Tag Archives: christmas

Santa Claus, Christmas Bok, and Naked Man

Nationality: Swedish
Age: 32
Occupation: Student, Actor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/15
Primary Language: Swedish
Language: English

So the German tradition of krampus, ah, was brought to Sweden some times during the Dark Ages…and back then, this was before like, Santa Claus came around. And he was only like Saint Nick, or a similar…like before he was actually Santa Claus he was like this Saint guy, right, that was giving gifts away. And the Christmas bok, Julbocken, would accompany him and if you hadn’t been a good child, he would put you in his sack, that he brought with him, and beat you. Uh, and if you’d been really bad he would put you in his sack and take you away. From your family. And how this was celebrated was basically, young University students, would go around to houses, carol singing. Wearing all these, the outfit of the bok – it’s a Swedish word. It’s basically like a goat head with horns. And they were mischievous. So it’s like a mixture of trick-or-treating and carol-singing, into one. And this would be used to threaten children to behave. And that lived for like, forever. Long time.

Is it still going on?

No. Because it’s sort of…that tradition of going around, sort of died off when Santa Claus came around. Basically Santa Claus was different, in Sweden, until Coca-Cola came to Sweden. And then all of a sudden Santa Claus was red. Before that he wasn’t. And Santa Claus…I’ll get back to that thought. The Christmas bok is now, under the Christmas tree you have one out of…what is the uh, horses eat?

Hay?

Hay. Yeah, out of hay, it’s like a figurine made out of hay, that you put under your Christmas tree, as a like a, oh he’s already been here. Because they would leave that, after the visit.

Oh, he would leave a little figurine?

Yeah.

The University students?

Yeah. And usually they got served alcohol, you know, that’s why they were going around. And if you didn’t, then you know, they would do something mischievous.

And the first Santa Clauses weren’t actually Santa Clauses as the way we think of it, basically they were gnomes that cared for the farmhouse. They cared for the whole plot of land where they lived. So they lived under the houses, and they would take care of that. And that was sort of like their gift to, to the people inside. And every year you would have to put out a bowl of oatmeal, outside. Almost like cookies and milk, but a poor version, and outside. So they would continue taking care of the farm. Most of the Swedish stuff has to do with nature. So the gnomes, they were friendly, taking care, making sure that plants grew, all that stuff. And they would come together, for a time period before Santa Claus became Coca-Cola-ized, the Christmas bok and Santa Claus would come together, and Santa Claus would give the good children gifts, and the bok would give them beatings. So they both have sacks – one is empty and one is full of gifts! Cause if you’ve been bad…you end up in the sack and get beaten.

So there was one Santa Claus? Or every house had their own?

No every house had their own, yeah. Houses weren’t close to each other, cause we didn’t have cities obviously, so it was more like a big farm. And each farm had their own, so each little village had several. Yeah. So each plot of land that you owned had their own little gnome taking care of it.

There’s a lot of mythology used to keep children at bay. For instance, in the wintertime, if you go outside the wolf’s gonna eat you.

Did your mom ever tell you that?

Uh, not me. But her generation. Because when I grew up, we were modernized in cities. So I’m too young to have that sort of thing. But if you go back, like at the turn of the century, that was definitely going around. Like that was the way to keep children in. So you had: don’t go into the forest at wintertime, cause the wolf will catch you and eat you; don’t go out in the summertime cause the trolls will take you…and they would trade you for a troll kid. So basically if your kid was misbehaving, it was thought that your actual kid had been taken by trolls, and they had left a troll kid. If you went down to the lake or the spring, the Naked Man would take you.

Naked Man? What’s that?

Naked Man…he plays his violin. Beautifully. So beautifully that you cant withstand it, so you have to walk closer and closer and closer, and once you’re close enough he’ll grab you and pull you into the stream and you’ll drown and die. He’s a naked man, yeah. And his name is, like…Naked Man. Näcken. That’s his name. So that’s sort of like the Elements protection.

 

ANALYSIS:

The above traditions and folk beliefs function not only as lower mythology, for example every household having it’s own spirit or small deity looking after the house and harvest, but also as a way to make children behave and stay out of harm’s way. The rituals and practices of the University students going around to the houses, as well as the figurine, reinforces the threat of the Christmas bok. In addition, the participation of the University students allows them to be involved after their belief in such stories and characters has passed, and they in turn get to have their fun and mischief and alcohol, a part of the transition between being a child who believes these stories but before they have children of their own. As the informant pointed out, these traditions are fading out, mainly because of the urbanization of Sweden – families no longer have their own large plot of land, and instead people live in cities.

Teddy Bear Dance

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA; Ukiah, CA
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English

I caught my friend watching her family videos on YouTube so I asked her what was going on, and she explained to me some of her family traditions.

