This holiday season was bound to be a bit special for our family. Our daughter is now almost two and a half years old, and while she was technically around for the previous two Decembers, she was way too small to really understand what it was all about, or engage with the festivities in any meaningful way.
Yule 2022, however, would be different. Since that same time last year, our little offspring has managed to truly develop as a person. She went from barely being able to walk a few steps and utter only a couple of words to a fully fledged kid who loves nothing but running around, singing, chattering, and eating vast quantities of food.
If we were to develop any family traditions around Yule, I thought, it was now or never.
Bread pieces left on the backyard tree (L. Perabo)
However, being cursed by being both a time optimist and a tourism-freelancer with half a dozen employers, I began to be swamped with work right around the beginning of December, so planning and executing any kind of complex plan was of the question. Still, I was able to come up with a few things to do to make my daughter experience a Pagan-ish Yule for the very first time.
Even before I was even able to do anything on my own, the little one already had sensed that we were heading into a special season. She started noticing Christmas lights popping up on the neighborhood’s houses at the beginning of December. To her amazed, and recurrent, comment of “Se pappa ! Vakker ljus!!!” (“Look dad, pretty lights!!!”), I started telling her that yes, people hang up lights, because it is the darkest time of the year, and people hang lights to celebrate the upcoming return of the sun. We eventually installed a few lights at our home as well and even a small Christmas tree, which our daughter absolutely loved.
Soon after, it was time for her to experience another side of Yule at her kindergarten. During the course of December, she attended no less than three Christmas-themed events. First was the “Nissefest” (“Elves-party”) where a couple of teachers dressed up as shaggy elves gave out gingerbread cookies and warm juice to everyone. Just a few days after, it was the old “Julenissen” (Santa) who visited the children, offering them clementines and raisins. Finally, on Lucia Day, a teacher came up to the kindergarten wearing her candle-light crown while the children helped make some bread balls to bring to their parents.
Thanks to the hard work of the kindergarten staff, my daughter was already having an excellent Yule, but we still wanted to do a bit more. We therefore decided to take her to yet another Nissefest, this time at the stables where a friend of my wife keeps her horse. Once we arrived, we were met yet again by the Julenissen, who, my daughter had learned by then, was eager to give out clementines and raisins.
Once we consumed the treasured fruits, it was time to eat some gingerbread cookies and chocolate cake, go on a little pony ride in the snow, and say hello to some sheep, goats, and rabbits that had been brought in for the occasion.
Norwegian goats at Yule (L. Perabo)
My daughter loved seeing the animals so much that the following weekend, we decided to take her to do it again, this time at a local farm that was having an open house. As we drove in, we saw the snow-covered barn, which basked in mid afternoon moonlight, already as Christmasy as it gets, but it got even better once we entered.
There, in the midst of dozens of bleating goats and rabbits, we were welcomed by an employee dressed like a real “Fjøssnisse,” an old household gnome/spirit, complete with hoarse grey beard and thick woolen sweater. At first my daughter wondered whether that one Nisse would give her some dried fruits as well, but she quickly got too engrossed by the cute goats and the fluffy bunnies to care for more food.
At that point, we had just a week to go before Yule and we already had quite a bit of seasonal fun, but we still had to think about what we wanted to do on the actual day of Yule, as well as on the solstice.
The “vintersolverv” or winter solstice in Norwegian, is generally celebrated on the 21st here, and my wife had heard that the local shamanic group was organizing a ceremony on that day. For a while, we thought this would be perfect for us, but alas, that day my wife had to have an online meeting at exactly the same time as the ceremony, so we had to cancel. Faced with the prospect of doing nothing at all for the solstice, I cooked up a plan to at least do something. I decided to bake gingerbread cookies, but with a twist. Instead of gingerbread it would be normal flat bread and we could hang those in the trees afterwards.
While the bread dough proved a bit sticky at times, our daughter had a blast. She helped a little bit with rolling the bread, selecting cookie cutters, as well as oiling and salting the “cookies.” After a few minutes in the oven, the cracker-like breads came out beautifully, and, dare I just say, tastily. We ate a couple right here and there, while we attached threads on a few others, and put a star-shaped one on the altar. All in all, it worked great and occupied the whole family on that most sacred day.
The finished baked products (L. Perabo)
As far as the 24th and 25th though, I still did not have a plan. My wife, who works at the university, had signed up for being host to two foreign students who were staying in Norway over the holidays and planned on cooking them a traditional Nordic Christmas dinner. With just two days to go, I made use of one of my few free days to go downtown and get a few supplies: gift wrapping paper, thick craft rope, glue, and a big burlap bag. I had found out what to do: instead of having someone dressed as Santa delivering gifts, I would have someone don a homemade Yule Goat costume.
The reason why I eventually settled on this peculiar Nordic tradition is twofold. On one hand, having someone dressed as a goat handing out presents is an old tradition from my wife’s Finnish homeland, and on the other, I don’t want to make my daughter believe in an almighty godlike Santa who is the sole gift giver in the world. By bringing in another character, namely, the Yule Goat, I wanted to introduce her to the idea that there exist a whole lot more spirits, creatures, and other beings she may encounter. And when in a few years time, when she starts asking me about it, I will simply tell her that people have many different ideas about who deals out midwinter gifts, and that it’s okay.
Now for the task at hand – namely, making a Yule Goat costume. I focused on the mask, which I made using thick cardboard. I drew inspiration from a number of tutorials I found online but tweaked them to accommodate my more than limited handicraft skills and in the end, I think it worked out all right.
I started by drawing an oval a few inches wider than my head on some silk paper. I then folded it vertically and drew a goat face outline on one half before folding it again, and cut it. I then proceeded to glue the silk paper on cardboard, slightly bend it vertically starting from the middle, and then cut it.
The finished Yule goat mask (L. Perabo)
The next step was cutting out eyes, small holes on the side for a thread, and then fashioning horns. These horns were made from the same cardboard that was rolled, taped, and then cut to fit. In order to make them stay on the goat face, I attached craft rope through it, poked a hole on each side of the face, then attached both strings together behind it. This made it possible to then glue the horns to the cardboard when bending the cardboard face. For that, I used normal superglue and it worked fine enough.
To give the mask further appeal, I also duck-taped a dozen strands of small craft rope to the back of the shin and painted the face with a few layers of white acrylic paint with black for the ears and the horns. The whole thing only took me about three or four hours to make, which was good because I was not done until late on the evening of the 23rd. In the future, with a bit of prep time, I think it could probably be done within one hour (not counting drying time for the paint), and could be a nice craft activity at festivals, or for the Satanic Temple’s after school Satan Club for example.
Once our guests arrived on the following day, I managed to persuade one of them to dress up with the mask and a cheap Grim Reaper Halloween cloak from Spirit Halloween, and it was in this garb that he came to the house, carrying the burlap bag on its shoulder, bleating. Thankfully, our daughter did not get scared of him, she just looked confused (which is a fairly reasonable reaction to meeting someone dressed like that.) But when she sighted the bag, she got excited, and happily received the gifts from that odd, dark goat.
The rest of the evening went very fine. My wife made some delicious Lutefisk, (which is not nearly as bad as some people say, as long as the cook know what they are doing), herring salad, sweetened potato casserole, and dried fruits salad with cream. Our guests, despite not being much used to Nordic cuisine, enjoyed themselves and even took seconds before leaving a few hours into the night.
Thus concluded a low-key, cozy, Pagan-y, Nordic-style Yule. I hope everyone reading this had just as good a time as we had, and that this little piece might inspire others for the remote, but hopefully merry Yule 2023.
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