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Dear Mrs. Riggs and students in Room 12,
You asked Zoe:
What are you doing in your spare time?
Do you celebrate Christmas? Does Santa come to visit you there?
Are there any other December holidays? Is it dark there most of the time now? If so, why?
Here’s what we have to say in response:
Christmas in Norway
Yes, we celebrate Christmas, and it’s a good thing, too, because Christmas in Norway is a BIG DEAL. Everyone starts preparing at the end of October, it seems, with stores starting to offer Christmas candy, special foods and even some decorations for sale. Molly and Zoe especially liked Julebrus, or Christmas soda, which is a little bit like cream soda in the United States. There’s even a special kind of Christmas beer with little elves on the labels. Remember, Norwegians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and they are only just beginning to celebrate Halloween, which is one reason we think maybe they start with Christmas so early and celebrate it so thoroughly. Another reason is probably the darkness, but we’ll write more about that in another part of this e-mail.
One of the big things that happens beginning in October is that lots of schools prepare for a Christmas fair, or "Julemessa," pronounced "Youl- ah- messah." Parents and kids make all kinds of Christmas items to sell at the fair, like Christmas tree decorations, and seasonal decorations for all kinds of household goods, from potholders to decorated, painted brooms for sweeping. There are always big bake sales at the fairs and often the school band plays – Zoe’s sister Molly played at our local Julemessa, held the last week of November.
Then there’s the usual frenzy of shopping and making gifts, both for us and Norwegians. Around the second week of December, you can begin to buy Christmas trees, but most of the trees for sale are Norway spruces, or a kind of fir that grows in Denmark. We bought a fir, but it didn’t smell nearly as nice as the balsam firs that we always had in Vermont. While we bought and decorated our tree in mid-December, most Norwegians buy their trees right before Christmas and they decorate them Christmas eve.
In addition to buying Christmas trees, Norwegians almost all buy these big bundles of oats on stalks and hang them in trees as a treat for the birds. They tie the bundles with brightly colored ribbons and when the birds are in the oats, feeding, it’s a very pretty sight. We bought a sheaf and hung it in the trees in our back yard, so we can see the birds feeding when we’re standing in our kitchen.
One thing Norwegians don’t do much of is celebrate St. Lucia Day, which I know Pennie helped you all celebrate in mid-December. Some places do hold St. Lucia celebrations, but those are almost always organized by Swedish people who have moved to Norway!
Christmas is a multi-day affair here; they even have words to describe the days. The 23rd of December is called "lille Juleaften" and the 24th of December is called "Juleaften" or Christmas eve. Christmas Day is called 1st Juledag and the day after Christmas is called 2nd Juledag. The big celebration is really on Christmas eve. We went to our neighbors house for a traditional lunchtime meal on Christmas eve, when they make a sweet rice pudding and put a peeled almond in the pudding. Everyone gets a dish of pudding, and the person who gets the peeled almond in their dish gets a prize! And guess what! Zoe got the peeled almond, and she won a marzipan pig. Marzipan, or sweet almond paste, is a kind of candy that everyone eats here during Christmas.
Then everyone, it seems, goes to church. Norway has a state religion, Lutheran, so most native Norwegians are Lutherans. Zoe and Molly even take religion class in school, in spite of it being a public school. It’s so different from the United States, where the government is expressly forbidden from getting involved with religion and freedom of religion is one of the founding principles of the country. We are not very religious and normally we would not go to church on Christmas eve or Christmas day, but as it happened, Molly’s band played at the church service on Christmas eve, so we all went to listen. The church was so crowded we couldn’t find a place to sit. It was very, very cold out – about 5 degrees Fahrenheit – and everyone was bundled up in warm coats, but you could tell that everyone was very dressed up underneath their warm coats. Many children and women wore what Norwegians call "bunad" or the traditional clothing that’s associated with the region they come from. Norway is so mountainous that each region has developed its own identity, including its own specialized costumes and dialects, and it is fun to see these costumes (even as it is difficult to understand all the different dialects!). One other striking thing was outside the church, in the cemetery, everyone had placed these large candles in broad flat cans, called fakkler, on most of the graves. Since the days are very short (only about 5 hours of real daylight) by 3 p.m., when we went to church, it was getting dark and the graveyard looked like it was filled with hundreds of little stars. It was very beautiful.