Informant: “Every Christmas eve, everybody gets a stuffed animal in my family and we put on Dolly Parton and Kenny Loggins Christmas CD. And play it around the house. And you select a leader so the leader is doing a dance move, and everybody copies.”

Collector: “Can you tell me more about these artists? Is there a reason why…”

Informant: “Cause ‘I believe in Santa Claus’ is the best Christmas song ever.”

Collector: “Does she sing the best version, or the most popular version? Or why that one specifically, because I’m sure there’s many versions of that song.”

Informant: “Its catchy. Everybody loves Dolly Parton. I don’ know, my mom likes country music, so…”

Collector: “Is this just your family, or do other families in Ukiah…”

Informant: “I think it’s just my family. We have so many stuffed animals. Like, everyone. I think I probably, when I was growing up I probably had like 20 stuffed animals. Maybe people just gave me stuffed animals for like, every holiday”

Collector: “Do you know why?”

Informant: “I don’t know why. It’s probably like an easy gift. When I was a baby. That’s probably why.”

Collector: “So this family tradition… when did it start? Did it start with your parents?”

Informant: “That’s a good question… it started with my parents’ generation for sure… but also, my parents’ parents, my grandma like, had this space where there was a fireplace in the center of the room, and they lived without electricity, so they’d always play the record and dance around… and then like, having no access to like, electronics or whatever… like, their popular culture was record players… or records, not record players.”

What the informant mentions at the end about records is particularly interesting because it points to a cultural shift in the way that family members interact with each other. This Holiday tradition started with my friends’ family at a time with a lot less technology than we have now, and they have maintained their family tradition of doing the Teddy Bear Dance, even though technologically they could engage in other more “modern” forms of entertainment. Although instead of using a record player they probably use a CD player or some sort of speaker system that hooks up to a digital music player, the spirit of the dance is probably kept largely the same. Family traditions like this are fairly common, and can vary widely depending on the family.

The Angry Elf

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA; Ukiah, CA
Performance Date: 4/23/15
Primary Language: English

While talking about family traditions, my friend started talking about a peculiar custom her family does for Christmas.

Informant: “The angry elf comes on Christmas Eve and, um, he like, he’ll hit you with a soft present. It’s usually pajamas wrapped in newspaper, and like it’ll be when you’re not looking, you’ll get hit behind the head and… one time my cousin Lucas like he saw the elf and he jumped out the window to go find the elf. He like, dive rolled out the window. He opened the window to go catch the elf. He never caught the elf.”

Collector: “But like, obviously someone…”

Informant: “Yeah, as I grew up I figured it was my mom, and my brothers. And we still do it like, well, the elf came! And like, I’ll do it to my parents now. Its fun”

Collector: “Where does your mom come from? Like, does she throw it through the window?”

Informant: “No, she wasn’t actually outside the window but like when my cousin chased after the elf, he was like putting on a whole show, like ‘I think he ran outside the window!’”

“Oh, I see”

Informant: “It was intense”

Collector: “Is this something that just happens within your family, or have you heard of anyone else doing this?”

Informant: “I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this”

Collector: “Do you know how it started?”

Informant: “I don’t. Probably when the three kids were there. It was me and my two brothers. It was all like, all my house. Like everyone just put on this big show. Probably the idea of elves came from the Waldorf School that they went to, because you leave your shoes out, and then on Christmas eve the elves fill your shoes with candy. I think that’s a German tradition.”

Collector: “And you’ve done this ever since you can remember? This angry elf thing?”

Informant: “Mhm”

It’s interesting to see that different families have different Christmas gift-giving traditions. Some have Santa Claus, others elves, and others have both. It’s also interesting to see how families continue traditions of magical gift-giving beings long after their kids have grown up and no longer seriously believe in these beings, in order to continue a family tradition.

Christmas Casserole

Nationality: Irish/American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Las Vegas
Performance Date: 04/24/15
Primary Language: English
Language: none

The informant is an 18-year old college freshman at USC majoring in environmental studies and geology. She is of Irish and English descent, and when she is not at USC lives in Las Vegas with her parents and two siblings. I asked her about what her family does to celebrate Christmas. She said although her family is “not very religious,” they do have a Christmas ritual they do each year.

 

Informant: “I can tell you what I do for Christmas, I guess. So, we always, in the morning…Well, the night before we have to make a casserole. I know it sounds disgusting.

Interviewer: “What’s in the casserole?”

Informant: “I can ask my mom for the recipe.” [Recipe provided beneath interview.]

Interviewer: “Did she learn it from anyone, or was it a recipe from a book?”

