When Lady Elizabeth Strallan, Sir Anthony's mother, was thinking about what Christmas was like in Sweden, she was thinking about the Christmas of 1832 and perhaps also that of 1831. But when Elizabeth's father George thought about Christmas in Sweden, he was thinking about the Christmas of 1827, his first Christmas in Stockholm. Because it had been something of a shock for him.
...
A week before Christmas Eve, on the seventeenth of December, George had been visited by the furious Henrik Gyllenstråk. That visit was the one that had ended in George agreeing to marry Emilia and Henrik agreeing to pay most expenses for that family. Before that visit George didn't know that Emilia was expecting a baby.
A couple of days after Henrik Gyllenstråk's visit, when George had calmed down a little and also had time to think over both his own and Emilia's situation, as well as the baby's, he decided that he ought to ask Emilia herself if she really wanted to marry him. He found it wisest not to invite her to his home, he didn't want her to believe that he was only trying to get under her skirts again, nice as that would have been.
So George went to Emilia's home, and asked if he could see her in private. He was ushered into a small saloon, where he sat waiting with increasing trepidation for quite a long time.
Then Emilia entered the room. He could see at once that she wasn't happy. She looked as worried about seeing him as he was about seeing her. So he swiftly went across the floor, threw his arms around her, and held her like that for many minutes, without moving. He just wanted to comfort her. "Don't worry, my darling!" he whispered. "Everything will be alright."
After a while George let go of Emilia, and they both sat down on the sofa.
"Do you hate me?" George began with a worried look at Emilia.
"No, of course not!" Emilia said. "I love you. But I was afraid you hated me, for telling my father that it was you who did it."
"Well, what else could you have done? This won't go away. And it is my child just as much as yours."
Actually, in some strange way, George felt quite proud of himself for what he had done. He had managed to make his woman pregnant in the first go - actively trying to avoid it at that. He must be very fertile. Quite some man, he thought.
One of George's reasons for going to see Emilia was that he had decided to propose formally to her. He thought he owed her that. If she was going to become his wife, she had at least the right to have a proper proposal to look back on. They were going to live their whole lives together, he couldn't let her believe that he only married her because he was afraid of her father.
So George bent down on one knee beside the sofa, took one of Emilia's hands in his and said:
"Lady Emilia Gyllenstråk! Will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?"
"I don't have much choice, have I", Emilia said with a smirk. "So, yes, of course. I'm glad you asked me. Thank you."
George finished his proposal with a very chaste kiss. He didn't dare to do more than that under Henrik Gyllenstråk's roof. Emilia was trying to smile at him, but he could see that she was still sad and worried.
"Life is full of mistakes", George said soothingly, stroking her cheek. "But if we don't make them, we wouldn't be alive. And perhaps this mistake is the best one either of us will ever make? I love you Emilia, and I am quite looking forward to having a little baby with you! I'm sure it will be a lovely child. The cutest little thing."
This time George had managed to say exactly the right thing. Much better than that stiff proposal of his.
Emilia's worried face split up in the most gorgeous smile of relief. Because she had spent the last few days worrying more and more about that poor little darling baby she had in her belly that nobody had wanted and no one had been happy about. Emilia had felt so sorry for the little one.
But now she knew her child's father would love it. As she herself had already started to do, more and more for each day that went by.
"I'm looking forward to it too", she said, smiling lovingly at George. "It will be quite an adventure! I guess we were wrong to do that, but I'm so happy that we did!"
...
Just as George was leaving, Emilia's mother came out into the hallway and invited him to spend Christmas Eve with his future wife's family. Christmas Eve is the most important day of Christmas for the Swedes, she explained to him, but he already knew that.
George couldn't well refuse, although he was a little afraid. Emilia's father had been rather intimidating, and George didn't really look forward to meeting her elder brothers. He was sure they were as angry with him as their father had been. Well, he couldn't really blame them, although he was feeling much better about himself now, after talking to Emilia.
Besides, he had heard people at the legation say that the traditional Swedish Christmas food was absolutely disgusting.
...
When George arrived to the Christmas celebrations at Emilia's home, both her brothers and their families were already there. They were both very large, even taller and broader than their father. Their wives were both rather short, much darker in colour than the Gyllenstråks and both from old Swedish aristocratic families, according to Emilia. The two brothers had seven children in all, all of them boys and somewhere between one and seven years old. They were not the most well-behaved children George had seen.
