December 13, 2008
Saturday

Today is Saint Lucy’s Day, the traditional entrance into the Christmas season in Sweden. I am baking the cardamom rolls (lussekatter) that the oldest daughter, or, in some explanations, the youngest daughter, or, in still other versions of the custom, the prettiest daughter, serves her parents on the morning of the festival. She wears a white gown tied with a red sash and on her head a crown of whortleberry twigs with five (or seven, or nine) lighted candles. I wrote about it for the first time in this space four years ago. The link is given below, but you probably don’t have to go clicking over there because I am going to repeat most of it here, including the picture of Lynn at five years old decked out as the Lussibruden.

I came to know about Lucia Day at about the age of ten. A family friend had given me a book put out by UNICEF which showed children from member countries in some native garb and a short essay about their culture. The page about Sweden explained the ritual of the Lussibruden in which everyone celebrates that the darkness of winter is at its depth and the sun will now begin its journey back to summer. (In the old Julian calendar the solstice occurred on December 13.)

As a child I’d learned the story of the fourth century Italian St. Lucy. In one version of her life, she is portrayed as a young woman from a prosperous family who converted to Christianity and then refused marriage to a pagan suitor. Because she refused to give up “the incorruptible treasure of her virginity” (a phrase known to Catholic schoolgirls throughout the twentieth century), she was martyred by having her eyes plucked out and then her neck pierced by a sword. She is often depicted holding a plate with her eyes on it. More delicate renditions show her holding something like a small jewelry box. (I once thought that’s where she kept the incorruptible treasure.)

This Swedish spectacle captured my imagination and it gradually became part of my Christmas mythology. The year that Lynn was born, a woman named Pleasant Rowland founded a company that produced dolls featuring American girls from a number of immigrant cultures. One of them was Kirsten, a 19th-century Swedish girl. When Lynn was about four I bought the Kirsten doll and her St. Lucia Day paraphernalia. I also bought the girl-sized crown and made a white dress and sash for Lynn.

Lynn as the Lussibruden, 1990

Above you see a picture of Lynn at five serving the cardamom bread at my first holiday open house. (The shoes had been used a year earlier as part of her Dorothy of Oz costume.) I got her decked out like this for another few years, until she learned that a particular classmate would be accompanying his parents to the party and she said, “I’m not wearing that crown any more.” In recent years I’ve placed it on the table along with the Lucia-outfitted Kirsten doll and a heaping tray of the S-shaped cardamom rolls. I’m not having the party this year, but as I said elsewhere, I am making my traditional foods anyway, just not all at once. As Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for Louisa May Alcott’s March girls without any presents, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me without my cardamom rolls.

There have been times in my life when December was filled with darkness. Not only have I from time to time had personal sorrows at this season, I also am subject to Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression that occurs at the onset of the dark days and can persist until spring. Some years the effects have been pronounced, even when conditions in my life were not complicating things. This is not one of them.

And so I take this Saint Lucy’s Day to celebrate all the light that is in my life, and I leave my readers with words from one of my favorite modern Advent songs:

Rejoice, rejoice, take heart in the night, though dark the winter and cheerless.
The rising sun shall crown you with light, be strong and loving and fearless.
Love be our song and love our prayer and love be our endless story.
May God fill every day we share and bring us at last into glory.

Happy St. Lucy’s Day.

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A year ago, I bid farewell to Wyoming.

Two years ago, I wondered why my mother sent me and my sister to the store for a jar of mayonnaise on a summer’s day in 1956.

Three years ago, I wrote about my 2005 birthday.

Four years ago, I wrote about St. Lucy’s Day.

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