The joulupukki goes to great lengths to make sure he visits every apartment in Helsinki.
Raili was a professional caterer for 30 years. Can you tell?Is that lutefisk I see on the table?
This church is a familiar sight to many Helsinki tourists, the underground stone church.Here it is during the Christmas peace.
One of Ritva's hobbies is making dolls and doll clothes. She recently had an exhibition of her work at the local library. Here are two of her handmade treasures.
Eli played to a "packed house" of Risto and Ritva's friends two nights in a row at New Year's.Greetings from Finland!
We hope that the content of this Finmail will be more worthwhile reading than its title suggests. We have been busy preparing for our performances on a cruise called Folklandia (more about that in a later issue), so it has taken us until now to record some of our observations about the Finnish holiday season. We hope that you will enjoy reading about Christmas and New Year's in Finland even though most of us have taken our trees down. A warning to the hurried: despite our best intentions, this Finmail got a little longer than we originally intended.
A few weeks before Christmas, the folk music students from the Kokkola Conservatory invited us to join them for their Christmas party ("Pikkujoulu"). The early part of the party included everyone singing Christmas carols together. (Later, the party got wild with crazy Finnish folk music students having an air-accordion-playing contest and playing other games.) In every culture where Christmas is celebrated, the "famous" Christmas carols are sung in the local language, in translation from Latin, French, and German. Finns also have "indigenous" Christmas songs with both melody and text written by Finns. Many of these songs are in a minor key, so although they sound quite sad, the songs express the joy and peace that is Christmas in a way that only Finns could do. Some of our favorites are "En Etsi Valtaa Loistoa," " Varpunen Jouluuamuna," and "Kun Joulu On." (English translation of "En Etsi Valtaa Loistoa" here: http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/En_etsi_valtaa,_loistoa_(Jean_Sibelius) Tarja Turunen (the former lead singer of popular Finnish heavy metal band "Nightwish") can be heard singing these and other Christmas songs on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqFIFkZ-60o We watched her in concert (on TV) on Christmas Eve. She seems very charming on stage and it is hard to imagine a heavy metal band behind her.
We are honored and pleased to say that we experienced a traditional Finnish Christmas with Eli's great uncle and aunt, Tero and Raili, in Espoo, a large city immediately neighboring Helsinki. Finns share a strong collective understanding of how Christmas "should" be celebrated. At noon on Christmas Eve day, the Finnish Christmas Peace (joulurauha) is declared in Turku. This Wikipedia article has some other interesting tidbits about the Christmas Peace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Eve#Finland Sometime on Christmas Eve day, Finns go to the cemetery where their relatives are buried. They light large candles and place them in lanterns at the grave, and wish their deceased family members a Merry Christmas. On our drive to the Espoo cemetery with Tero and Raili, Tero pointed out smoke coming from little shacks in several yards -- even in the big city, many Finns have wood-burning saunas.
When we got to the cemetery, it was difficult to find a parking place. Even though a lot of people were in the cemetery, it was quiet. The sky was just starting to get dark (about 2:30). People moved reverently, and the whole scene was very beautiful, with one or several candles lit at every stone. We walked to Tero's sister's husband's parents and lit candles for them, and then to another part of the cemetery where we lit candles for Tero's parents and Raili's parents. In front of the stone church (Finland's oldest), hundreds of candles were lit by people in honor of relatives who were buried elsewhere or by people who didn't know where their relatives were buried. Two soldiers solemnly guarded the memorial for the unknown soldier, and many candles were lit there to honor fallen Finnish soldiers. It was nearly dark when we left, but the cemetery was lit by thousands of candles. If we had had the camera with us, we would have taken a picture, so we hope that you can imagine this beautiful and peaceful Finnish Christmas Eve scene. (This tradition is also practiced in many communites northern Minnesota where Finns settled.)
