Scandinavian Christmas Traditions

In mid-December Scandinavia, it’s dark – just six hours of light each day. The sun rises in Oslo at around 9:20 a.m. and sets at about 3:15 in the afternoon. Winter is setting in now, and the locals are happy to celebrate light.

This region was late to industrialization, so most Scandinavians, including my ancestors, lived in rural areas. This was the time of year when people laid up food and waited for the sun to return. The Cooking of Scandinavia (1968) describes a mid-19^th-century Swedish Christmas where preparations started in October with the slaughter of animals and the storage of meats and preparation of sausages and meat puddings. Those foodstuffs joined the larder filled with jars, barrels, and pans of honey, butter, lard, goose fat, and fruit preserves.

Lighting the darkness

As we approach Christmas feasting, I was curious about the traditions to learn what might have continued to this day and what has been left behind. What I learned is that Christmas Eve was the occasion of the big feast. It was the most celebratory time of the year where the natives “eat Christmas, drink Christmas, and play Christmas.” The Danes describe it as the ultimate hygge. Danish chef and food writer Trine Hahnemann describes hygge as “the atmosphere created by hanging out. We love to hang out at each other’s houses for hours and eat, relax, eat again, talk – and it’s often to tune in and out of what is going on…. The only rule is that it has to feel good; it has to be hyggeligt.” To me, that’s another way of describing the ingrained Scandinavian desire to spur companionship with family and friends, and food is at the core.

Christmas was the antidote to darkness and appealed to that culture. Sweden was the wealthiest country, with a host of large farms. Denmark was a major dairy farm area while Norway, more mountainous and rocky, tended to smaller farms. Fishing, on the other hand, was paramount in Norway. In the 19^th century, Swedish Christmas foods tended to be large hams, while Danes tended to goose and Norwegians to lamb or large pork chops. Most meals included cooked cabbage or sauerkraut and applesauce. What went on the table was of course reflective of the foods available in the dead of winter. Lutfisk, dried cod reconstituted with lye, then boiled, was often served with melted butter. Other common side dishes included pickled herring, herring salad, and caramelized potatoes – boiled potatoes finished in hot caramelized sugar and butter. Dessert was a rice porridge. After the meal, the family joined hands and danced around the Christmas tree. Finally, the evening ended as they sat for coffee, brandy, and a table filled with Christmas cookies.

Acquired tastes

Looking back at the meals at my own grandmother’s house a century later, I recognize the roast ham and goose, the pickled herring, the applesauce, and the scores of cookies – traces of her Norwegian heritage. I checked in with one of my friends and high school classmates from Illinois, who married into a Norwegian family from Minnesota and now lives in Iowa. When her father married her mother, he declared that he didn’t want to see any fish on a plate. Christmas dinners at her Swedish grandmother’s house included Swedish sausage. When she married into a Norwegian family,” whose members married “no one other than a 100% Norwegian until I came along,” Christmas Eve at her in-laws’ house featured the “Blizzard Plate.” This, she remembers, included boiled cod supported by boiled potatoes, both drenched in melted butter, along with rutabaga and lots of lefse, the Norwegian flat tortilla-like bread made from flour and potatoes. “Cod is great, but it was boiled to the point of toughness. Finally, after years of this, I put my foot down and went to IKEA in Minneapolis and bought their very tasty Swedish meatballs with the sauce packet.” She added that, for a few years, her mother-in-law made lutfisk because she thought her husband liked it, only to learn a few years later that that was not at all the case.

This Christmas, she is planning a family dinner with a traditional ham together with potatoes au gratin. My sister, who lives in Illinois near the farm where we grew up, is planning a small dinner. My mother, who will be there, remembers a cold fruit soup from her own childhood, so my sister will be making this Norwegian version with dried apricots, dates, currants, and raisins, reconstituted and boiled with sugar, a cinnamon stick, and lemon slices, thickened with pearl tapioca.

How immigrant traditions endure

As for me, I might make some lefse to remind me of my own Christmases past and carry on that family tradition. I won’t go in for the big feast, but then again, I’m not working on a farm any more with the hours of hard physical labor, and my family, like many, is dispersed around the country. That’s one reason why some people don’t carry on the traditions of their forebears. But how do these immigrant traditions live on in communities in the U.S.? It’s when people live in communities where the immigrants or their descendants have clustered together – the Polish in Chicago and Buffalo, the Somalis in Minneapolis, the Koreans in Los Angeles. And of course, in New York City, neighborhoods strongly reflect their ethnic heritage, from dim sum in Chinatown and Jewish delis on the Lower East Side to galaktaboureko in Astoria. Smithsonian Magazine noted in 2011 that many churches and lodges in the Midwest, home to a large Scandinavian population, still hold lutfisk dinners during the holiday season. Ultimately, though, what’s really important is creating hygge.

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