Emilia's father was much friendlier to George than he had been last time they met. The rest of the family was also very friendly, including the two big brothers. Perhaps they thought that it was too late to change anything, and George was at least doing the decent thing. They were going to be related, so they could as well be friends.
They started out with the Christmas dinner. The table was laden with food. There were meatballs, spare ribs, small sausages, larger sausages, blood sausage, pates, liverwurst. Piles of bread. Piles of butter. Cheese. Many kinds of fish, four or five dishes with pieces of raw herring in different kinds of sauces, smoked salmon. There was also some strange white fish that was almost transparent and didn't look or smell very tasty. Emilia said it was called 'lutfisk'.
But the place of honour on the diningroom table was taken up by the most gigantic ham that George had ever set eyes on. He wondered what a pig with a behind like that would have looked like.
The other end of the pig or one of its friends, the head, was also placed on the table. It was decorated with something white and red and there was an apple in its mouth. And on a plate nearby, George could also se the feet of the poor animal, or actually the feet of more than one pig.
George was placed beside Emilia at the table, of course, so she could help him by translating and also tell him how to eat the different kinds of food.
The maids brought in a gigantic pot, it was so big that it took two of them to carry it. It seemed to be no food in it, just some dirty water, but George's future brothers-in-law were full of enthusiasm when they saw the pot.
"That is 'dopp-i-grytan'", Emilia said to George. "Dip-in-the-pot. It's the water left after boiling the ham. You are supposed to put slices of bread in it and then fish them up with a slotted ladle and place them on your plate. They really get soaked, you have to eat them with knife and fork."
Emilia's brothers repeated that word a couple of times. Dopp-i-grytan, yeah, that is nice, they said, smiling at their wives, who were both smiling and blushing. Then the two brothers burst out laughing.
"What is so funny about that?" George asked Emilia.
Emilia thought for a while, she had never understood that joke before, although she heard it at Christmas every year. But now it suddenly dawned upon her.
"I think they are talking about the kind of thing that you and I did on your sofa that day", she whispered with an innocent smile. "What is between my legs is the pot, and that part of you, whatever you call it, is what is being dipped."
Then she added: "And that is nice, really. Much better than that horrid wet bread."
...
The Christmas presents were distributed later on by a man dressed as a goat, probably one of the servants of the family. Each of the little boys got a couple of toys, the older ones also got a book each. There were many happy shouts when seven small boys were given so many new things to play with. The new toys had to be tried out at once, of course. Emilia's little nephews weren't the most patient of children.
...
Later the family started singing a song: "Drick ur ditt glas ty döden på dig väntar, slipar sin lie och på din tröskel står..."
"That means 'Empty your glass, because death is awaiting you", Emilia translated. "'Standing in your doorway sharpening his scythe'."
George was horrified.
"Do they mean that as a threat?"
"Of course not! It's just a song. They like you!"
George doubted that very much. After all he had ruined their darling little daughter and sister, and now he was going to parasitize on them during the forseeable future to be able to support her and their child.
...
Emilia told George that the song was written by the Swedish poet Carl Mikael Bellman, who had died some thirty years before. This song was one of his most popular ones.
George would remember that song more than a year later, on the 26:th of July 1829, when he was invited to the unveiling of a bust of Bellman, out in an outskirt of Stockholm called 'Djurgården', which Emilia translated as 'animal farm'.
There had been many hundreds of people present at that unveiling, perhaps even many thousands. Most of Stockholm seemed to be there. There were all kinds of people, the richer ones coming in their carriages, the poorer ones on foot, carrying picnic baskets and bottles of wine or beer.
Even the Swedish king and crown prince had been present at the unveiling, arriving there riding on horses. The poet's widow and son had been present as well.
There had been drinking and singing of Bellman's songs till well after midnight, long after most of the noble guests had left. It had all been nice and peaceful, much to George's surprise, with so many intoxicated Swedes assembled in the same place.
...
On Christmas Eve George had thought the Swedes had a very peculiar notion of what was suitable to sing on a happy occasion like that. This was most certainly not a Christmas Carol. But then again, Christmas wasn't called Christmas at all in Sweden, it was called 'jul', the old heathen word.
What he was invited to here was more like a Yule-blot than a Christmas dinner.
...
When the children had got their food and their gifts and were asleep in one of the spare rooms, the real drinking started. The 'brännvin' was taken from the cupboard in the corner, filled into small glasses and handed out to every-one who wanted one, men and women alike. Emilia translated it as 'snaps', although George didn't really need a translation to know what it was. Emilia didn't want any, her pregnancy made her feel sick enough as it was.
