Happy Holidays! This simple winter greeting has led to loads of confusion in conversations I’ve had in the past month. After years of political correctness training from the public schools system and the media, I have been programmed to use “Happy Holidays” instead of the incendiary “Merry Christmas.” Iceland has a national religion (Lutheran), so everyone says “Gleðileg Jól” (Merry Christmas).
As you probably know, when Europeans use the word holiday, it is in reference to vacation. When I have asked people what they are doing for the holidays, they have told me where they intend to go over the summer. A Ukrainian replied “You mean this weekend?” and then questioned why I was getting in his business (I decided not to break out my “the Ukraine is weak” Seinfeld joke on him after that).
Christmas is a big deal here. The celebration takes place on the 24th, and the entire nation celebrates at exactly the same time. At 5:30 pm on Christmas Eve, the radio stations all go off the air and observe half an hour of silence. Right at 6:00, all of the church bells in the country ring and the radios come back on. Families eat dinner at this time and open gifts afterward.
The Christmas tradition here is really interesting and absolutely terrifying for children. I am going to do my best to explain the tradition as I understand it. They have 13 Santas here known as the Yule Lads or the Yuletide Lads. The Yule Lads are the children of Grýla and Leppalúði. The family also has a pet called the Christmas Cat. The Yule Lads are all named after the things that they do at or steal from your home if you are a child who has misbehaved (if you are interested in reading about each one, here are a couple websites with more information http://notendur.centrum.is/sjbokband/joh.html/yulelads00.html, http://simnet.is/gardarj/yule5.htm).
Everyone puts a shoe out for the Yule Lads to put a gift in. If they have been good, they get something nice. If they have been bad, they get something bad. A potato is the traditional bad gift, but I fail to see anything negative about free produce. If children have been especially bad, Grýla cooks them and eats them. Apparently Grýla is dead now because children have behaved so well and she needed to eat them to survive, but if they ever start misbehaving again, it is possible that she could return.
All kids are given new clothes for Christmas, so they are expected to wear something nice and new. If they don´t wear their new clothes at Christmas, the Christmas Cat (which is apparently the size of a house) will eat them. It is pretty easy to see how the threat of being eaten might keep kids in line a little better than a lump of coal in the stocking.
Life is pretty dark here right now. I go to work in the dark. I go home in the dark, and it’s dark most of the time when I look out my office window. The winter solstice (21 December) is quickly approaching, so at least after that, days will start getting longer again. Here is a picture from my balcony taken at 3:00 pm this past weekend. The sun is almost down at this point:
You tend to spend a lot less time outside when it gets dark, but here are some pictures from a while back. We took a hike to a waterfall. Soizic was our guide because she had been there before. After we got to a part of the stream that we couldn’t cross, we had to backtrack to the beginning and walk up above the little canyon. Three hours of walking led to zero waterfalls. When we drove out, we went about half a kilometer and passed the stream that leads to the waterfall. That’s the last time I use a French guide.
These are from while we were down in the canyon:
These are from up top:
I got too hot because I was wearing my sweet new hat that Cat knitted for me:
We found a dead sheep. I like to think that an arctic fox got it, but it was probably just old:
Mark, Cat, and I did a bit of geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com/) to keep ourselves entertained. Here we are with our treasure:
Skúli Skúlason, the rector of the school, had his 50th birthday party last month. Yes, I am aware that it is funny that the head of the school has the word school in his name twice. When people here throw a party, they don’t mess around. Skúli is friends with about two-thirds of the population of Iceland, so his party was huge, and it was by far the most extravagant birthday party I’ve ever been to. This was the setup of the stage:
They had free beer and wine, which apparently happens once a lifetime in Iceland. There were songs, slideshows, and skits for this party…. all in Icelandic. I have been learning the language, but I definitely wasn’t far enough along to know what the hell was happening at this thing. This is Bjarni K. Kristjánsson (my secondary adviser) and me:
I’m not entirely sure if he is waving at the camera or giving me some weird Icelandic version of rabbit ears. This is my friend Anup (Nepal) who is a rafting guide here:
Bjarni and Stefán Óli Steingrímsson (one of my professors):
We recently had the Hólar Christmas (not holiday) Party. I decided that my hair was getting a bit out of control and needed to be dealt with. It was definitely not as bad as when I decided, about a year and a half ago, to grow my hair out to donate to Locks of Love. I think we all remember how badly that little experiment turned out:
GROSS! Anyway, something had to be done about my hair and there was no way that I was going to spend 3300 kronur on a haircut, so I borrowed some clippers from Bjarni and decided it was time to show off the widow’s peak for the first time in about 12 years:
This is what I ended up looking like for the Christmas Party:
SICK! Here is my buddy Mark’s look for the Christmas Party (apparently the wispy neck-beard and the side-part are acceptable looks in New Zealand):
Me, Soizic, Bjarni, and Rán Sturlaugsdóttir
I went to Reykjavik to meet with my primary adviser, Jón S. Ólafsson, a week ago, and I missed the most exciting thing to happen in the harbor outside of our office since I’ve been here. They unloaded a couple of Greenland sharks, which are used to make the hákarl, from one of the fishing boats. Fortunately, Mark was generous enough to share these pictures with me:
As you’ve probably noticed, all of the Icelandic names end with son or dóttir. They have a patriarchal naming system here. Everyone’s last name is that of his or her father with son added on the end for males and dóttir added on the end for females.
One thing that is really interesting here is the belief in little people. Most of the people in Iceland believe in elves. There have been a lot of cases where they have taken the homes of the elves under consideration when building roads (http://www.ismennt.is/vefir/ari/alfar/alandslag/aelvesmod.htm). There is actually a spot on my drive to work where they had to change a road they were building because of elves. I haven’t seen one yet, but I suppose anything is possible.
You might have heard about the polar bears that showed up here last year. Both of them arrived in Skagafjörður (where I live), and one of them was about five minutes from my office (http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23879662-23109,00.html). As you may have gathered with the elf stories, people tend to be fairly superstitious in this country. There was a local farmer here who had a dream that there was going to be a third polar bear. The farmer’s dream became national news and there was a sighting of the third bear (http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/search/news/Default.asp?ew_0_a_id=308034) which turned out to be a sheep. People like to point out the lady who claimed to see third bear when she’s out around town.
I have to apologize for the lack of pictures in this post. Cat has been stranded in the US for a while because of some snags in immigration. Fortunately, she’ll be returning this Thursday, so the number and quality of photographs will be much improved for the next time. I’m sure she’s thrilled that she gets to come back to this:
Thanks for stopping by. I’ll have something better for you next time,
--Dan (The Hairy American)
PS - I saw that Iowa got a New Year's Day bowl. Go Hawks!