For many people, Christmas would not be complete without sharing good food with relatives. Raili is an amazing cook, and we watched her with interest as she prepared Christmas pastries and homemade Karjalan piirakka (a Finnish torte with rice in the middle). We asked at every meal if we could help, but she usually refused. (We helped with the dishes.) The traditional Christmas breakfast is rice pudding, and Raili served large portions, much to Eli's delight. A ham is the traditional Christmas meat, and Raili started working on it a day in advance. When we first saw it, it still looked like a pig: there was no head, but the snout was obvious. Other traditional Finnish Christmas dishes include rutabaga hot dish, liver hot dish, carrot hot dish, and potato hot dish. (Honest, we swear! Everyone we know in Finland ate the same thing!) The Finnish word for "hot dish" (that's "casserole" for those of you that don't speak Minnesotan) is "laatikko," which means "box." Raili had also prepared the traditional herring, smoked salmon, lutefisk, and a cold red beet and pickle salad that had whipped cream on the side. Another traditional appetizer is cold salmon caviar in a cream sauce with onions -- mmm! We neglected to take a picture on the big day, but one of the pictures in the blog http://finmail.blogspot.com/ shows the leftover spread the day after Christmas.
Between December 27 - 30, we went to a folk music and dance workshop in central Finland. But we are trying to keep the Finmails from getting too long, and we can see that this one is threatening to get out of control. So we will tell you about our workshop at a later time and skip straight to New Year's.
We spent the New Year's holiday at the home of Eli's "aunt-in-law" Ritva and her husband Risto's home in Espoo. Ritva and Risto were delighted that Eli entertained dinner guests two nights in a row, playing Finnish and American fiddle music. After a lovely leisurely meal on New Year's Eve, we joined Risto and Ritva and their friends for a walk in their neighborhood. Finns (and many people elsewhere in the world) celebrate New Year's Eve by lighting fireworks. At first, the sights and sounds of the fireworks were like an ordinary neighborhood on the Fourth of July. But on the unspoken cue of five minutes before midnight, the firework activity multiplied exponentially. From where we were standing, we could see fireworks being set off by about fifty parties in the field next to an apartment complex. Behind us, we could hear the explosions and see the smoke from another neighborhood. The experience might be described as being in the middle of a non-combative celebratory war-zone. We did not see any "professional" fireworks, but individual efforts definitely made up for this. Whoever sells fireworks in Finland is probably now staying at the most exclusive hotel in the Virgin Islands and sipping a margarita on the beach.
Ritva deserves special mention for her practice of the rare art of creating historical period-accurate dolls and dollhouses from scratch. . .and we mean from SCRATCH! Check out the awesome doll photo on the blog. She makes the doll body parts from porcelain, fires them at high temperature and carefully hand-paints them. Then she sews dizzyingly ornate clothing, all of which is done in the style of a particular historical period. Thus, a completed doll exemplifies the graceful touch of an artist coupled with the attention of a scholar. And don't even get us started about the dollhouse: it is approximately four feet in height and width, two feet deep and, yes, she painstakingly creates everything by hand. It's like she's a carpenter, an electrician (yes, its wired), a furniture manufacturer, an interior designer, a feng shui practitioner and a historian all wrapped up into one. Since retiring from her banking career she views this as hobby, but we think she should have her own museum.
Among other wonderful things about our holiday season in Espoo was the opportuntity to speak and learn a lot of Finnish. For us, it was like an intensive conversational Finnish crash-course. In our classroom, we can resort to English if needed, so it was refreshing and challenging to get away from English for awhile. Thankfully, all of our hosts were unwaveringly patient, as speaking Finnish with us is more or less like speaking with a five-year-old and a three year-old. One of the first words we learned was "talvipäiväseisaus," (winter solstice), which translates something like "winter day ceasing." So we, like you, are celebrating the return of light to the Northern Hemisphere. Although we gain just one minute of daylight per day, we are sure that it won't be long before the sun plagues us with round-the-clock light.
Take care and have fun!
Eli & LynnAnne
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