Watching an annual Christmas showing of Donald Duck - aka Kalle Anka - and other Disney cartoon shorts is a holiday tradition in Sweden. I had no idea about this until Lisa sent me an article yesterday detailing the Scandinavian tradition.
At 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Swedish families gather around the television to renew a tradition that first began in 1959. Every year, at that time, much of the population watches a television special featuring ‘Donald Duck and his friends.'
I’ve posted the Slate magazine article as a content source for this blog. The piece includes some priceless imbetted clips of the animated shorts with Swedish dubs and subtitles.
Reading the story created a warm feeling for me as I imagine generations of Swedes joining in this observance each year. I can envision them saying some of their favorite lines that they enjoy each and every year. It’s endearing.
About 24 hours from now, they’ll renew the tradition.
We don’t really have anything like that – at least I couldn’t think of anything similar. We watch all the classic Christmas movies and we can recite some of the famous lines.
From “It’s a Wonderful Life” - Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel’s just got his wings.
From “White Christmas” - Let’s just say we’re doing it for an old pal in the army.
From “Miracle on 34th Street” - If you’re really Santa Claus, you can get it for me. And if you can’t, you’re only a nice man with a white beard like mother says.
But there isn’t one specific showing of “White Christmas” that the nation pauses to watch. In fact, last week, one cable channel was running it over and over and over. In a like manner, we watch the animated 'specials’ of childhood days of old - Rudolph, Frosty, Charlie Brown.
Still, there isn’t just one highly publicized time for everyone in America to join the fun.
I guess some of the closest things we would have DON’T relate to Christmas but, rather, other times of the year:
- The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
- Watching the ball drop from Times Square on New Year’s Eve (on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve)
- The Super Bowl
We have Super Bowl parties. I can’t think of any Christmas gatherings that involve national broadcasts of any sort. In a way, I wish we had something like that.
Thinking of the Swedes and their Disney Christmas Eve tradition also reminded me of my own brush with the Sveirge. When I was a Senior in high school, our student body welcomed a Swedish exchange student, Jan Aslund, for the year. He was blonde and athletic. You can imagine all the American high school girls swooning over this mysterious Nordic figure cutting through the halls of FHS.
But sitting and chatting with him, you’d never know he was the subject of about 500 schoolgirl crushes. He was as nice and down to earth as you could imagine. I remember, fondly, many talks that he and I had. We became fast friends. We enjoyed each other’s company and we especially liked deep discussions about our respective nations.
Over the years, I’ve tried to look him up via the internet, Facebook and so forth but, it seems, Jan Aslund, is a fairly common Swedish name. But, I’ll keep trying. It’s in the DNA of a former journalist to have that sort of curiosity and tenacity, right?
As it turns out, I got my journalistic start on the high school newspaper staff. As a member of “The Crow’s Nest” - I was the Sports Editor - I was present when we did a feature story about Jan (I didn’t write the story nor did I take photos. I think my official role was that of 'driver’).
Sad to say, the only photo I have of Jan was from that photo shoot. It is pasted in my senior memory book…a grainy black-and-white. It shows him standing by the two American teen guys - his 'brothers’ - from his exchange student family. He’s the guy in the plaid shirt on the left.
When I think of my senior year, I think a lot of Jan. We talked about music (reggae was very popular in Sweden at the time). He told me a lot about Swedish politics and their religious traditions. Really, we covered a lot of ground. Appropriately, I remember spending a lot of time with him around Christmas that year.
I just don’t remember him ever talking about Kalle Anka.
JG
(Source: Slate)
Originally posted 12/23/2011
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