On the seven seas and in harbours throughout the world Christmas trees are set
up on the mastheads of Norwegian ships when Christmas approaches. And on board
ship, as in Norwegian homes all over the world, Christmas is celebrated
Norwegian style -- which means that it is celebrated a little differently from
the way other people do it.
By Vera Henriksen
- Christmas in the country
- The oldest traditions
- Christmas in the towns
Yet the differences are less now than just a few years ago. Improved
communications and increased intercourse between countries have led to an
intermingling of traditions. And to a foreign guest the similarities between
Christmas in Oslo and in London or New York may appear more conspicuous than the
differences.
There is the same hectic Christmas shopping spree, the big, lighted Christmas
trees in the squares, streets decorated with garlands and lights, fanciful
window displays with starry-eyed youngsters craning their necks to get a better
view.
And, as in any city, the adults dream about the good, old-fashioned Christmas
the way grandmother used to celebrate it.
But in Norway this is a dream that may come true -- for those who are lucky
enough to be invited to a real country Christmas.
Christmas in the country
In big country kitchens in farms and villages off the beaten track the hectic
preparations still begin weeks before the festival season. The special Christmas
beer, "Juleøl", is brewed; the many traditional pork dishes are
prepared; numerous kinds of small cakes (biscuits, cookies), the minimum being
seven different kinds, are baked together with the "julekake", the
sweet Christmas bread filled with raisins, candied peel and cardamom. The smell
of Christmas fills the house, bringing the children's expectations up to fever
pitch.
And then there is the traditional thorough housecleaning as the Holiday
approaches, and the chopping of enough wood to keep the fires burning for at
least the first three days of Christmas.
Nowadays there is, in addition, a trip to the woods to select a Christmas tree,
a trip that grandfather probably did not make. For the Christmas tree was not
introduced into Norway from Germany until the latter half of the nineteenth
century; to the country districts it came even later.
Then, finally, when Christmas Eve arrives, there is the decorating of the tree,
usually done by the parents behind the closed doors of the living room, while
the children are ready to burst with excitement outside.
It is also usual on Christmas Eve to make a trip to the barn with a bowl of
porridge for the "nisse", the gnome who -- according to superstition
-- is the protector of the farm. Nowadays this ceremony is performed for the
benefit of the children, but grandmother may possibly have had an uneasy feeling
that the little fellow might actually exist. But he is not the only one to be
given a treat; the "julenek", a sheaf of oats for the birds, is
mounted on a pole, and the farm animals get a special Christmas feed.
And then, on Christmas Eve in the afternoon, the church bells start chiming to
ring in the Holiday. For this occasion, as for other great feasts, they are not
rung in the ordinary way: there is no lazy ding-dong, instead there is an
intense and protracted ding-ding-ding for several minutes, as the bell is struck
by a rapid succession of blows.
As the sound of the bells dies away, Christmas peace settles over the farms and
the villages. Stragglers who have not yet reached their destinations hurry to
join relatives and friends, while in the farm yard the snow creaks underfoot,
and light from the windows glows invitingly into the dark winter afternoon.
The Christmas celebration itself begins with the solemn reading of the
gospelfor Christmas Day; perhaps from a family Bible that is several hundred
years old, with generations of births and baptisms, confirmations and marriages
and deaths recorded on its opening pages.
After this, the family sits down for the traditional meal, which to a foreigner
may seem to contrast strangely with the festive occasion. Usually the main dish
is porridge, or -- where available -- fresh cod, or possibly "lutefisk",
cod treated in a lye solution and served boiled. This traditional fare is
probably a survival from pre-Reformation times, when Christmas Eve was a day of
fast and abstinence. Today however, the meal is rounded off with a variety of
dishes that have no connection whatever with abstinence.
But the children do not usually enjoy the meal very much. Their eyes keep
turning to the closed living room door, and they grow more and more impatient
with the unbearably slow pace with which their elders finish the meal. It seems
to them as if an eternity has passed when the big moment arrives and the door to
the living room is thrown open.
The children tumble in, only to stop short, awestruck by the sight of the tree,
aglow with the light from real candles, and with the neatly wrapped gifts heaped
underneath.
Then follows a Norwegian ritual known as "circling the Christmas tree".
Everybody joins hands to form a ring around the tree, and the company then walk
around it singing carols.
Finally, the gifts are distributed, and the children can relax. The rest of the
evening is spent on fun and games and there are cakes and other good things to
be eaten.
