My family Yule tradition is Danish, from the isle of Bornholm in
the Baltic sea. On December 1st, we would put up a Jul calendar,
with small rings. The Jul Nisse would tie a gift for each child to
the rings for each day -- like an advent calendar, but with Nisse
(brownies) bringing the gifts. Our house and my grandparents' house
were decorated with straw goats, posters of Nisse, and little paper
Nisse figures everywhere, doing all kinds of amusing things. Jul
Nisse like cats, ride goats, pigs and geese, and eat risengrot.
Our family, with three small children, still celebrates this way
(except that, being pagan, we do it on the solstice). When I was
growing up, it was a big family reunion celebration, on Christmas
eve, with three generations all collected together, some 18 people.
Now we are scattered, and the children have children of their
own.
Yes, we still leave a bowl of risengrot out for the nisse. The
Christmas eve/Jul meal was/is a 'fasting' meal -- all white and
yellow: boiled cod, cauliflower, and potatoes, with risengrot for
dessert. Butter and yellow mustard sauce if you wish, cinnamon and
butter in the risengrot. We also had/have the almond in the
risengrot -- we kids grew up thinking it was found by chance, but I
was told as an adult that my grandmother would 'fix' the lottery.
Kids got it more often than adults, of course.
After the dinner, we would dance around the tree and sing songs,
then open presents. Christmas day was a feast, and 'Santa Claus'
would come, but to small children, it was an anticlimax. The real
celebration was Christmas eve, when we got to open presents. Santa
only brought small presents, and only came the once, so he was a
comparitively unimportant figure in our childhood.
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