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.