On the morning of Christmas Day itself the family goes to church, In previous
times there was an early morning service, followed by a big breakfast at home.
Nowadays the service is later and the traditional meal is a family dinner,
usually with pork as the main dish.
But in some communities the church itself will be the same as in ages past,
perhaps a small wooden church that has served the parish since the Middle Ages.
There may be runic inscriptions on the time-darkened walls, paintings and
carvings done during the centuries since those remote times, and -- perhaps too
-- for those who have ears to hear it -- the faint echo of the hundreds of
earlier Christmas services.
But Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are only the beginning of a season of
celebration lasting at least to Epiphany, and even in some places until the
thirteenth of January -- the twentieth day of Christmas, and the feast day of
St. Canute. Then, according to a saying, "twentieth-day Canute drives away
Christmas".
It is a season for socializing. In some places, though only for nostalgic
reasons, people still use horse and sleigh, and the tinkle of sleigh-bells may
be heard among the snow-clad trees. It is a season of welcoming, of warm light
streaming out of open doors as guests are received, a season of games and
merriment, when nobody mentions children's bedtimes. It is also a time when
children are allowed to dress up in fancy-dress and to go around from one farm
to another, to be treated to cakes and other delicacies wherever they come. This
custom is called "to go julebukk" ("Christmas goat"), and
the origin of it is obscure; there is, however, agreement among historians that
it dates back to the Middle Ages.
This is the kind of Christmas that can still be experienced in country
districts, a kind of Christmas very much like that which grandmother knew. It
is, however, possible that grandmother felt like going into hibernation for a
week after St. Canute had finally put an end to the festivities; they must have
involved her in a quite staggering amount of work.
The oldest traditions
Generally people accept their Christmas tradition without question. They do not
stop to consider that these customs are a kind of museum, showing glimps es of
their forefathers' way of life and beliefs, of pagan cults as well as of ancient
Christian traditions.
But Christmas, the great Christian festival, has assimilated customs from many
religions. And each country has woven its own special Christmas traditions from
a tangle of various threads, all leading back through the centuries.
The evergreen Christmas tree conveys the idea of vitality and growth, in spite
of winter and the dark period, and incorporates pagan as well as Christian
symbols. The misteltoe we acquired from the Celts, the holly from the Saxons,
and the custom of giving gifts was taken from a Roman New Year festival. The
people of Norway have among their own Christmas customs some that can be traced
back to the pagan sacrificial offerings of their viking forebears.
Even Yule, or in Norwegian "Jul", which is the name for the Holiday,
dates back to pre-Christian times. Joulu or Lol was a pagan feast celebrated all
over Northern Europe.
Historians differ as to what kind of feast this "joulu" was, also as
to the exact time of the year when it was celebrated, although there is general
agreement that it must have fallen on some date during late autumn or early
winter. Most of them agree that it was not only a fertility feast, but that it
was also, or somehow came to be associated with, a sacrificial feast for the
dead.
This combination may sound strange to modern ears. But in an agricultural
society, tied to the yearly cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and of
birth, reproduction and death, it might have seemed natural to link together
fertility and death -- life's emergence from and return to the unknown.
The oldest of our customs seem to be remnants of this feast. They have to do
with sacrifices to the gods and to the dead, and they generally concern food and
drink.
A Norse skald who lived about the year A.D. 900, a hundred years or so before
Norway became a Christian country, said in a lay about his king:
He drinks Yule at sea,
if he has his way,
the far-sighted chieftain.
In the same connection the skald mentions Frøy, the god of fertility,
and the lay thus indicates the ancient origin of one or two of the traditions
mentioned above.
One is the special "juleøl", the Yuletime beer that is brewed
on the farms, and in modern times also by the breweries. The custom of brewing
this special beer can be traced back through the centuries to the time when
horns filled with beer during the Joulu festivities were dedicated to the Norse
gods Odin, Frøy and Njord. But when modern-day Norwegians at Christmas
time lift their glasses in the traditional Scandinavian "skål"
(Pronounced scawl), they give little or no thought to their viking forefathers
who lifted the horns of sacrificial beer to drink for peace and a good year to
come.
The juleøl tradition survived the country's conversion to Christianity
simply because people refused to give it up. And the rulers wisely chose to give
the old tradition new symbolic meaning, rather than abolish it. The beer was no
longer to be considered as a sacrificial drink: it was just to be called Holiday
beer. And, according to one of the old laws of the land, it should be "blessed
on Christmas night, to Christ and the Virgin Mary".
