The Old Magic of Christmas

by Linda Raedisch

  Craft: Christmas Tomten

  No matter how many of these little fellows you make, you will find that each has its own personality. The grain of the wood will suggest a face; there is no need to draw one. Why plaster a smile on a creature who, like you, may not feel cheerful all the time?

  Since each tomten’s pointy hat is a quarter of a circle, you might as well make four of them at a clip. There is only room for one tomten in a household, so give the others away.

  Tools and materials (per tomten):

  One 1-inch-diameter plain wooden bead for the body

  One ¾-inch-diameter plain wooden bead for the head

  White acrylic paint

  Color acrylic paint: red, dark blue, or soft gray

  Paintbrush

  Glue

  Paper for hat:

  Use a paper with a bit of nap, nothing smooth or shiny. Washi—high quality Japanese origami paper—in a solid color works very well. This usually comes in packs of square 57⁄8-inch sheets.

  Scissors

  Pipe cleaner

  Cotton ball

  Paint the larger bead with a base coat of white. When dry, paint with color. Glue the smaller bead on for the head and set aside (figure 6.1).

  Christmas tomten, figure 6.1

  Cut a 41⁄8-inch-diameter circle out of your paper. Fold the circle into quarters and cut along the creases. One quarter equals one hat. Crumple the paper gently to give it a softer, clothlike look (figure 6.2). Now roll it into a tall, skinny cone and glue the seam (figure 6.3). Glue the base of the hat to the tomten’s head.

  Christmas tomten, figure 6.2

  Christmas tomten, figure 6.3

  While the glue is drying, cut a 3½-inch length of pipe cleaner and twist it into a ring. This is the fur trim on your tomten’s cap. Slip it on and secure with a few dabs of glue. Fold the point of the cap over and glue down.

  Pull a wisp from the cotton ball and glue on for the beard (figure 6.4).

  Christmas tomten, figure 6.4

  Recipe: Rice Porridge

  The last thing you need on Christmas Eve is a complicated dish to prepare, so this one is easy. You can even use the leftover rice from the Chinese food you ordered while you were busy making tomtens. This recipe makes enough for four humans and one household sprite.

  Ingredients:

  2 cups cold cooked white rice

  2½ cups whole milk

  ½ cup sugar

  ½ cup ground almonds

  Dash vanilla extract

  Dash sherry (optional unless you are cooking for a Danish nisse, in which case you should make it a generous dash)

  Cinnamon

  Butter

  Combine all ingredients except cinnamon and butter in a large pot. Stir together and heat to boiling, watching to make sure it doesn’t boil over. Simmer on a low flame for 15 minutes, stirring only occasionally. Pour into a large bowl or individual dessert dishes and top with cinnamon and a pat of butter.

  So You Want to Buy a Troll

  Well, why not? They’re awfully cute these days with their big feet, bigger noses, beady little eyes, and shaggy manes of hair. But before you pick one up at the Christmas market, you ought to know a little about its ancestry. If the troll and the helpful little Scandinavian household sprite are blood relatives, the household sprite certainly never speaks of it, while the troll is barely capable of speech. Scandinavian trolls, or “goblins” as their name is sometimes translated, do many of the things that elves and fairies do elsewhere: they keep a few cows, pilfer food from the nearby farms, and swap their own offspring for human babies.

  Because they are not above stealing, many trolls are fabulously rich, though this has done nothing for their looks. They are governed by a king, but his court in Sweden is hardly a center of culture. Trolls have few practical skills. The textile arts are quite beyond them, and they have never attempted farming. They can, however, work magic and have been doing so for as long as anyone can remember. The trolls are descended from the Norse jotnar and risir, or “giants” who were present at the world’s beginning, though the giants were both larger and more attractive than their great-grandchildren. They also had a bigger role to play in world events, while many of today’s trolls are reduced to skulking under bridges.

