by RICK DANLEY // December 23, 2017
At least according to the 1959 tome “Swedish Christmas” — now, sadly, out of print — Christmas wasn’t Christmas without the yuletide pig:
“It was not easy to slaughter the Christmas pig in the correct manner. It must be done in the first light of early dawn. One must face all four corners of the compass, swear an oath, and pour brandy over the pig’s back as his last breath expires. To be absolutely correct and certain that all details of the custom had been observed, one must dip a finger in the beast’s blood and paint a cross on the forehead.”
This is not, by and large, how Christmas in Sweden is celebrated today. And so it will come as a relief to pig-lovers everywhere to hear that when Savonburg-native Janice Johnson Fewins and 17-year-old Swedish exchange student Clara Ylander appeared at the Iola Public Library last week to discuss the customs of a traditional Swedish Christmas, they arrived not with slaughter in their eyes but with joyful stories of the old country and with a heaping tray of delicious finger sandwiches, each crustless tidbit topped with a tiny Swedish flag.
Library assistant Colleen Dobbins introduced the guest speakers last Thursday.
“These ladies have knocked themselves out to bring all of this together,” said Dobbins, indicating the smorgasbord laid out on card tables before the 20 or so residents who turned out to see the Scandinavian teen and her host mother lecture, and to taste from the fare assembled from recipes in an authentic Swedish cookbook. Lussekatter. Pepparkakor. Gummy fish. Cold punch. Swedish tea cakes. And much else besides. But the snacks were for after the program.
ALLEN COUNTY natives will know that Clara Ylander isn’t the first Swede to set clog
in the Savonburg area. “So, how many of you have Swedish ancestry?” asked Fewins, whose own family was among that first generation of Swedes to ride into Allen County in the late 1860s. A handful in the audience raised their hands. One old man, unsure, half raised his arm. “I’m Norwegian,” he said apologetically. “Which the Swedes say is a Swede with his brains beat out.”
The Swedish immigrants who poured into southeast Allen County in the latter part of the 19th century did so either as evacuees of the devastating crop failures that whacked their native farms or as adventurers in the grips of an incurable Amerika feber, a condition — “America fever” — which grew more fervid as excited letters from relatives and friends who had tasted of the new world began to reach the Swedish provinces. According to the late Swedish-American scholar Emory Lindquist, these Swedes saw the United States as — warning: another Swedish word ahead — a framtidslandet, which, translated, means “the land of the future.”
But the future isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Lindquist quotes a Swedish writer of the day, who, recounted his first impressions of Kansas: “Hour after hour we rode through a boundless, barren prairie…. I found myself indescribably oppressed, lonely, and miserable. Tears came to my eyes. Was this the place that I had chose for my home, this dismal, terrible wilderness….” And so on.
After Clara said her few words about Sweden, she opened the floor to questions. Perhaps it was an echo of this same Scandinavian gloom that led an earnest woman in the front row to pose the night’s first question.
“What,” the woman asked Clara, “was the big disappointment to you coming here?”
It’s a good question, and Clara was game. But Clara shares nothing of the gloominess or morbidity of her tearful forebears. The apple-cheeked teen, who speaks an impeccable English and is possessed of a cheerful demeanor, didn’t hesitate.
“The food,” she said, with a big smile. “Because I’m used to eating kind of healthy, and then I come here and everything’s fried.”
But, pointed out her equally sweet-tempered host mother, Clara has become a quick convert to at least two American delicacies previously outside her experience: 1) sausage gravy and 2) iced coffee. “Oh, yeah,” said Clara. “I’m addicted.”
“And your biggest shock, since coming here?” wondered another library patron.
Clara, who is a senior at Uniontown High School, thought for a moment. “Because I come from a city, Gothenburg, with 600,000 people, when I came here,” said Clara, “I was like, ‘Wow, not too many people.’ I’d never seen a rural area before, or ag culture. But now — now, I’m in FFA.”
“Wow, not too many people” might just as easily stand as Savonburg’s town motto. You can drive up and down the ’burg for an hour without seeing a soul abroad in the streets. A couple of squat brick buildings cluster around the big hump on Main Street where the train tracks pass. But, with the exception of the Savonburg Public Library — which, thanks to the dedication of a handful of locals, remains the beating heart of the town — all other signs of life have faded.
