So this year I managed to honoured the age old tradition of oversleeping past Julottan.
Like every year..
Julotta is the Swedish word for Christmas church but actually means...Christmas...8..because it starts at 8 o'clock in the morning. I know it's not the same in England, its much later and doesn't have the same traditional significance but still, I thought I'd give it a go this year too.
I woke up at half past 10.
But it kind of brings me to another thing I strongly associate with Christmas: Ghosts.
Aside for the candlelit carols and the crunchy snow and the achievement of getting up early there's another reason 10 year old me was so eager to go to church early on Christmas day.. Almost every year I got some sort of ghost story book (as many children do) for Christmas and one story goes like this:
There is an old lady who wakes up to see the lights are lit in the church. She thinks she has overslept and hurries to get dressed and runs up to the church. As she runs she hears carol singing and feels so ashamed of her self for having to go in there late while everyone in the village watches. She gets there, opens the door and with her eyes down on the floor she walks over to her bench and sits down. For a second she thinks about the strangely dark blueish light in there..and a rotten smell..? but nevermind that! Now she will listen to the priest! But..she doesn't recognise him. Who is that? She turns to the person next to her to ask, but..she doesn't recognise them either. Then the one in front of her turns around and she breaths a sigh of relief! It's her neighbour. But as the woman opens her moth to speak she remembers..Her neighbour has been dead for over a week now.. "Get out of here!" she sais to the old woman, "get out before they notice you, you're too early, this is the mass of the dead. But be careful and remember to throw your shawl behind you when you leave!". Carefully she gets up and walks towards the door. Almost running she pulls open the door and throws her shawl to the claw-like fingers behind her. She hears screams behind her as she runs all the way home.
In the morning when the priest comes to prepaid for Julottan he finds a piece of the old ladies torn up shawl on each bench in the church. Along with the usual gravedirt..
There's some variations, sometimes it's a young maid who oversleeps and sometimes she meets her dead grandfather but that's pretty much how it goes and...I always wanted to find out if it was true. No smoke without fire..is there?
In the end and in the same spirit I also ended my Christmas day traditionally! by being shit scared of demons and sleeping with the lights on. For me Christmas will always be more ghostly then Halloween. Both in stories and for real.
Scary Christmas!
