Old-time Icelandic Christmas – dodging trolls, and a kid eating cat

Icelanders love to celebrate Christmas. In a country where people must deal with a long, hard winter, feasting, gift-giving, and merrymaking are welcome distractions. Articles about Icelandic Christmas are popular with my readers during the advent. This is why I wanted to write about old-time Icelandic Christmas. How did Icelanders celebrate Christmas when the country was agrarian and destitute?

Pagan origins and hardscrabble life

During the settlement era, people would celebrate the pagan festival of the solstice in style. Chieftains would do their best to outdo each other with grand feasts. However, Iceland got hit hard when the country’s climate became colder and harsher in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is known as the ‘little ice age. Plagues and volcanic eruptions added to the misery of a colder climate. Icelanders were reduced to eking out a living with sustenance farming in a cold and unforgiving climate.

Indentured servitude made things worse

Harsh laws that placed most people in indentured servitude to farmers stifled all economic and social progress. Farmhands were basically completely beholden to farmers to either owned or leased enough land to be eligable to have servants. Corporal punishment was on the cards if you were not in the service of a farmer. Indentured servitude was the law until the end of the nineteenth century, and people could finally pursue a better life and move to the emerging towns and villages by the seaside. One could argue that these restrictions on social and economic life condemned the country to be a poverty stricken backwater compared to other countries in Northern Europe. Consider that until the dawn of the 19th century, Iceland had no urban centers. It beggars belief, but it is still true. But how did people celebrate Christmas in all this hardship?

Surprise feasts!

In the north of Iceland, it was traditional to surprise the farmhands with an unexpected feast on the advent. The farmer’s wife had dictatorial powers when doling out the daily food ration to the farmhands and dependents. A competent matron would not be too generous with the all-important food supply.  But one evening on the advent, she would make an exception and generously give out smoked sheep meat, sausages, butter, and flatbread. The aim was to surprise everyone with this generosity. All work on the farm would cease, and people would immediately dig in. The farmhands would chip in on big and prosperous farms, so there would be even more of these evening feasts.

Free ideas for today’s hard pressed HR departments

During the advent, it was also traditional to work very hard on treating wool, spinning it into thread, and then fashioning it into clothes. Farmers could sell this to merchants to get merchandise needed for Christmas. Farmhands and dependents would be rewarded with new clothing if they worked hard. Children considered naughty or lazy were threatened by the giantess Grýla or her pet, the awful children-eating Yule Cat.  Grýla, it was said, would come and collect all naughty children, put them in her bag, and then unceremoniously boil them and eat them. If children didn’t get a new piece of clothing before Christmas, the Christmas cat would catch them and eat them. I would say that should be motivation enough to behave and work diligently. Maybe these creatures from Icelandic folklore can inspire HR departments in poor-performing workplaces?

The work was so hard on the advent that the last week before Christmas was called stick week. That refers to sticks of wood, called waking sticks, that people would use to keep their eyes open so they wouldn’t fall asleep working. I kid you not. Another idea for HR! 

Dealing with trolls and scary hidden people was essential for old-time Icelandic Christmas

Yule is an ancient festival, much older than Christianity. In iceland, old traditions would linger, despite the pious Christianity practiced in the country. Catholicism was introduced in around 1000 AD but Icelanders switched to Lutheranism in the middle of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, people believed that frightful hidden people, monsters, and trolls roamed around Yule and New Year’s Eve.

Enter the awful Yule Lads

The most famous of these creatures that haunted Icelandic Christmas were the thirteen Yule Lads, the downright despicable trolls and the sons of the hated and feared Grýla, She, and her husband Leppalúði,  also were an unwelcome addition to old-time Icelandic Christmas. The Yule Lads preyed on children and stole food. Then there was also the child-eating Christmas cat. How is that for holiday cheer? In some places, leaving a large plate of smoked lamb meat for the hidden people was customary. After everything was ready for Christmas, sometimes the omnipotent  farmer’s wife would ritually say, “Come those who want to come, and those leave who want to without causing any harm to me or mine.” This was meant as a peace offering to the hidden people.

Combing your lice-infested hair for Christmas

Icelanders were not big on personal hygiene back then. Bathing was infrequently or sometimes nonexistent. However, people would clean their beds and underwear, wash up, comb their hair, and wear their best clothes to celebrate Christmas. 

Housing was deplorable. When you think about an Icelandic turf house, you might think about the turf houses that remain in Iceland and have been turned into museums. However, these large houses were the estates of the 1%. There were a few houses made of houses, but those “palaces” weren’t built until the late 18th or early 19th century.  The 99% lived in small turf huts, which were small, cramped, dark, and often filled with smoke.

Grandpa didn’t glorify the past

My late grandfather, born in 1926, once told me about visiting his uncle, who lived in a turf house in Eyjafjörður when he was six. He told me that he started running outside to the daylight every day from the dark and dank turf house (or hut) to get rid of the bugs that covered his body. The creepy-crawlies were mainly lice, silverfish, and centipedes.  When he told me this by his ktchen table, he shook his shoulders as a reflex from this unpleasant memory. He had it better then country folk; he grew up with his family in a timber house in Akureyri. His family was relatively well off and had left the countryside for Akureyri to seek the opportunities there. Like so many others, that town grew from fishing and trade.

