Sinister Santas

We put up the first of our christmastide decorations a few days ago, lagging days behind the rest of the town, which was fully lit up in good time for the first day of Advent. Sadly, the municipal decorations took a bit of a battering during the storm that passed by Friday night through Saturday morning, toppling the fifty-foot julgran (christmastree) that stood in the town square. In the storm’s wake came the season’s first flurries of snow.

Sweden has only partly embraced and assimilated the standard North American version of a North-Pole-based Santa Claus. The equivalent figure here is jultomten, the christmas gnome. Tomte was, traditionally, a little fellow who dwelt under the floorboards in a homestead’s barn, a guardian spirit who looked after the farm’s people and their livestock. All he asked in return was that a bowl of porridge be left out for him at Christmas. In the latter part of the 19th century, tomte began to take on, in the popular imagination, some of the attributes of St. Nicholas, coming to be associated with the bringing of gifts, a rôle previously carried out by the Christmas goat.

Even bearing all this in mind, it’s hard for those of us here carrying Anglo-American cultural baggage not to look at some of the tomtar on display in the shop windows, and think, with a faint shiver, those are some creepy-looking Santas…

The fellow above with the leering grin, for example, stands in a side-window of the store where I bought my last three pairs of shoes. In the front of the same shop stands this chap:

…the entirety of whose misshapen weirdness this picture cannot quite capture. My favourite sinister Santas, however, can be found in a store just across the street, which sells horse-riding accessories and other pet-related paraphenalia. Here is perhaps the very creepiest of the three on display:

Merry Christmas!