Whereas tens of millions of kids everywhere in the world wait eagerly for Father Christmas or Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, kids in Iceland begin receiving their presents on December eleventh.
That’s when the Yuletide Lads start 13 nights of visits to Icelandic properties, bringing small presents to place within the sneakers of well-behaved youngsters.
Naughty youngsters, nevertheless, get one thing disagreeable of their footwear.
Who're Iceland's Yuletide Lads?
These mischievous tricksters all have distinctive names and character traits, like Þvörusleikir the Spoon Licker; Pottaskeifill the Pot Licker; and Askasleikir the Bowl Licker (you possibly can see a food-related sample right here!)
A number of the Yuletide Lads swipe sausages, gobble skyr, or skim the perfect froth from the highest of the milk; and others slam doorways, steal candles and peep in your home windows.
Whereas the Yuletide Lads are thought of pretty innocent these days it’s their mom the troll witch Grýla who is really terrifying - she’ll boil naughty youngsters alive - there’s her lazy husband Leppalúði, and her evil black cat who prowls round Iceland and eats anybody not carrying a brand new piece of clothes at Christmas.
These homegrown Icelandic Christmas traditions have endured, at the same time as Western Christmas beliefs of a adorned pine tree, Santa Claus on his sleigh pulled by reindeer, and elves making toys have turn out to be firmly cemented in lots of different international locations.
“We don’t have the American Santa Claus actually,” explains Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir, a folklorist on the College of Iceland in Reykjavik.
“Many individuals are very happy with these Icelandic traditions and maintain them very expensive. It’s very visible as nicely, you've these occasions the place the Yuletide Lads come, and on each milk carton in December you’ll see photos of them” she says.
The evolution of Iceland’s trendy Christmas traditions
Though the Yuletide Lads and their scary household sound like they’re deeply rooted in Iceland’s previous, they’re the truth is a comparatively new phenomenon of their present-day type.
The primary written point out of Grýla seems within the thirteenth century however at the moment she’s only a troll girl and doesn’t turn out to be linked with Christmas till the seventeenth century.
In the meantime the fashionable model of Yuletide Lads solely actually begin to crop up in written tales and poems within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though they actually existed for much longer than that in oral storytelling traditions.
The quantity and nature of the Yuletide Lads have actually solely solidified within the final century and a half - earlier than that they had been way more sinister, dressed all in black, with extra ugly character traits too.
The Lung-Splatterer for instance was mentioned to have his lungs on the skin of his physique and would run after misbehaving youngsters and attempt to hit them together with his floppy lungs.
As folklorist Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir explains, every parish had their very own set of Yuletide Lads with their very own traditions, however round 150 years in the past an Icelandic poet picked the 13 which appealed to him probably the most and introduced them collectively into one household unit with Grýla, her husband and the cat.
“It’s across the similar time that the Yuletide Lads began making higher traditions, they began giving youngsters presents, they weren’t the misbehaving thieves they had been earlier than,” she says.
“Earlier than, folks feared them, however now they’ve taken up higher methods to a level, even when they nonetheless steal meals and slam doorways and wake you up within the night time!”
How Christmas traditions adapt even within the twenty first century
Throughout Europe Christmas traditions have advanced by way of the centuries, however we will thank the Victorians for being liable for shaping lots of the most enduring Christmas pictures and actions.
Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert is credited with bringing the custom of adorning a Christmas tree to England within the 1840s - whereas in Southern Germany timber had been being adorned already within the early 1600s - and Charles Dickens’ seminal story A Christmas Carol was first revealed in 1843.
The V&A Museum in London holds a set of 30,000 greetings playing cards and notes that its founding director despatched the primary mass-produced card.
The Victorians additionally launched winter scenes with robins, holly, and snow-covered landscapes, and invented the Christmas cracker, and the depiction of Santa Claus as a jolly outdated man with a white beard and crimson swimsuit first turned widespread within the USA and Canada within the 1820s.
“It's proper that people traditions need to evolve and have relevance to society, in any other case they'll simply be forgotten,” says Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir.
And Icelanders are additionally seeing some modifications to mirror modern-day values of their Christmas traditions, with Grýla’s cat turning into extra environmentally acutely aware.
“You’re supposed to purchase a brand new merchandise of clothes for the Christmas Cat or else he’ll eat you. However now with extra sense of the risks to the planet of mass consumption, he has additionally turn out to be this instrument for promoting,” Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir explains.
“Now, the Yuletide Cat doesn’t thoughts in the event you get used clothes, so long as it’s new for you.”
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