But it wasn’t always thus. At the start of last week’s talk, Fewins played a short videocassette depicting the history of Swedish influence in Savonburg. The video was created by Fewins’ daughter 20 years ago as part of a school project. It featured an interview with an elderly couple who grew up in the area.
“Well,” said the old woman, “when I was a child, this town was bustling with activity. I remember the fairgrounds in back of the high school. We used to have horse races, car races. You’d never believe that today, with the way it looks back there now.”
Her husband had his memories, too. “The Swedish band played out there every Saturday night. You couldn’t find a place in Savonburg to park your car on Main Street. It was full. Oh boy, everybody went down on Saturday night. It was full at them band concerts. A busy place.”
“You never would believe it,” said the woman. “But after the Depression, things just started going downhill with us. They didn’t have enough money to finance schools. They didn’t have money for this or that. I’d say it was the start of the downfall of Savonburg.”
BUT THERE’S a historical through-line that connects the Swedish colony that formed on the barren, boundless prairie of Allen County in the late-19th century — the Olesons, Johnsons, Andersons, Hocanson, Overgaards, Carlsons, Wallqvists, and others — with the Savonburg of today.
In 1872, a group of Swedish settlers, missing the fellowship of their stock, and desiring to remain on good spiritual terms with their higher power, organized Friends Home Lutheran Church.
This Swedish church — which today boasts 105 baptized members and averages about 50 congregants each week — remains the polestar around which the rural Swedish-American diaspora still organizes itself.
But not only Swedes. Starting in the 1920s, each year in the lead up to the Christmas holiday, the rural church has flung its doors open to the wider community in celebration of its Annual Lutefisk Dinner.
Lutefisk, for the uninitiated, is the traditional Christmas dish of most Nordic countries. Formed from a piece of dried codfish that has been soaked in lye and then drenched in butter, the ultimately gelatinous dish has its fans — but they’re thin on the ground. Our scholar Lindquist, for one, calls it a “culinary delight.” While the food writer Calvin Trillin compared the agony that accompanied his first taste of lutefisk to the experience of teenage circumcision. Perhaps it was this paper, in an article in December of 1934, that put it most diplomatically. “[Lutefisk],” the reporter wrote, “is a genuine delicacy — for those that like it.”
The Annual Dinner survived the Great Depression and the Second World War — during which, because of the fighting, the fish had to be ordered from Iceland and brought to the states on returning American warships — but it has faded to black in recent years.
“We gave up the lutefisk supper many years ago,” explained Fewins, “because the fish was getting too expensive and the older folks couldn’t soak it anymore. And even though a few of us learned how to do it, many of us worked full-time. Ours was a generation that just didn’t have the time to take off for a whole week to get ready for that.”
But a few years ago, continued Fewins, a group at the church decided to renew the tradition on a more manageable scale, limiting attendance to church members only. “We missed it so much, those of us who remembered it from when we were younger.”
The truth is that the tradition of feasting on lutefisk died out in Sweden long before it did in Savonburg. “Clara had never even tasted it,” said Fewins, “until we had it at our church two weeks ago. She tasted it and —” Clara scrunched up her face and vigorously shook her head. “And it was not good.”
IN A NOD to the ostensible subject of Thursday’s talk — “Swedish Christmas” — Clara came dressed as Saint Lucia, the 3rd-century Christian martyr who carried food to the poor in the dark catacombs of ancient Sicily. Lucia wore a wreath of candles on her head, which lit her way and left her hands free to carry food to the famished.
In honor of the virgin martyr, on Dec. 13, in many households in Sweden, the eldest daughter dons the white robe and red sash and wreath of candles of this patron saint of light. Unbelievably, it took the Swedes centuries to realize the folly of putting actual candles in your hair; today the crowns are battery-powered.
At the start of the Christmas season, then, parents in Sweden gather in churches and concert halls to watch their children sing the traditional holiday songs. The lights go down in the church and the children’s caroling faces are aglow, each in their own personal circle of light.
The final lyrics of the traditional Saint Lucia song are there to remind those who’ve endured the long, cold winter that whatever worries have burdened you over these past twelve months, the light of a new year is breaking:
Darkness shall take flight soon,
From earth’s valleys.
So she speaks
Wonderful words to us:
A new day will rise again
From the rosy sky…
And then the children chant: Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia!
This story originally appeared in The Iola Register on December 23, 2017.
RG danley 