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.

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.

Lutefisk for Christmas

Mom loved Christmas :) This is her in 2011, joining in on the Christmas Eve Nerf gun battle :)

I think now I’ll describe how we celebrated Christmas in Kjettestorp when I was a kid. Christmas was the biggest holiday that we celebrated. Preparations started way before December. Making the Julost or Christmas cheese was the first part of Christmas preparations and that was done in late July or August like I described before. They used the bigger cheese molds for the Julost. It was usually the biggest cheese they made that year, and the Christmas cheese was called that from beginning.

There were some meat dishes that they really only made at Christmas. They used to make two different kinds of sylta. One was calf sylta. That was made with ground veal. They mixed in gelatin and you sliced it and ate it cold with red beets.  Oh that was good! The other kind was called pressylta. It was made in a big mold, like a cheese mold and you had a cheesecloth in there. Then they layered different pieces of meat. It was often made of the less-desirable cuts of meat because they didn’t have to be big pieces. They put in lots of different kinds in this mold. This kind was also very good, but the other was my favorite.

Fish drying on a wooden rack in Norway.

Then there’s the lutefisk. Lutefisk had to be put in lut before Annandagan. That was the 9^th of December and that was the last possible day to start the lutefisk. It had to be put in lye—how long I don’t know. I was too little to help with that. Then after it had been in the lye the right amount of time, it had to be watered out and that took several days too. It was a long process. Many people have asked me what lutefisk really is. The fish was called långa in Swedish. It is

A Långa!

a cold salt water fish. I think it is a kind of cod. They catch it up along the coast of Norway and in the North Sea. Then they sun dry it. Along the coast of Norway and down the coast of Bohuslän in Sweden they would have long tall racks – high as a house. They would cut the head off and clean the fish and then hang the pieces of fish on these racks. They’d leave

Our Christmas Lutefisk

the tail attached and that was how the fish would hang over the rail. The sun was hot against the cliffs there and there was always a breeze from the sea. When I was small, when we got the lutefisk, it was so hard and dried that you thought it was made of wood.   By the time I was old enough to help cook the lutefisk, though, we bought it frozen like we do today. I don’t know how much of this drying is still done. I think you can still buy the dried if you want to do your own lutefisk but most people buy it frozen.