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.