Forget Playstation, here is a bright tallow candle for you!

The darkness of an Icelandic turf hut made candles made from sheep tallow an otherworldly luxury during old-time Icelandic Christmas. People mostly used small lamps that burned liver oil from fish, birds, or whales. The result was a bad smell, poor lighting, and smoke. However, at Christmas, it was customary to give children tallow candles, and it must have been incredible for them to have many brightly burning candles in the dark semi-subterranean turf houses in which people lived through a long winter.

Christmas trees were non-existant

It is hard to overstate what a luxury a tallow candle was. Sheep tallow is highly nutritious and calorie-rich. Making it into candles is also hard work, which consumes precious fuel. In modern terms, it is the equivalent of giving your kid a Playstation 5. These candles were not placed on Christmas trees until they became a part of celebrating Christmas after the middle of the nineteenth century. Initially though, the tradition of Christmas trees was at first only adopted by the wealthy.

Feed those little sheep herders proplerly once a year

It was also customary to feed children well during Christmas. One of my favorite Icelandic Christmas songs is about precisely that. The lyrics are, in my poor translation, something like: 

Children should get bread to bite on Yule
Red clothes so they get out of bed
A large piece of a fat sheep that roamed the mountains and hills
Now old Grýla is dead, she gave up on the swings

Video from Youtube featuring the Icelandic folk band Þrjú á palli performing an traditonal Icelandic song:  Það á að gefa börnum brauð –

However, if you think children had it good, consider this fraction of a lullaby still sung to Icelandic kids:

Little children roam to the edge of a mountain
Willingly seeking lambs

Video from Youtube featuring Valgerður Guðnadóttir singing an Icelandic lullaby: Bíum bíum bambaló

Young children were often responsible for managing sheep herds and were expected to ensure the flock would return home to the last sheep. If a sheep were missing from the flock at the end of the day, there would often be hell to pay. If you have seen how skittish Icelandic sheep are, you will know this was a hard job for an adult, let alone a malnourished child. 

Shoes for all

Another treat for Icelandic kids was that they, and everybody else on the farm, would receive new shoes. These were called Christmas shoes, but unfortunately, getting new shoes would not reduce the risk of getting torn to pieces and devoured by a giant cat since the shoes did not count as new clothes.

Origins of a modern and fun custom

This might be the origins of a modern custom. Since there are thirteen Yule lads, children put their shoes next to an open window thirteen days before Christmas. Each of the thirteen Yule lads comes to the realm of men on his chosen day, and nowadays, they give little treats or gifts by placing them in the shoe by the window. Icelandic Yule lads have gone through a lot of self-improvement since the old days and are now really nice.

Smoked lamb and smoked sheep belly for real old-time Icelandic Christmas

On Advent day – 24 December – people would wash up, comb their hair, and wear their best clothes. Christmas starts at 18.00, and the farmer reads from the bible. Then, it was time for a feast. It would feature a smoked sheep’s belly (magáll), sausage, smoked lamb, perhaps 3 – 4 leaf bread, and maybe rice pudding.

Sad cakes

Leaf bread is deep-fried, thin, round cakes decorated with carved patterns. These fatty cakes are still popular in Iceland for Christmans and I love them with smoked lamb with a lot of butter. However, they are one of the saddest forms of a Christmas treat ever. There was so little wheat or rye for making bread that a flattened dough of a leaf bread was supposed to be thin enough so you could read the bible through it. Nothing more tells you about the state of Iceland before modernity arrived properly with the arrival of allied troops who occupied the country in World War 2. 

Dinner is served. Enjoy your bony ptarmigan

Sometimes, people would also get coffee and a primitive form of pancakes. But this depended on the food available. If people were down on their luck, they would catch and eat ptarmigans for Christmas. This emergency Christmas food for poor people is now a delicacy and unmissable for many Icelanders. I find ptarmigans a poor fare. There is not much meat on them, so the hassle of cooking them is hardly worthwhile.

Smelly skate from the sweaty and hairy armpit of the devil

Another poor fare of old-time Icelandic Christmas is the fermented skate that was tradionally served in the Westfjords on the mass of St. Thorlakur on 23 December.This tradition of eating skate on the  day of the revered Saint Thorlakur is a holdover from Catholicism,. The advent used to be a time for fasting where meat was not on the menu. It is also practical to save food in run-up to the festival of Yule. The skate smells and tastes like I imagine stale urine does. The texture is that of soft cartilage. Now it is considered festive among many Icelanders to eat this ‘challenging fish’ on 23 December. If you are in Iceland on this day and you smell something like spoiled fish, you just had the ‘privilege’ of smelling this awful dish. Masokism is plainly alive and well. 

No fun please. It is Christmas

Tallow candles would surely light everything up, but that was the end of the cheer. Playing cards, arguing, dancing, or engaging in fun was forbidden during Christmas night. If you played cards, the devil would be sure to catch you. If you danced, the devil would sink the farm into the ground. It is safe to say that modern would be absolutely bonkers to my forebears. So be grateful for having all the cheer and merry-making of modern Yule. Happy solstice to you!