Informant: “Both my parents learned it from their parents. We have to make the casserole the night before. And so then in the morning, we’ll wake up…so all the kids have to stay upstairs and we have this landing you can look over, but we aren’t allowed to look over it or go downstairs until my dad has his video camera and then he records us all coming down the stairs together. We go in a circle after our presents are sorted and one person opens and then the next, etc. We go through the whole thing until everyone is done, and one of my parents will put the egg casserole in. Once it’s ready, we eat that, and we just go and play with our presents. It’s so good, it’s like breakfast food, called egg casserole. It’s so good.”

 

 

“Recipe:

6 eggs

2 pieces of bread (need to rip apart in small bite sized pieces)

1 pound of hot sausage

1 cup of mile

2 pinches of salt

2 pinches of pepper

Dry mustard (No exact amount, but around the same amount as the salt and pepper)

 

Brown the sausage. Combine all ingredients in a bowl.

 

Place in baking dish over night.

 

Next morning—preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook for 45 minutes. It might need an extra 15 mins. Closer to one hour.”

 

Thoughts:

My informant told me that it was a casserole passed down to her mom, as opposed to some other treat, because in Ireland—where her family is from (my informant described herself as “very Irish”)—they were very poor and as there was a lack of food, casseroles were something that could be thrown together using whatever they had. I thought it was super interesting that my informant perked up when she talked about he casserole and said multiple times how good it was. Food is fuel, but it is much more to people. There are emotional connections to food—memories of specific times or holidays or family members associated with certain foods—and that is passed down through families from one generation to the next is one example of this importance.

Wooden Shoes for Sinterklaas

Nationality: American/ Dutch
Age: 66
Occupation: Retired Lawyer
Residence: LA, CA
Performance Date: 04/05/15
Primary Language: English
Language: Dutch, Spanish

The informant is a 66-year old mother, step-mother, former poverty-lawyer, property manager/owner, and is involved in many organizations and non profits. She was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was four years old. She grew up in California, where she also attended college and law school. She lived in the suburbs of Chicago for a short while with her husband and family, and now they live in Pacific Palisades, California.

 

Informant: “St. Nicholas Day there is like December 7th or 8th. It was a secular holiday. I mean everybody, all the Jewish people (all 10% of them, the few left after the war), we all celebrated St. Nicholas day. So, your dad is in the Netherlands with us on St. Nicholas Day, we call it Sinterklaas there, and he looks out the window and says, ‘Oh yes, really secular holiday.’ There’s the St. Nick, whose you know, this cardinal. White haired cardinal all decked out. And then, Swarte Piet, which is Black Pete was a little black guy with him. On St. Nicholas Day in Holland we always put out our wooden shoes. We’d put out the wooden shoes because then they’d be filled with chocolate. They would do it really literally though. So if you were “bad” that year, you would actually get coal in your wooden shoe. Not like they do here in America with the stockings and presents. Even in the United States early on we would always get packages from the Netherlands before St. Nicholas Day.

 

Interviewer: “So could it be any shoes?”

 

Informant: “A wooden shoe! Instead of stockings it was the wooden shoes. If you were a bad kid, then St. Nicholas would put coal in your shoe as opposed to, you know, chocolates.”

 

Analysis: I remember in class we talked about most Christmas traditions being based on older Pagan festivals, and many religious holidays’ links with earth-cycle rituals. St. Nicholas Day being a secular ritual in the Netherlands could be an example of a Christmas tradition’s origins being based in pagan tradition, or it could also be an effect of Christianization of the area where the Netherlands is now.

 

The figure of Black Pete, or Swarte Piet as he is called in Dutch, really fascinates me. I did some research on him and found that there has actually been a good deal of controversy surrounding “Santa’s Black-faced Helper”, as a writer for NPR refers to the figure. It’s not just that there is a statue of a little black man next to the more favorably-sculpted Saint; each year, there is a Sinterklaas parade, during which several individuals in black face dance around as St. Nicholas’s helpers.

 

There are different stories as to why Swarte Piet is swarte. Some say it is because he was once the devil – this in and of itself is problematic in the context of blackface minstrelcy—that black is associated with the devil goes to support racial supremacy theories. Some say that Swarte Piet was a slave of Sinterklaas. Others say Piet is just dirty from sliding down too many chimneys helping St. Nicholas.

 

Regardless of how Piet became Swarte, in recent years there have been more and more people upset by the blackface tradition associated with Sinterklaas parades. It will be interesting to see how the controversy plays out. As of now, the Dutch courts have refused to intervene.

 

For more information on blackface in Sinterklaas celebrations see: http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/12/01/367704573/santas-black-faced-helpers-are-under-fire-in-the-netherlands