Santa Lucia

The 13th of December is the Feast of Saint Lucia, known as Luciadagen here in Norway.  I'm not religious, but I enjoy learning about the history behind traditions, so I did a little light reading (this will become a terrible pun in a minute) about Saint Lucia this morning and learned that she was a martyr from the year A.D. 304.  You can learn as much as I now know by checking out wikipedia; naturally, being a figure from so far back in history, the specifics of her life are shadowy.  However, the tradition of her Feast Day is still celebrated in many churches, and there is one particular reason her day is so special here in Scandinavia: we are at the height of the mørktid (dark season), and hers is the Feast of Light.*  As such, it fits in splendidly with everything else I have so far experienced of the Norwegian approach to Juletid (Christmas): yet another day to celebrate light and koseligtid (cozy time… a hybrid word I just sort of made up, but Norwegians love compound words so I think it works) amidst the polar night.  After reading a bit about that, I felt it only appropriate to light a couple candles to her, and enjoy a little early afternoon taknemligness. 

*In addition, Santa Lucia is the patron saint of the blind, and I forgot my glasses when I left for work today… coincidence?? 

By the way, the records in the background are, in fact, two of my new favorite things.  Tyler has orchestrated our second annual record exchange this year.  We decided last year that instead of being a couple that fusses over trying to secretly think of presents for each other, we would just buy each other some records for our joint collection.  This year, being so impractically positioned in the arctic, it made much more sense for one of us to do the picking and the other to do the awestruck opening, for various reasons related to spatial, environmental and monetary thrift.  My present to Tyler was letting him pick, because he is so stoked about it.  I am also really good at opening things and being awed, so it's working out!  I am looking forward to a future year when I can stage an advent calendar of records for Tyler, too, though.  That's also becoming part of the tradition: the fact that we are too impatient to wait until Christmas itself, and have to open some of them as early as Thanksgiving.  It's been many years since I experienced the bottled-up joy of Christmas-morning, and as an adult I would like to proclaim that I actually do think it is more fun not to wait and wait and suffer and wait for one big orgy of newness.  I love opening our presents together a little bit here and a little bit there, making this or that otherwise ho-hum Monday feel like a holiday, too.  It also takes the emphasis off the presents-for-presents-sake, and back into the simpler sharing of warmth and excitement.  It's totally great.

Getting back to Santa Lucia, I have to point out my own irony in constructing an altar out of prized possessions while burning candles in her name.  In one quote I found on wikipedia which is attributed to Ælfric's Lives of Saints, she supposedly proclaimed: "...whatever you give away at death for the Lord's sake you give because you cannot take it with you. Give now to the true Savior, while you are healthy, whatever you intended to give away at your death."  Point taken.  I am no saint in this manner, clearly, but I don't have a lot of stuff.  The fact is that we simply move around too much to accumulate.  Our record collection is slowly snowballing into what will probably become the anchor that ties us to a home.  I rather hope it does, eventually.  But outside of this one fanatical collection of ours, I think my uprooted lifestyle has taught me a little bit about the futility of trying to hold on too tightly to plain old stuff.   I had a storage unit in Portland for a couple years, but sadly much of what was in it literally molded from disuse.  Even my bike, which I loved, and which was still in fine shape, just looked sad not being out in the fresh air.  I sold or gave away most of what I could, and I felt much better knowing that most of those items had been recycled back into the working market of stuff.  I gave away three sleeping bags to a homeless shelter in the process, and that was the moment when I really felt a sense of the necessity of the act: I mean, someone literally needs this warmth, and I was just keeping it in a box for when I maybe needed a spare bag for a camping trip?  Silly.  Not meaning to turn preacher or anything, but I might as well share the revelation, since I only thought to give my old things to a shelter myself because I happened to come upon a sign for a blanket drive while I had a truck-bed full of items to get rid of.  It feels really good to shed that excess, and better to place it where it really fills a need.

Okay, so what's up with these sweet little offerings?  These are known as Lussekatter, a delicious little sweet bun made of enriched dough and dotted with raisins or currants.  These beautiful babies were baked by verdens nordligste baker, aka my boss, this morning and Tyler and I have been happy to try some.  I am going to have to make these at home sometime; they are so pretty!  Ideally, they would be made with saffron; what you can't quite see from my photos is the brilliant yellow color of the dough.  You can also use turmeric as a replacement spice if you purely want to create the color without the expense (which occasionally becomes necessary for, say, a large-ish bakehouse producing more than they make back in revenue at one of their tiniest remote outposts… ah well).

And now here are some further celebrations of that other theme of Santa Lucia day, light!

Frozen candleholder.

One thing I can say about Norwegians is that they really know how to get cozy.  "Kos deg" is one of my favorite phrases in the language, which is essentially a wish that you go cozy yourself.  Awesome.  And one of my favorite things is walking by people's houses and seeing the candles they put out on the doorstep to greet guests.  At one house we passed recently, there were a whole bunch of candles sitting in holders fashioned out of ice blocks, which was both beautiful and ingenious!  I would be very surprised if Martha Stewart has not already featured this somewhere in her magazine. Tyler immediately set to making our own when we arrived home.  Above is a photo of our first attempt, which is quite sweet.  We are in the process of making more, but our experiments in improving the design have only failed, so right now this is still also the best one.  Anyway, if you live in a cold enough climate, try this, it's so pretty!  We just filled an old plastic ice cream container with water, and then suspended another plastic yogurt cup in the center, weighed down with a bit more water just so it floated at a good depth.  We also used tape to anchor it to the side of the larger container and keep it steady until it froze solid, which is the part of the design we keep trying to improve, but yea, this works just fine.

And here are the good, old northern lights:

Our camera is really not fancy enough to capture the magazine-worthy images that some people can get.  But this is pretty good, because it captures about as much of the light as you could see with your naked eye that day.  You have to imagine the light flickering.  It's pretty much unspeakably awesome.  I think the only thing cooler than seeing these overhead would maybe be getting to take a ride on the International Space Station and seeing them from above!  Oh boy, it all starts with a wish...

Astonishingly intricate hand-cut paper star designed by Karen Bit Vejle.

Finally, two photos just in celebration of all this Jule-ness.  Above is a photo of the sweet paper-cut star my mother gifted to me and Tyler before leaving Svalbard.  We are very pleased to enjoy it hanging over our little leiglihet.  Incidentally, if you want another special little shot of Norwegian Christmas culture, check out Reisen til Julestjernen (Journey for the Christmas Star) from 1976.  There are some clips on youtube, including Hanne Krogh singing about the julestjernen.  We watched this film in my Norwegian class last week, which was a pretty great way to practice norsk.

And below is a picture of my first Julekuler: a little knit Julegris (Christmas pig), from the book Julekuler by Arne&Carlos.  This is a great book of patterns for ornaments, and they knit up really quick.  But also, once you get the basic pattern for knitting the spheres, you could easily go wild designing your own color work patterns onto them… which I am naturally day-dreaming of doing for future years, possibly for gifts.  As usual, I am borrowing the book from the local library, and the copy I am using is in Norwegian, so I don't know if it is available in English.  If you know enough about how to read color work patterns, you probably mostly need the pictures anyway.  This one I made on needles that were a bit too big, so the ornament is too heavy to hang on a tree, but that's okay because our apartment is too small to have a tree!  Instead, we've just hung the ornament from the rafters along with the julestar from my mom.  Anyway, that is definitely enough for one day… kos deg!

Sweet little Julegris with a heart for a tummy.