After church, Norwegians go home, decorate their trees, and then…. There’s a knock at the door and a man in a red coat, white beard and red hat appears with a bag of presents for children (and grown-ups) who have been well-behaved! This is "Julenissen" or the Christmas elf. Because we are Americans, Julenissen didn’t come to our house. He’s a relative of Santa Claus, and so it was Santa Claus who came to our house via reindeer Christmas eve while Molly and Zoe slept. Zoe heard the sound of reindeer on the roof but she stayed in bed and woke up Christmas morning to lots of presents!
Norwegians have a number of traditional foods they eat at Christmas, including lamkjøtt, which is a leg of lamb, dried slowly and salted, served in small thin slices; pinnekjøtt, which are lamb ribs that are also salted and cooked a special way, and the famous lutefisk, which is dried, salted cod that is reconstituted by boiling or baking. We did not eat any lutefisk but we understand it is not so tasty – it is kind of gooey after it has been cooked and very smelly. As the Norwegians say, you have to grow up with it to like it.
In addition to these main dishes, Norwegians bake all kinds of treats to eat at Christmas. They bake tons of gingersnaps, called pepparkaker, and sometimes they make these cones out of a thin pancake batter that dries hard, like an ice-cream cones. These are called "kremerhuset" and they are filled with a mix of berries and sweetened whipped cream.
Norwegians are still celebrating Christmas, even though it is January 6th. For the next few weeks, friends and family will gather at different "Juletrefests" or Christmas tree parties, during which children join hands and circle around the Christmas tree and sing songs, and they’ll get small presents, mostly candy.
Norwegians also make a really big deal over New Year’s Eve. For about four or five days before New Year’s you can buy fireworks EVERYWHERE, at every grocery store, gas station, even sports stores. And you’re not just limited to bottle rockets or sparklers or roman candles, but you can buy really big fireworks like they shoot off in Vermont on 4th of July. And EVERYONE, it seems, buys fireworks and shoots them off at midnight on New Years. We all stayed up and walked to the intersection of our road and a larger road where we can get a good view of the whole city. And the entire city was erupting with hundreds and hundreds of fireworks for about 45 minutes right around midnight. It was amazing. We bought a few fireworks and shot ours off, too, but we now know that next year we’ll need to buy more!
The DARK…..
Yes it is VERY dark here and will be for a while, although the darkest day of the year, Dec. 21, has passed so each day is now a little longer than the last. The reason it is so dark is because we are so high on the Earth’s surface – Trondheim, the town where we live, is at 63.5 degrees North latitude. It’s a little hard to explain, but I will try:
The earth takes a year to revolve around the sun in a long, lazy ellipse, an oblong circle. During the winter in the Northern hemisphere, the earth is located in a place relative to the sun where the North Pole is tipped away from the sun. Even though the Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours, the part of the earth that’s tipped away from the sun will not get any sunlight. Because the earth is tilted at a 23.5 degree angle, the place on the globe north of which the sun won’t shine on the shortest day of the year is the Arctic Circle, which is at 66.5 degrees North latitude. Since we are so near the Arctic Circle, we have short days in winter (we see the sun but since the Earth where we are is tilted away from it, the sun is very, very low in the sky). On December 21, Trondheim had only 3.5 hours of daylight. But the sky gets very light about an hour before the sun actually rises, so the effective length of the day is about two hours longer than the amount of time the sun is above the horizon. Even so, Molly and Zoe walk to school under a nighttime sky, with the stars still out and the streetlights on. By 9 a.m. the sky is light and by 10 the sun is up!
FREE TIME
Both Molly and Zoe are pretty busy with after school activities, so I think if you asked them what they do in their free time, they might look at you funny and say, "what free time?" Two days a week after school, Zoe has special Norwegian lessons so she can learn to speak the language all her new friends speak. And one day a week after school, Zoe gets special English lessons with a few other English speaking students, so she won’t forget how to read and write in English! One night a week, Zoe is taking swimming lessons at a very nice swimming pool in downtown Trondheim, and twice a week she has to play her clarinet, either in the band or at a lesson with her teacher. Before we had enough snow to ski, we were skating on a big lake that was frozen solid with foot-thick, clear ice, so we could skate from one end to the other, a trip that took about half-an-hour! It was kind of spooky to skate across the clear ice because it looked like dark water, not ice. But it was frozen quite thickly and it was also amazingly smooth. None of us have ever skated on ice like that.
On weekends we ski, either in the big public forest that is right across the street from our house, or another big cross-country ski area on the other side of town, about 15 minutes away by car. There are mountain huts in both forests, and often we ski to the huts and buy hot chocolate and pasteries and eat our bag lunches. Right after Christmas we went to some huts in the mountains where we spent three days by ourselves, just skiing and playing lots of cards and Charades during the long winter nights.
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