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Lutefisk: A Norwegian Christmas Dinner Oddity
| Article
# : |
12059 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
2,566 Words |
| Author
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Roger L. Welsch
Plains folklorist Roger L. Welsch is professor of English and
anthropology at the University of Nebraska. |
Some years ago, I was courting a young woman whose family was very American, but which remembered and embraced its Norwegian roots. Over the course of three generations, the family had fared well in America; they had become successful, primarily as farmers and prosperous businessmen. Although all members of the family were outspokenly proud of their Scandinavian background, little about them--other than their name and fair skins--was Norwegian. Not one spoke Norwegian; only one had even visited the old country. Their clothing, manner, speech, and food ways were unvaryingly middle American.
Although I had met almost all family members on one occasion or another and we got along just fine, I not only was not invited to the family's annual Christmas celebration, but was told explicitly that outsiders were not invited to that family gathering unless they had established a clear and solid relationship with the family--marriage, that is to say, or at least engagement.
This mysterious rite was therefore a matter of curiosity for me as the deliberately excluded outsider. When I eventually was invited to the family's Christmas, I accepted the offer with eager, even avid, enthusiasm.
What struck me, on my first Christmas with this family, was that a series of unique and spontaneous events was in reality an established scenario that, I was to learn while attending the next fifteen consecutive celebrations, was played out every year with little variation. The process was not written down; it was not maintained by any sort of official enforcement. There was no deliberately, artificially conscious effort to maintain the details of the celebration; the process was pure folklore, an elaborately choreographed event that was carried on unself-consciously by each performer.
Some activities during the family Christmas evening were generally American in nature--a distribution of gifts, for example, and a visit from Santa Claus. There were distinctly, uniquely family activities that are not, as far as I know, shared by the culture in general, but are clearly family-specific. These customs were not Norwegian, American, Plains, small-town, but the exclusive esoteric property of this close-knit family group.
For example, the homesteading grandparents of the principal generation at the celebration had been teetotalers. When Christmas was celebrated fifty years earlier, no alcohol was permitted in the house. But there was a general desire among the
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