Reimagining the Christmas Spirit

Establishing New Traditions for a Danish Yule Celebration

For the past 10 years I have been trying to distance myself from Christmas and the consumerism that inevitably followed every November, December, and even January.

As a child I used to love Christmas. How could I not? With all the snow and baking and family time, it was my favorite time of the year. A time where everything felt just a bit more magical.

But as a grew into young adulthood I started to recognize how capitalism had infiltrated Christmas, and I felt that all the magic had gone out in favor of sales, over-consumption and wastefullness.

I would ask family members to not buy me any presents (they still did), and I would not decorate my home for Christmas. No lights, no red hearts and absolutely no plastic Chistmas tree. I would look with mean eyes at the people who would eat way too much at Christmas dinner and somehow still manage to leave leftovers on their plates, to be thrown out with the big sacks of wrapping paper that would be left the next day.

Just this year, in October, my daugther and I visited the town mall to go the library that for some reason is located in the same building, and they had Christmas decorations up everywhere.

In October.

I was already silently cussing out the marketing technique of getting folks into ‘The Christmas Spirit’ earlier in order for them to spend more money, because “it’s only Christmas once a year afterall” (except when it lasts three months).

But something stopped me completely in my cussing.

“Mommy, mommy, it’s Father Christmas.”

It was my daughter who was tucking at my sleeves while watching the mechanic doll in front of us with big eyes.

And there it suddenly was again. That little glimpse of magic. Right there, in my daughters eyes, was what I had not been able to see myself since I had grown out of my own childhood.

Because of my distaste of Christmas, I have not been very forthcoming on teaching my child anything about Christmas. But somehow, through her own findings in books and TV-shows, she has found out that there is something about Christmas, something special.

So the library that day we read books on Father Christmas, and we even borrowed home some of them, tough I was reluctant to begin to prepare her for something that was still 2 months away.

In November it started to snow, and my daughter was overfilled with joy. She wanted nothing but to sit in her indoor swing while singing along to old Christmas songs, songs from my own childhood that I somehow still knew the lyrics to, even after all those years.

One snowy day in late November we went sleiging the three of us in the snow covered hills, and when we returned, the home was dark and brooding in the afternoon twilight.

“Perhaps we could hang up some lights this year. I think we have some in the attic,” Herluf said.

“Will that not be too expensive to have them turned on all night?” I asked, but Herluf just shook his shoulders.

“Not more expensive that firing up the masonry oven a cold winter day, or baking cookies in the oven. The darkest time of the year is now.”

I thought a lot about what he had said that day. The winter months in Denmark are cold, but more so they are filled with darkness. Everyone finds a way to go through these months of darkness, but so far in my adult life I had let them overwhelm me. Each year in November typically I would be hit by a seasonal sadness.

A sadness that I would swell in for several months, leaving me depleted for energy untill spring came once again with its sun and its flowers and its promises of a warm summer.

I decided, this year I would try another way of combatting winter sadness.

Not that of embracing darkness and sadness, or even the consumerism. But of building up our own winter traditions to celebrate this time of year.

And so we hung the lights on the facade, and I made a natural wreath of the spruce of the forest and red berries of our cottage garden. I searched for old winter traditions and came upon ‘the yule log’, a piece of firewood that you decorate to burn on Christmas night in order to celebrate the light of the months to come. We decorated our with moss and fir cones.

Slowly, but surely, I started to feel the magic of this time of year again. Not in the mall, not in any shop, but in my own home. In the handmade crafting of warm sweaters for Christmas gifts, in baking cookies with my daughter while it snows outside, in singing Christmas songs, loud and proud, and most of all, in returning home from a cold walk in the snow to see our little farmhouse on the dark hill, brimming in glittering lights.

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