Christmas in Sweden (a long time ago)

I know Christmas is over, and I probably should start telling other kinds of stories, but do you mind hearing a few more Christmas tales?  I hope not.

Christmas in Sweden

My mother’s family is Swedish, and I grew up on stories about life in Sweden.  Christmas is a wonderful holiday there.  It begins on December 13^th with Saint Lucia’s day.  Early in the morning the oldest daughter in the family puts on a white dress with a red sash, and wearing a crown of candles in her hair she brings a hot drink and Lucia buns to each member of the family. 

My Great Grandmother, Ulrika, and her children baked in their wood burning stove for weeks before Christmas making sweet rolls and breads and cookies and other good things.  Whenever someone came to visit they were always given something good to eat.  Maybe that’s why my Grandma Johnson always fed us such yummy things whenever we went to her house. 

One special Swedish Christmas food is Lutfisk.  That is a kind of fish that is pickled in Lye water for two or three weeks.  Several weeks before Christmas the fish is taken out of the lye water and put in clean water to rinse.  The water is changed every day until the lye is washed out.  It takes a lot of work to make Lutfisk, but Grandma Johnson’s father, Johan, figured out a faster way to do it.  When the herring was done soaking in the lye water he would take it down to the lake.  After cutting a hole in the ice he would tie the herring up in a bundle and drop it into the water, tying one end to a stick to keep it from floating away.  The herring hung there in the clean water and by Christmas the lye was all rinsed away.  Johan always had to buy more herring than he needed, though, because the fish in the lake would eat some of it while it hung in their water.