Blessuð og sæl!
Today’s newsletter, friends, is all about the thirteen Icelandic Yule Lads, that set of impish men-trolls that come down from the mountains, one per day, beginning in the we hours of December 12 and continuing until the 24th.
Which of course means that the first one—Stekkjarstaur—came trudging into town this morning.
Now, some folks would have you believe that the Yule Lads are the Icelandic version of Santa Claus, but that is hogwash. The Yule Lads are totally different from the tubby ho-ho-ho character we have come to associate with Christmas and Coca Cola. For one thing, their mother is a hideous, child-eating ogress, and their father an insipid weakling who does little more than take up space in the cave in which they live. Also, there are thirteen of them, each with his own definitive character—or, should I say, character defect, because the Yule Lads are, truth be told, hopelessly flawed.
Their only remote resemblance to the red-clad, chimney-sliding, stocking-stuffing Mr. Claus is that over the past century or so they’ve morphed into kindly fellows who bring small gifts to well-behaved children. Prior to that they were—like their infamous mother—grotesquely ugly and inherently nasty creatures, who thrived on profanity and ill-will. Over the centuries they gradually came to look more like humans, but were nonetheless fairly big and dorky-looking. In more recent times they are usually depicted in burlap clothing, knee-high socks and sheepskin shoes, which is the type of garb that the Icelanders wore in the old days. The churlishness that once rendered them so offensive is now little more than a set of quirks that, when you think about them, are kind of endearing.
So how was this Great Rebranding achieved?
Easy—they were simply instructed to place small gifts in the shoes of children while they slept.
The procedure is this: when a little girl or boy goes to sleep in the evening between 11 and 24 December, they leave their shoe on the windowsill, near an open window. If they have been well-behaved that day, the Yule Lad who comes to town leaves a small present inside their shoe. Nothing extravagant, you understand: perhaps a new eraser, hair barrettes, or a sticker with their favourite superhero.
If, on the other hand, the child has been naughty, they are likely to wake up in the morning to find only a potato or a piece of coal in their shoe. (Yes, that is correct: the Yule Lads are a super-duper manipulation tool to help parents keep their children in line during Yule season.)
Some children will leave out cookies and/or milk for their Yule Lad, similar to what kids elsewhere do for Santa on Christmas Eve. An excellent strategy for scoring points because, as we shall learn, the Yule Lads are always hungry.
That’s it for now, but later this week we shall get better acquainted with each Lad and his particular set of quirks.
This post was excerpted from my Little Book of the Icelanders at Christmas, which is all about our crazy and wonderful Yule traditions here in the Land of the Ice. It is available in hard cover (from my website), paperback (from Amazon), ebook format (from most ebook retailers) and as an audiobook (from Audible).
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Give me a potato and I'm liable to keep behaving the way I have been, hoping for another.