked like. Morbror Kalle made several things like that for us for Christmas. When Henrik got a little bigger then, he made a sled for me one year. Of course, Papa helped him. Then we were going to have a race on our

Kjettestorp in the snow in February 1958.

sleds on the hill down to the schoolhouse. Folke i Sör had a red sled that would go so fast. We had an old sled that Henrik was riding. The wood across the runners was cracked but it was still holding together because there were the steel runners. Sara said to me, “You’re crazy if you’re going to race with them.” But I was determined, so I laid on my stomach on the sled. We didn’t have any steering, so we dragged the toes of our shoes in the snow to turn. There were many turns in the road. Well, lo and behold, I won the race. Henrik’s old sled had gone to pieces on one turn, and Folke hit a patch of loose snow and got slowed down. You can imagine how good I felt about that.

Mom on skis.

There was another Christmas when Ragnar gave me skiis. It was when it was first becoming popular for everyone to ski. I was the first one then to have skis. Why he gave them to me I don’t know. Maybe the same reason why he gave me a book once called En Liten Yrhätta.  I think that was the only book that I had from my younger years that was really mine. It was about a girl who was really lively, kind of a tomboy. I think maybe he thought I would be the first one to take the skis. Well, you can imagine going out and getting on skis with skirts and a long coat. It didn’t take long before it became popular to have skiboots. We called them pyäxor. They were big heavy shoes, so you could wear heavy socks in them and keep warm. Then soon after came ski pants. That was a big step forward for girls. We could wear pants. My, that wouldn’t have been thought of before. I, of course, had to share my skis so everyone got to try to ski. It didn’t take long them before on another Christmas Mom and Dad gave Sara a pair of skis. Brita had said she didn’t want any. Of course, in time, Margaretha and Lennart had their own skiis. We used to do a lot of skiing in the neighborhood. The neighborhood kids would arrange competitions in skiing. I

I think these folks are standing among the haystacks at Kjettestorp. The back of the photo
says 1952. Left to right they are Nisse Karlsson, Astor Karlsson, AnnCathrine Karlsson and Lennart Boberg. 

was never very good at fast skiing but we were in on all that. We had a hill down by Storängen where we did downhill skiing. At the bottom of that hill there was an opening in the fence where there was a summer gate. Those gates had no hinges. Instead there was just an extra length of fence that they removed during the winter when there were no animals in the field. So this hole in the fence stood open at the bottom of that hill, and we ran down that steep hill and through that opening and onto the field on the other side. I think it happened once or twice that somebody missed the opening and got hung up on the fence, but it’s amazing that none of us ever really got hurt.

Christmas Presents!

The other thing that happened on Christmas Eve was the exchange of presents. When we were little, us kids were each given 50 öre to buy presents with. You couldn’t get much for that. You couldn’t buy for everyone, so

sometimes we decided who was going to buy for who. I remember one Christmas when it was decided that Margaretha would buy a gift for Mama, and she went to her and said, “Mama, I am not going to tell you what I’m going to give you for Christmas because it’s only hair pins.” You can guess how much she was teased about that through the years. One year, I had bought a round pocket mirror for Henrik. We, of course, hid the presents we bought all around so nobody could find them ahead of time. When Christmas came, I had hidden it so well that I couldn’t find that mirror anywhere. I remember that Sara came and was helping me dig through my drawers and look in all our hiding places, and she said, “Well, when we find it, at least we’ll be able to see the look on our faces!”

In those days, we didn’t have any pretty Christmas paper. Most presents were wrapped in brown paper, but then we had something we called lack. It was a stick with some kind of red wax. I think in English I’ve heard it called sealing wax. You lit a match and melted drops of wax onto your package. Sometimes you had a stamp that you stamped in the wax while it was hot or you could let the drops cool as they were. Sometimes you see pictures of packages from Sweden that have those red blobs on. That’s this wax.

