i went to a beautiful swedish st. lucia (sankta lucia) festival last friday (not my photos). it was ion a lovely church on the meory campus... so beautifully decorated for christmas. it was a local volunteer choir, it's memebers of mostly swedish descent. the songs were in swedish and english... but i prefered the swedish, especially a beautiful rendition of "o holy night" by the director maria lindberg-kransmo, and also the traditional sankta maria song. wonderful! if christmas was just moments like that, it would be enough for me.
there was also a swedish christmas market yesterday, where i got to enjoy more singing while drinking coffee and eating ginger cookies... again, heaven. very nice swedish market as well. i bought a lovely st. lucia image made from bobbin lace, a traditional lace making practice. i have never heard of this technique? the artist, susanne howard was there and nicely explained it to us. add this to my list of textile art i would love to learn.
as you can probably guess i am a little bit obsessed with all things swedish... having to do with christmas, especially! watching the lucia festival and hearing the director talk about being picked as lucia herself as a child, made me wish i had grown up with more traditions like this. my family is primarily of german background... my grandmother grew up in a house with german speaking parents, but all this has been lost. i really know very little about the customs that would have been so important to my family before me, which is a little bit sad. i'm glad to see others holding onto these traditions and passing them down. what about you? do you have celebrations you hold dear and still practice each year? or have you made your own?
4 comments:
I'm _totally_ obsessed with Sweden. I want to move there immediately, but my Texan husband says no way. Ah, well, I'll have to make do with occasional trips to IKEA, I guess. ;-)
yes, thank goodness for ikea:)
hmmm.....growing up in England, I have found that I have managed to keep our tradition of popping crackers and wearing the silly little paper crowns that come inside of them on our heads while we eat. And you cannot have an english dinner without yorkshire pudding! (and what lovely timing...I found myself reading this post as I browsed through all of my son's St. Lucia projects he brought home from school today....)
what kind of school does your son go to sam? that's sounds lovely. my daughters school keeps everything so "generic" which kind of takes the fun out of it. i loved the advent spiral my son's preschool did... lighting candles from a single flame and leaving them in an evergreen spiral. it was lovely to watch.
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