The holidays are a time to celebrate and share the unique traditions each of us remember from childhood. These traditions are often rooted in our cultures, religions, families, and the landscapes in which we live.
Swansons Nursery has Scandinavian roots and so do two of our veteran employees: Inger and Rolf. Both of whom have been with us over decades and have helped shaped Swansons to be the warm and welcoming place it is today.
Just like the Swansons family, who brought their Scandinavian traditions to Ballard when they settled here in the early 1920's, Rolf and Inger have carried over similar traditions brought by their families from Sweden and Norway.
As the holidays approach, we would like to share the stories of their Christmas traditions. God Jul!
A Swedish Christmas, by Rolf.
Swedish Christmas traditions were kept alive in our home from as far back as I can remember.
My Swedish-American mother would start baking cookies in November and always did at least seven different varieties. From Seattle we would also send coffee back to my grandparents in Sweden as there was a shortage in the 1950's and 1960's, and it was shipped by boat, so we would send it in November to be sure it arrived in time for Christmas.
Every November, my father took a Saturday afternoon drive to Aberdeen, Washington to pick up dried cod for lutfisk and salted herring for the pickled salt herring we enjoyed during the Christmas holiday season. We would also go to our neighbor Hillstrom's farm (a Swede-Finn) and get blood from their butchered pigs so my mother could make blood sausage and blood bread.
Our mud room was where the lutfisk was made and I remember changing the water daily, adding the lye and wood ashes from our wood-burning stoves, used for both cooking and heating the house.
We always put up the traditional advent candle in the window for the four weeks before Christmas. There was also a candle with the dates of December on it to burn each day. The candle would get shorter and shorter as Christmas eve approached.
With all the activity involved in food preparation, we didn't get a tree until a couple of days before Christmas and it was placed in a parlor off the living room. My mom would hang a curtain so we couldn't see the tree before Christmas Eve. After all the chores were done on Christmas Eve, the tree would come out into the middle of the living room decorated with Swedish flags and bubble lights and ornaments. We also had pewter candle holders with lit candles on the tree for Christmas Eve.
Dad would always make a speech before dinner and there was always Akevit and beer. Dad played his Harmonica and I played the accordion for a couple of old Swedish songs before we opened the presents. Dad would ring the bell for someone to open their gifts. The presents were double wrapped and dad said that was done in the old days to make opening them take longer, since there were so few gifts. Before each gift was opened, we wrote and read a little poem to try to guess what the gift could be.
Christmas Eve dinner, usually spent with the Carlsons, another immigrant family, included lutfisk with melted butter and mustard sauce, veal loaf, meatballs, blood sausage, ham, mom's limpa bread, homemade head cheese (I especially liked helping to prepare this dish), potato sausage, and an assortment of cheeses. Mom was a great baker and dessert always included lingonberry and whipped cream, a braided cardamom loaf, julkaka buns, many cookies and great kaffe (coffee).
We were not a Christian family so we didn't get up early Christmas morning to attend Jul Lotta, but were treated to sleeping in after all the exhausting preparation work and our Christmas eve festivities.
What great memories!
My Norwegian Christmas Traditions, by Inger.
My Christmas traditions started in Norway when I was a young child and have continued to live on after our family immigrated to Seattle many years ago. We would begin the season in early October, shopping for gifts and writing cards and letters to our family in Norway because it would take six to eight weeks for packages to arrive!
In November, my mother would start baking a variety of cookies and cakes for the holiday season. She made quite an assortment, some of which were:
Pepperkake - ginger cookies
Frystekake - almond cake
Lefse - soft Norwegian flat bread with butter, sugar, and cinnamon
Blotkake - whipping cream cake
Kringla - puff pastry formed into a pretzel shape with various fillings
Sandkake - buttery sugar cookies
Krokankake - caramelized toasted almond cake
Krumkake - a thin cone-shaped waffle cookie
Julebrod - a raisin and cardamom bread
She baked hundreds of krumkake and stored them in airtight glass containers which she would give away to friends as gifts. She labelled the containers with her name and address so when they were empty they could be returned to her, to be refilled with krumkake year after year. If you did not return the glass container, you probably wouldn't receive krumkake the next holiday season!
In early November we would take salted herring and make pickled salt herring for the holidays. My parents would also take a salted lamb leg (fenalar) and cure it by hanging it in the corner of the kitchen to be ready for Christmas Eve. My friends were always surprised to see the leg hanging there in our kitchen.
We would start decorating the house several weeks before Christmas with lots of traditional Norwegian decorations. Our tree was put up a week before Christmas and decorated with colored lights, tinsel, Norwegian flags, and ornaments that we had brought with us from Norway.
On Christmas Eve, all of the family members would arrive in the late afternoon: my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was a large family that filled our small house.
Dinner was a feast of Norwegian specialties like pinnekjot (salted lamb ribs), kalrabistappe (mashed rutabaga), kjotboller (meatballs), tyttebaer (lingonberries) and surkal (sweet cabbage stew). We would eat our prepared lutefisk and fenalar, as well as rullepolse, meat that had been pounded, rolled and pressed with a filling to be sliced for open-faced sandwiches.
We would always end the meal with riskrem, rice pudding with a red lingonberry sauce. An almond would have been hidden in one of the bowls of pudding, and the person who found it would receive a marsipan pig with a red bow tied around it's neck.
I can remember one Christmas no one could find the almond so we continued eating more and more pudding until my mother realized she had forgotten to put the almond in! As you can imagine, we were quite full by that time.
After dinner we would open gifts, but not until all of the dishes were done and the leftover food was stored away. As small children, that seemed like an eternity of waiting for the gift opening to begin. We would all sit in a large circle by the Christmas tree and the younger children would pass out the gifts. We would open them one at a time so each person could see what the others received and make the gift-opening process last as long as possible. We were especially excited to open the presents from Norway since they came from my mother's family members that weren't able to be with us.
After the gift opening, we would start the coffee and bring out all of the cookies and cakes for everyone to enjoy. We would also bring out the Akevit, a potato-based spirit, for toasting. My uncles would get out their accordion and guitar and the music and singing would begin. Along with music, there were many jokes and stories shared.
At 11pm we would gather everyone together to attend the traditional Norwegian candlelight service at Ballard First Lutheran Church.
The days following Christmas were spent visiting friends and attending Christmas parties at Leif Erickson Lodge and Rock of Ages Church, singing around the Christmas tree, and continuing the holiday festivities until New Year's day.
There were so many great Christmas memories made. Even though my parents and many family members are no longer with us, I continue to celebrate my Christmas eve traditions with my husband, children, siblings, and their children, creating many more memories.
Editor's note: Hear Rolf and Inger talk about their childhood Christmases during The Scandinavian Hour radio show, 12-2pm December 24th and 25th on KKNW 1150 am, hosted by Doug Warne.