The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (15 page)

The Sami’s reputation as a magical people endured over

distance and through time. The Norse sagas tell of children like Gunhild Asursdatter who was sent away to learn witchcraft from two men of Finmark, one of the northernmost

portions of Lapland. These men were such powerful sorcer-

ers that they could kill with a glance. 26 In Russia, Ivan the Terrible sent an envoy to the Sami to get their take on the recent appearance of a comet. It was believed that the Sami could also raise thunder and lightning and control the winds by the tying and untying of knots. In 1844, Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” featured a Wise-woman of Finmark Woman

who could “twist all the winds of the world into a rope.”

While the Catholic Church frowned upon such doings,

it was the Lutherans, still caught up in the zeal of the Reformation, who really got the persecutions going. Suffice it to say that we are lucky to have any of the noide’s old drums left to look at. But the flame of magic, even the smoky

rumor of magic, is a hard one to snuff out. No matter how

26. Gunhild eventual y becomes a witch in her own right, but she repays her teachers very poorly. She charms them to sleep and cinches them up in sealskin bags into which she invites King Harald Hairfair’s men to thrust their weapons.

Reindeer Games 115

thick a layer of ashes you kick over it, the fire always strug-gles back to life, though it may not burn the same color as before. The Sami retained their supernatural aura well into the nineteenth century—long enough to sell the jolly old

elf eight head of tiny flying reindeer.

All of this is most likely unknown to the average letter-

to-Santa-writer. Still, the old man’s arctic idyll persists. Perhaps it has something to do with Lapland itself. Most of us have witnessed snow’s power to transform an ordinary landscape into a white wonderland. Now add to this the lam-

bent play of the aurora borealis, the “blue lights” which the Snow Queen burns in her palace each evening. Behind these

blowing veils, the stars show crisp and clear, while the moon admires her reflection in the hard crust of the snow. And

then there are the acoustic qualities of snow. Compare the steady jingle of a reindeer’s harness ringing out over the frozen tundra to the hollow clanging of a goat’s bell in the dry Turkish hills.

Whatever the source of Lapland’s magic, it’s too late for

Santa to relocate. Following the lead of dear Virginia’s rule of thumb, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so,” children’s pro-gram host Markus Rautio announced on Finnish radio in

1927 that Joulupukki, the Finnish Father Christmas, made

his home on Lapland’s three-peaked Korvatunturi Fell.

Because it straddles the border between Russia and Fin-

land, the mountain is off limits to the casual visitor. In this respect, English language media has gone one better, convincing children that Santa’s workshop is planted squarely at the North Pole. Theoretically at least, one could get permission from the border patrol to climb Korvatunturi Fell,
116 Reindeer Games

but the North Pole? I suspect that the “Santa Lives in Lapland” theory has been actively suppressed in the United

States because we don’t want our children getting wind of

the fact that there is now a sort of Finnic Disneyworld near Lapland’s capital, Rovaniemi. There, you can meet Joulupukki himself, observe the elves at work and ride in a sleigh drawn by reindeer, all for the price of a trans-Atlantic plane ticket plus hotel.27

Stallo

Yule has never loomed particularly large on the Sami cal-

endar. Their reluctance to celebrate the birth of Christ is reflected in the laws enacted in the eighteenth century

requiring church attendance on December 24. Well into

the twentieth century, the holiday, for many Sami, paled

in comparison to Easter or St. Andrew’s Day (November

30). There were, however, special precautions to be taken

on Christmas Eve. Sami parents warned their children to

be on their best behavior as preparations were made for

the arrival of a certain sleigh. Firewood was stacked neatly so the sleigh’s runners would not snag on any out-sticking twigs, and a sturdy branch was staked by the river so

the driver could tie up his vehicle and drink his fill of the cold water before moving on. Move on quickly was what

the Sami were anxious for him to do, for this driver was not Santa but a wicked giant named Stallo.