This is an illustration from Astrid Lindgren's Alla Vi Barn i Bullerbyn

I remember one Christmas when Ragnar was tricky. Farfar got a rather big package and he started to unwrap and inside there was another box and another box and another box. I don’t remember how many boxes there were, but when he finally got to the inside, there was a piece of wood for his stove. That was of course a big joke. Ragnar really had fun with those kinds of things.

One of the biggest presents that I ever got myself was the year that Margaretha and I got something called skinhatta. A skinhatt was made of really pliable leather like you had in nice gloves, and lined, of course, with a fur brim in front to keep you warm in the face and on top was a little round ball of fur. That same year we got something called botiner. Both women and men could wear botiner, but women’s were taller. They went half up to the knee. That was a kind of rubber boot that we wore outside of our dress shoes. Sometimes when you were going to a party or someplace where you wanted to be able to take

Mom, Lennart and Margaretha

your outer shoes off when you got there or you didn’t want to wear your dress shoes outside because it was too cold and snowy. Those botiner that we got that year were lined with some kind of fur. I remember when we went to julotta that year, I was sure that everyone must notice how fine I looked as I walked in with my skinhatta and botiner. There probably wasn’t anyone who noticed but I thought so.

Wishing for Snow and Rice Mush

There was a lot of extra baking and cooking before Christmas, and of course, there was special butchering for Christmas. They used to butcher both a pig and a calf that went toward Christmas food. They cooked brown beans and they made sylta. I can’t remember all the food they prepared but the Christmas celebrations were a feast. At noon we had dop i gryta. This was the water that they had boiled the ham in for julskinkan, the Christmas ham. They boiled that water down, so it condensed and was really flavorful. We would take a plate with bread and dip the bread in that broth and go and sit down and eat it. We thought that was a special feast. That was only on Christmas Eve at noon that we ate this. Then in the evening, we always celebrated on Christmas eve in salen, and being in salen was an event in itself. They heated up salen, and we ate our evening meal in there.

Snow in Kjettestorp

I remember one Christmas, we had wished for snow. There was not a speck of snow on the ground. It was always more fun to go by sled to julotta. The wagon just wasn’t the same. But this year the ground was bare. There was just no snow. Then Dad asked me to come out and help him with something. He had to roll up the barbed wire that he had between the yard and the field next to the yard. They never left barbed wire up in the winter because people skiing or sledding or wild animals might run into that wire because it was hard to see when there was snow. Still, as a kid, I couldn’t understand why we had to be out there doing that on Christmas Eve morning, especially when there was no sign of snow. Dad had his ways of seeing the signs, I guess. So we got started rolling up that wire and we weren’t even halfway through when snowflakes started coming down. They got thicker and thicker so that by the time we got it finished, there was even snow sticking on the ground. It was cold enough to be frozen and by Christmas morning, there was so much snow that they could barely get the horses and the sled down to the road where the snowplow had gone.

Well, back to the usual Christmas Eve now. They had to start kind of early in the evening. They’d go to the barn to get the milking done and oh, how we’d wait for the grown-ups to come back in. Then we had afternoon coffee, and we had extra cookies, and everything was so special and festive and then sometimes we got our presents. Supper was a special meal and took longer than usual. We always had rice mush for this supper. There weren’t very many imports in those days like it is now, so rice was a special treat. And there was a game that went with the rice mush. They used to blanch an almond and put it in the rice mush and whoever got that almond was supposed to be married within the next year then. Mama usually manipulated the almond as she served it all up so that either Farfar or Ragnar got the almond. When Farfar got it, he would make such a face and oh how we kids would laugh and be jolly.

Morfar Thor's violin and case -- One of my bucket list items is to fix it up and learn how to play :)

After that we read the scriptures. As long as Farfar was alive, he read from Isaiah and from Luke. When Farfar was gone, then Dad used to read from Isaiah, and he let us kids take turns each reading a few verses from Luke. Then we had some music. Sara learned to play the pump organ first and when she was big enough, she’d play it. Otherwise, Dad would play his violin. He was quite a good violin player. We would all sing Christmas hymns.