The old lay's mention of the god Frøy points to the origin of another
tradition: it is believed that a pig was sacrificed to Frøy at some point
during the Joulu celebration, and that it provided the main dish of the
subsequent feast.
This may be the reason why, even today, pork is served in most Norwegian homes
at Christmas. But the Christmas pork is prepared in many different ways. It may
be a whole roast piglet, or it may be served as pressed pork, roast pork with
sour cabbage, smoked ham or pickled trotters.
The belief in the "nisse" also goes back to pagan times. His ancestry
as protector of the farm can be traced back to the man who, some time during the
distant past, had first cleared the land. Often this man was believed to be
buried in one of the burial mounds near the houses. At Yuletide, the feast for
the dead, food and drink was brought out to the mound for him, and he was
believed to come out to eat and drink. During the centuries the popular image of
this much respected and feared ghost changed into the less dangerous, but still
at times destructive and leprechaun-like "nisse" of Norwegian fairy
tales.
But the "nisse" does not survive today only in Norwegian tradition. A
strange intermingling has taken place between the Nordic "nisse" and
the St. Nicolas of central Europe. The result is the queer mixture of gnome and
bishop that American children get to know through the poem "The night
before Christmas"; the jolly little Santa Claus with the red suit, the
potbelly and the merry eyes. In Norway too the native «nisse» contains
strong elements of the imported Santa Claus.
However the ancestor of the "nisse" is not the only ghost supposed to
be around at Yuletide; the dead were believed to travel about in great numbers
during this season. Food was therefore left on the tables for them on Christmas
night, or even in some places, for the entire Holiday period. It is an eerie
thought, as one helps oneself to the abundance of food on the Christmas buffets
of Norwegian restaurants, that the tradition of these meals probably goes back
to the ghostly banquets of superstition.
However, the abundance and variety of dishes may probably be traced to another
tradition. People believed that the quantity of the food served at Christmas
augured poverty or plenty in the year to come. Naturally, therefore, they outdid
themselves to ensure a year of abundance.
There are other Christmas traditions, too, that can be traced back to the early
Middle Ages: the use of straw decorations and the sheaf of oats set out for the
birds, for instance, and also the Christmas baking. But the origin of these
customs is more uncertain. Some historians maintain that they have some
connection with the old fertility feast, others insist that they do not.
Christmas in the towns
In the cities and towns of today people tend to simplify the traditional
celebrations. Even so, many of the time-honoured traditions are still upheld.
The gifts are still opened on Christmas Eve and carols are still sung around
the tree. The traditional foods, the porridge, the "lutefisk" or
ordinary codfish, the various pork dishes and the "julekake", are
still served; but the most complicated pork dishes have most probably been
bought readymade, and there is a fair chance that the cakes will have come from
a bakery.
However, the custom of paying visits to friends and relatives during the
Holiday week is still kept up; and there is also a tradition of Christmas
hospitality even to strangers, in keeping with the feeling that nobody ought to
be alone and unhappy on Christmas Eve.
Moreover, the foreign visitor who knows what to look for will soon discover
that there is still a distinct Norwegian flavour even in those busy preparations
for the Holiday in the city streets.
There is, for one thing, the whiteness: not only the whiteness of the snow, but
also the white lights used for decorations, so unlike the coloured ones used in
many other countries. And there are the traditional Christmas dishes and small
cakes, the straw decorations and the "nisse" dolls, all prominently
displayed in the stores. He or she will also find that some of the shop window
displays have typically Norwegian themes: the "nisse" sitting in the
barn with his bowl of porridge, for instance, or the sheaf of oats full of
gaily-coloured birds.
In addition there are, of course, many things that may be seen in other places:
the Santa Clauses in the large department stores with their beards and red
costumes, the Christmas trees and decorations, the happy and expectant people.
Moreover, if the opportunity presents itself, a visitor to a Norwegian town at
Christmas should give him or herself the treat of sampling the Christmas buffet
of one of the well-known restaurants. And, if something is to his or her liking,
it might be appropriate to send a grateful thought to those mediaeval ghosts who
may well have been responsible for the first Christmas feast.
Produced for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Nytt fra Norge.
The author is responsible for the contents of the article. Printed in March 1996.
Reproduced with permission from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Related links:
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A St Olaf Christmas in Norway