27. If you’re not up for this kind of adventure, you can put your kids off the scent by showing them the Finnish film,
Rare Exports: A
Christmas Tale
, which builds on the Korvatunturi Fell theory but features a Joulupukki they won’t
ever
want to meet.

Reindeer Games 117

Stallo resembles the troll of Swedish fairytale, with a

huge nose, tiny eyes and knotted black hair. Some say he

is as stupid as a trol , while in other accounts he has magical abilities comparable to those of the noide. Stallo is actually only half troll; the other half is human. This human

half may link him to the early Samis’ conception of their

non-Sami neighbors, or at least to their dead. The material culture of the Sami was founded on wood, skin and bone,

while Stallo was greedy for silver and gold. The ancient

reindeer herders could not have failed to notice their more settled neighbors’ devotion to metallurgy, an apparently

magical process, or the value they placed upon its incor-

ruptible products. This is not to suggest that the Sami were naïve; within the mythologies of the metallurgists themselves, the smith is portrayed more as a magician or god

than as an ordinary craftsman—the smith Ilmarinen of

the Finnish epic
Kalevala
forged the lids of heaven, among other wonders, and the Anglo-Saxon Wayland the Smith

bears the epithet, “lord of the elves.”

Stallo continues to be associated with non-Sami graves

and stone house foundations within Lapland: that is, with

those places haunted by the ghosts of Norse or Finnish settlers. Perhaps a band of Sami had witnessed the laying in

howe of some Bronze or early Iron Age warrior all clad in

armor, his sword at his side. Before such a grave was eventually abandoned, they would have observed the leaving

of offerings on the grave mound and concluded that the

clanking ghost within must be propitiated or at the very

least avoided. Stallo’s name may come from a word mean-

ing “metal” and he does love the stuff. In one story, he falls
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through a hole in the ice because his eyes are fixed upon the moon which, he is convinced, is made of gold. In another,

he is weighed down by a haul of silver, though it is usually children he lugs around in his sack.

The fact that Stallo prefers to cook children before he

eats them usually gives them a chance to outwit the brute, make their escape and count it as a lesson learned. Because he only snatches naughty children, he appears to be in the same class as Čert and Black Peter. While those two labor

under the restraining influence of St. Nicholas, Stallo would not think twice about stuffing good girls and boys in his

sack. But he can only ever get his hands on the bad ones. It is the children who disobey their parents—staying out too

late is the most common offense—who find themselves en

route to Stallo’s cauldron. Stallo, then, is a cautionary figure, and not all Stallo stories end happily.

It’s one thing to pretend you can’t hear your mother

calling because you’re too busy trying out your new pair of skis in the moonlight, or to take your time coming home

from your friend’s
kota
on a bright summer evening, but once upon a time there were some really horrible children

in Lapland: three boys who refused to accompany their par-

ents to church on Christmas Eve. Unlike the virtuous lit-

tle red-socked children in “See My Grey Foot Dangle,” these boys are plotting mischief as soon as they shut the door

behind their mother and father. Instead of staying safe

inside the house28 as they were told, they venture outside to try their hands at slaughtering a reindeer.

28. Even those Sami who are still nomadic maintain vil ages of permanent houses where they spend much of the winter.

Reindeer Games 119

Unfortunately, there are no reindeer to be found, so the

youngest boy agrees to play the part of the sacrifice. He may have thought his brothers were only playing a game, but

soon his blood stains the snow. The other two hack him to

pieces and light the fire under the pot. As the meat cooks, the smell of human flesh draws Stallo from the forest. In

an instant, he is upon the surviving brothers, his huge head and tangled hair blotting out the stars. The first boy is killed instantly while the second escapes into the house and hides inside a chest. It is he who suffers the worst death of all, for Stallo kindles a fire inside the chest by blowing sparks through the keyhole and roasting the boy alive.