  One thing that can be said for the trolls is this: they are excellent timekeepers. There have been several instances in Norway and Iceland when the humans lost count of the dark days of winter and had to ask the trolls when to celebrate Christmas. Since trolls are illiterate, they probably used the old Norwegian primstav, a sort of farmer’s almanac inscribed on a yardstick. Yule was marked by the image of an ornately carved drinking horn. As far as we know, the trolls, like us, have now made the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

  The trolls are most likely to be about on Christmas Eve, perhaps so they can admire one another’s treasure hoards. This is the one night of the year that humans can take a peek at the trolls’ subterranean lairs, for the hills rise up on golden pillars to reveal the glittering heaps of chalices, coins, and candelabra. The trolls are hoarders par excellence, never pawning or selling any of their loot no matter how hard times get.

  Because they’re such terrible cooks, and too stingy to order in, trolls are always glad of a free meal on Christmas Eve. If you want to prepare dinner for a troll, you must include a generous helping of meat. A few trolls, having converted to Christianity, promised they would no longer eat human flesh, but you can hardly expect them to be vegetarians. Leave the troll’s meal out in the woods, far from the house; you don’t want him peering in the window when you open your Christmas presents.

  If you decide to take things a step further and install a troll inside your home, keep him out of the kitchen. He has an aversion to iron, so your stainless-steel kitchen implements are sure to put him off. And whatever you do, don’t put him in the window; the sunlight will either turn him to stone or cause him to explode. Keep your troll in a dark, out-of-the-way corner, and all should be well. If you notice any coins, jewelry, or candlesticks going missing, you’ll know just where to look. If he does explode, don’t expect your household sprite to clean up the mess. If, however, your troll accidentally turns to stone, you can always move him to the garden.

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  20. There is an episode early in the Icelandic Laxdaela Saga in which the matriarch Unn the Deep-Minded recovers the High Seat pillars, which she had brought from Norway and lost when her ship was wrecked in Iceland. She decides to build her house right there where the carved pillars have washed ashore. Had her household sprite been carried along with them, she might have expected to find a fire already burning, the turves for the house walls cut, and the horses fed and combed, but this was not the case. Earlier, Unn had left her granddaughter Olof behind in the Faeroe Islands. Olof was to become the progenitoress of the mighty Gotuskeggi clan, so it is possible that the family nisse stayed with her and was later conflated with the Faroese niðagrisur.

  21. Not every nisse is a heathen. Each church used to have its own kirkegrim, or church nisse. Though identical to the farm nisse and often believed to be a specialized breed of the same, the kirkegrim is more likely to be the lingering ghost of a foundation sacrifice.

  22. For more about the botrae, or apaldr as it was known to the Norsemen, see my article “The Golden Apples of Jotunheim,” in Llewellyn’s 2013 Herbal Almanac.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Reindeer Games

  We know that Santa Claus took his name, if not his character, from the fourth-century St. Nicholas, Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. His headquarters, therefore, really ought to be in Turkey, perhaps among the outbuildings of some crumbling mountain monastery. There, elves bearded and hooded like orthodox monks would whittle away by the light of the beeswax candles, all the while conversing quietly in New Testament Gr
eek. Under the smudged gaze of the icons, they would keep themselves busy boxing up batches of Turkish delight to distribute to the world’s children. Or, Santa might have placed his enterprise further to the east, amid the snows of Mount Ararat, where the wrecked stalls of Noah’s ark would be put to good use again as workshops and warehouses. What better setting for the elves as they carve all those toy animals?

  If I were to posit a third location for Santa’s workshop, it would have to be the federal state of Thuringia in east-central Germany. Das Wütende Heer, as the Wild Hunt was known in the snow-covered Thuringian forest, was led by a white-bearded gentleman named Eckhard. The Hörselberg, the magical mountain from which the procession issued, belonged to a goddess referred to in the thirteenth-century Tannhäuser legend as Venus, Roman goddess of love, but who might originally have been Freya, one of the Vanir, or Norse fertility gods. The errand on which Eckhard and his troop were bound was a trip around the world, an excursion that took them only five hours. Unfortunately, no sleigh is mentioned in relation to Eckhard, only a black horse and a staff. And since the Hörselberg, a.k.a. “Venusberg,” was the scene of fertility-inducing sexual license, the elves would probably have been making the wrong sort of toys.

