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Skriv ut sidan - SV: A Christmas question, my family comes from smaland and varmland
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Titel: SV: A Christmas question, my family comes from smaland and varmland
Skrivet av: Klas Wallén skrivet 2018-12-20, 22:59
Hi!
If your great grandparents left Sweden as early as mid 1800's they might have brought traditions and songs that we do not have anymore and that are now forgotten by most of us. Christmas developed very much 100 years ago. It is possible that the Christmas traditions were very individual before early 20th Century when the radio helped create a more general Christmas tradition. My grandmother on my mothers side were also from Värmland but she was born early 1900 and I do not remember that she told me about any special Christmas traditions. My mother told me they used to eat the special sausages called Värmlandskorv (värmlands sausages)but that is the only odd dish. Perhaps it was as you mentioned, there had been bad times in Sweden and when they got dopp i grytan during Christmas they remembered the sparse times and was so thankful for their food so they sang songs and made some rituals. I checked it up and dopp i grytan is one o few dishes on our julbord that people have eaten for several hundreds of years.
Tomte is a little gnom that people thought could help the farmers with some things but also punish them with mean jokes if he got angry. It was important to put out the Christmas porrige for tomten which is something many still do today as a tradition even if they live in cities. Every Christmas we use to see an old short movie on Swedish tv called Tomten, in which a person reads a poem by Viktor Rydberg. Rydberg was born in Jönköping in Småland. (Gränna is today a part of Jönköping administration area.) Here is a link if you like to see it. The poem is translated to English on this site https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robin_Goodfellow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BVzYcuVg-c
It is a very fine poem and I have the book too. It was first written in 1881 The Swedes still knew about the old tomte during the 19th Century and one of our artists Jenny Nyström used to paint them. Later on we took the old tomte and transformed it into Santa Claus but still our tomte often comes to us from the forests not the North Pool as in USA and England or Africa/Spain as in the Nederlands. I have read somewhere that the artist who created the picture of Santa Claus for Coca Cola in the early 1900's was from Finland and knew about Jenny Nyströms pictures of tomtar and was inspired by them.
As you say we celebrate most on Christmas Eve or Julafton as we say. I am not sure it was the original way of celebrating the pagan festival for the winter solstice though because our Christmas is a little later in december than the solstice. It seems that the eve/afton is generally important in Sweden. Also we celebrate midsommarafton/midsummer eve. I think that I read that it might be because the Churches rang the bells on the evening before an important Christian holiday (and maybe that the new day started already when the sun set), but that must be the case for several other countries too. I guess no one knows for sure why the eve is so important here.