It seemed that everything in Sweden had to be done to music, at least drinking alcohol.
"Helan går", George's future family sang.
"What is it you are singing? Hell and gore?" George asked with a bewildered air.
Emilia laughed.
"No, of course not", she said. "It means 'The whole one goes'."
That didn't make things clearer to George. "Why?" was all he was able to ask.
"Because when you drink your first glass, it is all the alcohol you have in your stomach. The next strophe is 'Halvan går' which means 'The half one goes". Because when you drink that down you already have one glass in your stomach, so that second one is only half of the total amount. And the next one is about the third going and so on."
The Swedes obviously had a fondness for mathematics, George thought.
"How many verses are there?" he asked worriedly.
"Oh, I guess you can sing it for ever. But the thing is you are not really able to do that. Because you have to drink a glass for every verse. So it usually ends naturally, when no one can drink any more or remembers which verse to sing."
There was more text than this in the song, but George decided he didn't need to have it all translated. This was obviously no poetical masterpiece, after all.
The women stopped drinking after a couple of glasses and a couple of verses from the song. But the men continued, singing and drinking, singing and drinkiing again. George felt that he had to keep up with those three gigantic Swedes, who were constantly filling up his glass. After his fourth glass, and the fourth verse of the song, he couldn't care less what they were singing about. He tried to say something friendly to his future father-in-law, but he didn't know what language he was using, and it didn't really matter anyway, because his tongue was sliding around in his mouth in the same way he was sure his feet would do if he would try to stand on them.
After the first few drinks, Emilia saw that her father and brothers were taking turns drinking, only one or two of them drank every time, the others let their glasses be when George was emptying his, and then fastly pretended that they had filled them up again.
"My poor darling!" she thought. She found her father's and brothers' behaviour awful. Even if they were to drink as much as George did, they still had the advantage of being bigger, older and more used to the Swedish snaps. But Emilia didn't dare to warn George. She didn't want to irritate her father any further. She knew he was still angry with her for getting pregnant in that thoughtless way.
But after the fifth drink or so she noticed that George unintentionally started playing a similar trick on them. His hand was so unsteady by then that most of his drinks landed outside his mouth, on his napkin and clothes, or on the floor.
...
When George was back in his room late that evening, after throwing up most of the snaps and parts of the food on the snow in the gutter on his way home, he was very close to tears. What had he let himself into?
His head was muddled, his mouth dry, his clothes reeking of snaps and even worse things he didn't want to think about. He loved Emilia, he loved her very much, more and more every time he met her. But her father and brothers were a little bit too much.
And the snaps had tasted absolutely terrible, not like the brandy and whiskey and punch he was used to from England. No wonder they swallowed it in one gulp!
The Swedish food had also been horrible. Well, he was invited to a real English Christmas dinner at the legation tomorrow. It was just as good that he was hungry.
...
George would have felt happier if he had known that he had been tested, and still happier if he had known that he had passed the test.
"Well, Emilia, I don't think you have chosen so poorly after all!" Henrik Gyllenstråk said to his daughter before going to bed. "I like it when a man as young as that can hold his drink."
Emilia gave her father an irritated smirk. She hadn't liked the way he and her brothers had filled George to the brim with alcohol. But she didn't say anything.
"Especially a foreigner", Henrik added, and then he went to get some sleep. They were all going up early the next morning to go to church for 'julottan', the early Christmas Day service, at six o'clock.
They weren't complete heathens, after all.
...
AN: Thank you for reading! Please tell me what you think!
I have to warn you - this is a story, not a history book. I wrote this exaggerated description of a Swedish Christmas mostly for fun, although the details are mainly accurate. I didn't live then and haven't bothered to look it all up, so I don't know if they had these customs then. But all food mentioned is traditional on a Swedish Christmas dinner, and quite popular among an older generation of Swedes even today or at least twenty years ago. I hated that soaked bread when I was little, but haven't had it since.
The first written mentioning of the song 'Helan går' is from 1843, but I assume that this little gem of Swedish tradition has been sung long before that, so I don't feel anachronistic in using it here.
Everything I say about Carl Michael Bellman, his songs and his bust is true. Or at least taken from written sources.
Swedes sometimes sing Bellman's songs, as well as 'Helan går', at parties, but as far as I know never at Christmas. I guess the Gyllenstråks do it just to show George some Swedish culture!