  Like St. Martin’s Land, Santa’s realm is necessarily one of the imagination, and for various reasons the Arctic serves as the most magical blueprint for this never-to-be-discovered country. But before we can explore the reasons why, we must explore a name. Lapland, which lies well within the frozen embrace of the Arctic Circle, is so called because it is the home of the Lapps, a non-Germanic Scandinavian people who have been there for as long as anyone can remember.23 Although they share certain aspects of their culture with the peoples of Siberia, their language is most closely related to Finnish. The term Lapp is so old that its etymology is uncertain. One theory is that “Lapp” meant “patch of cloth”: not such a strong indictment, especially given that it may simply refer to the use of appliqué in their traditional woolen garments. Then again, it may come from a Finnish word meaning “people who live at the edge of the world.” The Norwegians referred to them not as Lapps but as “Finns on skis.” Either way, the preferred term is now Sami,24 which is what the Sami have been calling themselves all along, so that is the term I will use.

  When it comes to their homeland, I am going to stick with “Lapland,” because, at least for us non-Sami, “Lapland” says Christmas magic far better than the more-correct Sápmi. Lapland’s reputation as a magical place inhabited by a magical people probably goes all the way back to the first encounters between Norsemen and Sami. Even before the divisive advent of Christianity, the Sami differed from their Nordic neighbors both culturally and spiritually. While their southern neighbors were able to scratch out a few farms from the deciduous forests and the steep banks of the fjords, the Sami’s arctic environment dictated nomadism. The word tundra comes from Sami. During the blink-of-an-eye summer, the surface of the tundra turns into a spongy, insect-ridden bog. The rest of the year, it is covered in ice and snow. And while the mountains of Lapland are picturesque, they are impossible to farm. The only crop the Sami could depend on was lichen, the reindeer’s mainstay.

  For the Sami, the spirits of the mountains and bogs were always close at hand. The Sami gods were visible in such naturally occurring idols as an oddly shaped boulder or birch snag, and they were audible through the medium of the reindeer-skin drum. In both the pagan and the early Christian eras, the Norsemen, whose native religion was shamanic to a somewhat lesser degree, often employed the Sami as consultants in times of supernatural need. With the help of the drum, the noide, or Sami shaman, allowed his spirit to fare forth from his body, enabling it to spy on people and find lost objects in places as far away as Iceland.

  The Sami’s reputation as a magical people endured over distance and through time. The Norse sagas tell of children like Gunhild Asursdatter, who was sent away to learn witchcraft from two men of Finmark, one of the northernmost portions of Lapland. These men were such powerful sorcerers that they could kill with a glance.25 In Russia, Ivan the Terrible sent an envoy to the Sami to get their take on the recent appearance of a comet. It was believed that the Sami could also raise thunder and lightning and control the winds by the tying and untying of knots. In 1844, Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” featured a Wise-woman of Finmark who could “twist all the winds of the world into a rope.”

  While the Catholic Church frowned upon such doings, it was the Lutherans, still caught up in the zeal of the Reformation, who really got the persecutions going. Suffice it to say that we are lucky to have any of the noide’s old drums left to look at. But the flame of magic, even the smoky rumor of magic, is a hard one to snuff out. No matter how thick a layer of ashes you kick over it, the fire always struggles back to life, though it may not burn the same color as before. The Sami retained their supernatural aura well into the nineteenth century—long enough to sell the jolly old elf eight head of tiny flying reindeer.

  All of this is most likely unknown to the average letter-to-Santa-writer. Still, the old man’s arctic idyll persists. Perhaps it has something to do with Lapland itself. Most of us have witnessed snow’s power to transform an ordinary landscape into a white wonderland. Now add to this the lambent play of the aurora borealis, the “blue lights” that the Snow Queen burns in her palace each evening. Behind these blowing veils, the stars show crisp and clear, while the moon admires her reflection in the hard crust of the snow. And then there are the acoustic qualities of snow. Compare the steady jingle of a reindeer’s harness ringing out over the frozen tundra to the hollow clanging of a goat’s bell in the dry Turkish hills.

