I’ve never been in Iceland over Christmas but I’ve been there in December, in the run-up, and there’s nothing more Christmassy than a cold dark snowy place that loves warmth and light.
Because there isn’t much daylight in the winter, people put up Christmas lights and then leave them up far longer than would be acceptable in the UK. I’m not a huge fan of Christmas myself but I love lights in the dark, so my room and office contain an obscene number of sets and I enjoy it when the afternoons get dark early. Add in some snow and I reckon I could spend at least one winter in Iceland.
Then there’s the Christmas book flood. Iceland is a big place for reading and writing. It has a disproportionate number of publishers to population and although the story that 10% of the population will have something published is taken to mean “a book” when it’s no such thing, the fact remains that a lot of books are published in Iceland every year. The majority of them are released in the two months before Christmas. It’s a book flood. I love it.
It’s a tradition, at least in recent years, that everyone must have a book and a little heap of chocolate to take to bed with them on Christmas Eve. I tried to implement this wonderful tradition at home, except my mum only really reads on holiday. (Hey, if you’re interested in Iceland & want your own Christmas Eve book, I wrote one you might be interested in!)
Minus Twelve: An Arctic Adventure – buy it here
But Iceland’s most famous Christmas tradition is Gryla, the Christmas Cat and the Yule Lads. Let’s take them one by one.
Gryla is a Christmas hag who eats children. I have a lovely felted Gryla hanging from the bottom of my Christmas tree where my mum can’t see it, because she thinks it’s horrible. She comes down from the mountains and takes away naughty children in a big sack and turns them into stew. I mean, it leaves “Santa won’t leave you any presents” in the shade a little, an actual Christmas monster.
The Christmas Cat is similar. He belongs to Gryla and he also eats children. But not the naughty ones. He eats the children – and the adults – who don’t receive new clothes for Christmas. That’s two opportunities to get killed & eaten at Christmas.
And then there are Gryla’s thirteen sons, the Yule Lads. They’re not exactly Father Christmas either but they’re not child-killing monsters. They’re trolls and they come to town, one per night, on the thirteen nights before Christmas, leaving small gifts for good children, usually in shoes on windowsills, or potatoes for naughty ones. They leave again, one at a time, on the thirteen nights beginning on Christmas night. And they all have a thing they do, indicated in their names. They are:
- Sheep-Cote Clod, who harasses sheep.
- Gully Gawk, who steals milk.
- Stubby, who steals the cooked-on leftovers from pans.
- Spoon-licker, who – guess what? – steals and licks spoons.
- Pot-scraper, who steals leftovers from pots.
- Bowl-licker, who steals and licks bowls (do the Yule Lads exist to scare Icelanders into doing the washing-up?).
- Door-slammer, who slams doors in the night.
- Skyr-gobbler, who steals and eats the skyr (a kind of yoghurt-like cheese native to Iceland. The kind beginning to spread across Europe is pretty much just yoghurt).
- Sausage-swiper – you’ll never guess – he steals and eats sausages.
- Window-peeper, who looks through windows in search of anything his brothers haven’t already had to steal.
- Doorway-sniffer, who sniffs out, and steals, bread.
- Meat-hook, he’s here for your meat.
- And finally, Candle-stealer, who obviously steals candles. They won’t eat your kids but they’ll have anything else you’ve got in the house.
The Yule Lads come to the Natura Hotel near Reykjavik Domestic airport. I stayed there one December and was astonished to find, my first morning, a little bag hanging from my door handle containing some kind of chocolate-covered nut-and-seed sticks from Spoon- licker & a little note about the Yule Lads. The next morning I had some gingerbread trolls from Pot-licker. The third morning I had some more gingerbread, this time from Bowl-licker, some chocolates from Door-slammer on my fourth morning and on my last morning Skyr-gobbler left me two little oranges. I’m not paid or sponsored by the Natura (wish I was!) but it has a lovely little spa of its own, lends you bus passes and the visits from the Yule Lads were a delight. On the downside, it’s usually out of my price range.
So that’s Christmas in Iceland. Yes, like a lot of mainland Europe, they tend to open the presents and do the big meal on Christmas Eve and then have Christmas Day itself a bit more chilled. The big meal is often smoked lamb or hog roast or sometimes something a bit more specifically Iceland, like reindeer or ptarmigan. But the special Icelandic bits of the season are the lights, the books and the monsters. Happy Christmas.