On Iceland's Yule Book Flood

I have loved Iceland since grad school. I took some Old Norse classes, read some Icelandic history, and even found a way to study one summer in Reykjavik, glacier-climbing and geyser-watching in person. The Icelandic language is quite conservative (read: “it hasn’t changed much”) due to isolation and intention, so folks who speak modern Icelandic can read Old Norse. And they do—Icelandic kids read sagas like American kids read Tall Tales. My favorite word in the world (which is saying a lot—I like a LOT of words) is the Icelandic noun uppivǫzlumaðr, which means a “pushy, contentious/tempestuous man.”

All of this awesomeness pales in comparison, though, to the best thing about modern Icelandic culture: the Yule Book Flood. On Christmas Eve in Iceland, people exchange books and turn in early to read and eat chocolate in bed. These are my people.

Iceland has always been exceptionally literate, producing long, complicated sagas and dense, interlocking poems since the Middle Ages, as well as vast corpuses of legal texts and proceedings. Today Iceland remains extremely literate, with more books printed per capita than any other country, and with one in ten people publishing a book.

The Yule Book Flood, though, has a little more to do with happenstance than spontaneous awesomeness. During World War II, strict restrictions on imported giftware made paper, which wasn’t taxed as highly, more desirable. So everyone started buying books for gifts, and it stuck.

On November 1^st, the catalog of all the new books comes out and is delivered all over the country. Fiction and biography sell the most, so I love to imagine a whole nation settling down to storytime, chocolate in hand.

How do we bring this kind of book-love to the US? 

I once saw on Pinterest a cute idea of wrapping up a picture book for every day of Advent to read a special holiday story. That was great, and I bought a few new books for it and dug out some other, less recently read books, but it failed ultimately, because my kids were never satisfied with one picture book. They were used to five or more a night, so they wanted me to wrap five a night instead of this one-book nonsense. Thus ended the Book Advent tradition.

I do give books for holidays—birthdays and Christmas—but since they also get family presents on Christmas Eve at my house (an age-old Baker strategy to stretch out the holiday), we tend to play games on Christmas Eve together, not read books by ourselves.

But in the years to come, when our munchkins have established their own households and traditions, I see a Baby Book Flood in our future.Two little old married people snuggled down with new books (though Rob will likely be listening to his on ear buds or whatever replaces them) and plenty of chocolate. I’ll insist on the chocolate.

Happy holidays, everyone.

https://www.npr.org/2012/12/25/167537939/literary-iceland-revels-in-its-annual-christmas-book-flood

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24399599

Twenty-Four Tiny Treats

I am an Advent junkie.

I like lots of things about the idea of Advent as it is expressed today. I love the countdown to something wonderful—whether it be the celebration of the birth of Christ, the return of the sun, or the warm fellowship of family and friends. And I seriously think we should count have countdowns more often.

But let’s start with Advent. One of the immediate benefits of this custom is the extension of a shortish holiday in to a long, glorious season. With Christmas, you really just get the two days, and sometimes day and a half, of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Kwanzaa celebrates seven days; Hanukkah gives you nine nights. Those few, intrepid traditionalists who celebrate the 12 days from Christmas to the Feast of the Epiphany get—you guessed it—twelve. But Advent lets you double that—24 little celebrations.

And you get those lovely calendars that help you mark your progress. All you have to do is wake up the next day to earn another Advent treat.  Depending on the calendar you use, that treat can be something as small as moving a felt bird from pocket to pocket, to opening doors on a cabin that produce another forest critter for decorations, to drawing out a paper with a different celebratory activity or a holiday story to read, to receiving little presents—candies or toys or tea or whisky.  It’s all good.

In my house, we celebrate a lot. And I plead guilty to both the decorating type and the treat type of Advent calendars. The ritual moment of moving that silly little bird is still lovely. 

When my kids were little, we did the activities and the story time.  I stocked little tins with slips of paper that told us to make paper chains and to read Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins. We had Lego and Playmobil calendars a couple years. We did candy treats the last several years, and I’ve paid for access to electronic Advent calendars with games and interactive scenes.

But we always do something.

There is something powerful about knowing you have a treat coming that turns a normal month in to a time to anticipate and enjoy. Something nearly meditative that brings one in to the moment for a short time each day, as we pause to pull out another critter or munch our treat, to notice where we are in the month and to take a step forward purposefully. 

I’m not saying we should have countdowns every month. (I can hear my dad saying if we did it all the time, it wouldn’t be special.) But I am grateful for a tradition that draws out good cheer over weeks instead of hours, that encourages delight in small things, and that forces us to pause and notice our progress.

Enjoy the whole season, y’all.