  Whatever the source of Lapland’s magic, it’s too late for Santa to relocate. Following the lead of dear Virginia’s rule of thumb, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so,” children’s program host Markus Rautio announced on Finnish radio in 1927 that Joulupukki, the Finnish Father Christmas, made his home on Lapland’s three-peaked Korvatunturi Fell. Because it straddles the border between Russia and Finland, the mountain is off-limits to the casual visitor. In this respect, English-language media has gone one better, convincing children that Santa’s workshop is planted squarely at the North Pole. Theoretically at least, one could get permission from the border patrol to climb Korvatunturi Fell, but the North Pole? I suspect that the “Santa lives in Lapland” theory has been actively suppressed in the United States because we don’t want our children getting wind of the fact that there is now a sort of Finnic Disney World near Lapland’s capital, Rovaniemi. There, you can meet Joulupukki himself, observe the elves at work, and ride in a sleigh drawn by reindeer, all for the price of a transatlantic plane ticket plus hotel.26

  Stallo

  Yule has never loomed particularly large on the Sami calendar. Their reluctance to celebrate the birth of Christ is reflected in the laws enacted in the eighteenth century requiring church attendance on December 24. Well into the twentieth century, the holiday, for many Sami, paled in comparison to Easter or St. Andrew’s Day (November 30). There were, however, special precautions to be taken on Christmas Eve. Sami parents warned their children to be on their best behavior as preparations were made for the arrival of a certain sleigh. Firewood was stacked neatly, so the sleigh’s runners would not snag on any out-sticking twigs, and a sturdy branch was staked by the river so the driver could tie up his vehicle and drink his fill of the cold water before moving on. Move on quickly was what the Sami were anxious for him to do, for this driver was not Santa but a wicked giant named Stallo.

  Stallo resembles the troll of Swedish fairy tale, with a huge nose, tiny eyes, and knotted black hair. Some say he is as stupid as a troll, while in other accounts he has magical abilities comparable to those of the noide. Stallo is actually only half troll; the other half is human. This human half may link him to the early Samis’ conception of their non-Sami neighbors, or at least to their dead. The material culture of the Sami was founded on wood, skin, and
bone, while Stallo was greedy for silver and gold. The ancient reindeer herders could not have failed to notice their more settled neighbors’ devotion to metallurgy, an apparently magical process, or the value they placed upon its incorruptible products. This is not to suggest that the Sami were naïve; within the mythologies of the metallurgists themselves, the smith is portrayed more as a magician or god than as an ordinary craftsman—the smith Ilmarinen of the Finnish epic Kalevala forged the lids of heaven, among other wonders, and the Anglo-Saxon Wayland the Smith bears the epithet “lord of the elves.”

  Stallo continues to be associated with non-Sami graves and stone house foundations within Lapland: that is, with those places haunted by the ghosts of Norse or Finnish settlers. Perhaps a band of Sami had witnessed the laying in howe of some Bronze or early Iron Age warrior all clad in armor, his sword at his side. Before such a grave was eventually abandoned, they would have observed the leaving of offerings on the grave mound and concluded that the clanking ghost within must be propitiated or at the very least avoided. Stallo’s name may come from a word meaning “metal,” and he does love the stuff. In one story, he falls through a hole in the ice because his eyes are fixed upon the moon, which, he is convinced, is made of gold. In another, he is weighed down by a haul of silver, though it is usually children he lugs around in his sack.

  The fact that Stallo prefers to cook children before he eats them usually gives them a chance to outwit the brute, make their escape, and count it as a lesson learned. Because he only snatches naughty children, he appears to be in the same class as Čert and Black Peter. While those two labor under the restraining influence of St. Nicholas, Stallo would not think twice about stuffing good girls and boys in his sack. But he can only ever get his hands on the bad ones. It is the children who disobey their parents—staying out too late is the most common offense—who find themselves en route to Stallo’s cauldron. Stallo, then, is a cautionary figure, and not all Stallo stories end happily.