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.