One expects such things from Stallo, but how to explain

the boys’ own cannibalistic behavior? Well, just as Stallo is half-troll, it was rumored that some Sami might be half-Stallo, for the monster had a huge sexual appetite as well. In many of the tales he is either happily or unhappily married to a troll woman, but he prefers the pretty young Sami girls.

In Finland, the Christmas processions of earlier centuries sometimes included a randy Stallo: a large youth dressed in ragged black clothing who tried to poke his wooden club

up the girls’ skirts. (This may be the reason why so many

Finnish girls now go about dressed as male or at least asexual tonttu at Christmastime.) So perhaps the boys were

Stallo’s progeny.

Then again, maybe the boys weren’t really so bad after

all. They may simply have been re-enacting a Christmas ritual they had seen their elders perform, albeit with a real reindeer instead of a human child. Too young to understand what they were doing, though not to get the job done,
120 Reindeer Games

they might have expected their little brother to be returned to them on the tide of the northern lights, which some

Sami believe to be a manifestation of the ancestors.

The Yuletide People

It is not entirely clear who or what the Yuletide People were, though they appear to be part of the widespread northern tradition of honoring and feasting the dead at this time of year. We know that they were the recipients of sacrifice and that the air was thick with them on Christmas Eve. We

do not know what they looked like or how much sympa-

thy they might have had for humankind. What we do know

comes from scenes painted on drums as well as from the

complaints of seventeenth-century clergymen. At least one

Protestant cleric referred to these Sami spirits as the
Julheer
, linking them, at least in the mind of the writer, with
Das
Wütende Heer
and with the
Jolorei
, yet another name for the Norse Yule Host or Wild Hunt. But it was a German

theologian’s
Juhlavolker
, translated poetically into English as “Yuletide People,”29 that has stuck.30

Try as they might to get the Sami to Mass, those har-

ried clergymen could not prevent some of their parishio-

29. The farthest back that I have been able to trace the English term,

“Yuletide People” is 1954 when it is offered as translation of both
joulu-herrar
and
joulu-gadze
. It appears in the essay, “The Lapps and Their Christmas,” by Ernst Manker in the book
Swedish
Christmas
. On the book’s copyright page, translations are attributed to “Mrs. Yvonne Aboav-Elmquist, M. A. Oxford, and others.”

30. “Stuck where?” you might ask if you are hearing the term for the first time. Surprisingly enough, the subject of the Yuletide People was a popular seasonal filler in the smaller American newspapers of the 1970’s.

Reindeer Games 121

ners from slipping outside to attend older spirits, for the Sami gods were not to be found inside a church. One of the ceremonies involved removing all but the trunk and central boughs of what would today be a modest-sized Christmas

tree. A reindeer was then slaughtered and the tree painted with its blood. Select portions of the sacrifice, including the lips, were draped over the branches and consecrated to the Yuletide People.

In yet another ritual, the participants fasted, collect-

ing morsels of their Christmas Eve feast in a boat-shaped

birch bark basket painted red, again with reindeer blood,

and sealed with melted fat. The basket was then hung from

a tree in the forest, too high up for wolves or naughty children to pull down. Only after this spiritual Christmas hamper had been delivered could the mortals return home to

their own festivities.

I do not know if it is possible to draw the Yuletide Peo-

ple into your own observance without blood, molten fat,

and fresh reindeer lips, but you can certainly try. Pack a basket full of Christmas goodies and consecrate it to the

Yuletide People but donate it to the living. You can also take note of the role of the
seite
in ancient Sami religion. A seite is an unusually-shaped feature of the landscape such as a

rock or a tree stump. A carving knife was sometimes used

to tease out a figure which nature had already suggested,

but for the most part a seite is found, not made. The seite was deemed worthy of sacrifice and not all sacrifices were bloody. Though the gods did occasionally call out through

the drum for the gift of a horse or a reindeer, bones, coins and all manner of trinkets could also be offered to the seite.