Merry Christmas!
Before I say anything else, I would like to point out that it is not at all weird for a Swedish person to be blogging on christmas day. The only thing special about today is that it’s a bank holiday - the actual christmas celebration took place yesterday. Which brings me to the actual topic of this post, a topic which seems to be very popular among secularist bloggers this time of year: Us godless atheists and our supposed difficulties with the holiday season.
The ridiculous figment “War on Christmas” aside, I’ve seen quite a few very snide remarks about atheists and humanists and how we obviously don’t celebrate christmas, and how we probably would like to forbid it altogether as the spoilsports we are. The fact that most of us celebrate christmas like any other person, and are not ashamed to admit this, is completely irrelevant to the people making these arguments, as they live in their own little imaginary world where atheists are all, if not the spawn of satan, then at least cousins of the grinch.
So how do I celebrate christmas? Eating with my family, like most other Swedes. Religion plays a very marginal role in Swedish christmas celebrations, mostly present in the form of music. In my family the only overtly religious tradition we follow is the lighting of the advent candles, the four candles of increasing height that can be seen at the back of the table in the picture. They’re lit sequentially on the sundays of advent, the fourth on christmas eve. But, for the most part, a regular Swedish christmas is a modernised pagan solstice feast centered on the consumption of vast amounts of a variety of seasonal food.
The crown of the “julbord” (literally “christmas table”, a seasonal variant of the smörgåsbord) is the christmas ham, a large ham which has been soaking in a solution of salt and sugar for ten days before you stick it in the oven. Then there should be meatballs, small sausages, various kinds of pickled herring, and so on ad infinitum. An interesting specialty is “dopp i grytan” (lit. “dipping in the pot”), where you take a piece of bread and soak it in a fat, salty broth and eat it with ham. Presumably back in poorer days, this was a way of making stale bread more palatable. Not all families prepare all dishes, of course, it’s all a matter of personal preference.
Then there’s obviously a lot of traditional sweets, cookies and other yummy things that should be present to make a christmas feast complete. This year I decided to make christmas sweets as a present to my family - depicted on the right is knäck, a kind of hard toffee with chopped almonds, resembling daim.
A slightly quirky component of a typical family christmas celebration is a reel of Disney cartoons shown every christmas eve at three in the afternoon. As far as I’m aware, most families with children will sit down in front of the television at this point and watch an hour of mostly the same cartoons as they saw last year, with a few changes (there’s a few perennials and then they show clips from the latest Disney movies, presumably to get us to buy them). My family still watches at least part of it, even though the youngest of my siblings is nearly 20 years old.
After the cartoons it’s time for the presents (although my family has developed the unconventional and blatantly, unabashedly materialistic habit of going christmas shopping together before the cartoons), which may be brought by Santa, or may be lying under the tree, which we decorate with most of the usual stuff.
In short, christmas in Secular Sweden is an advanced family dinner preceded by presents and disney cartoons. We celebrate not the birth of christ (which, if it happened at all, at least didn’t happen on December 25) but each other, by giving each other gifts and spending time together. It’s a time to indulge in what’s good in life, and you really don’t have to be christian to do that.
Merry Christmas everyone, and if that offends you, feel free to substitute “Christmas” with the holiday of your choice!