Growing up it was easy to get the
American/Swedish Christmas stories to line up, mostly because we were either
celebrating in the US or in Sweden, and in that case, it didn’t seem odd that
Santa stopped off at Northern homes earlier and more southerly homes in the
middle of the night. It is a time consuming job.
But in The Swede’s family, like most
Swedish families, Santa comes on Christmas Eve and delivers a few gifts to the kids
before departing again to other homes. (Yes, it can be tricky to find a Santa
to show up! The Swede is on Santa duty for our neighbors this year.)
But there are a ton of kids in the Swede’s
family, so there is a gift limit. And since this is a big party, we like to
open grown-up gifts, family gifts and a few other little tokens before we go to
the big party (We originally thought we would keep a Christmas Day celebration,
but since we usually end up at sleeping over somewhere, that is too difficult).
My Swedish in-laws developed the tale of
The Christmas Goat, a classic part of the Swedish Christmas, to put the story
together and thus this year we decided to tell the tale of the Christmas goat.
This may prove to be a mistake, but, well, none of the other stories really
seemed to add up.
So the Christmas goat is delivering some of
Santa’s gifts early, to take the load off. We left out some water and
gingerbread cookies (Little Swede wanted water rather than milk). We could go
with reindeer. Or maybe some goat/reindeer combo. But Little Swede is pretty
into goats at the moment. He decided this goat’s name was ‘Brown’ since it was
gingerbread. So obviously, we have some elements to go over for the future.
But hey, I don’t think this story will be
believable for more than just a few years.
The goat is a traditional Swedish symbol,
and is often made of straw and set around all over the place, and often burnt
to the ground.
Do you have any weird combo traditions in
your family? Either way, I hope you have a Merry Christmas!!!
Posts
Believability is overrated. If you're lucky you get two years from when kids stop being terrified/confused until they figure out it's not real. Better to go with something that's practical and fun to pretend.
ReplyDelete"He decided this goat’s name was ‘Brown’ since it was gingerbread. So obviously, we have some elements to go over for the future."
Oh dear, here we go again.. :)
I thought you would appreciate that --- :)
ReplyDeleteIn the 1800s, the presents were sometime delivered by a man dressed as a goat actually.
ReplyDeleteIn a lot of families, a family member is the Santa. "Jag ska gå och köpa tidningen" is a common gag ^^
ReplyDelete