Santa & The Demon Drink.
Norwegian has a useful word; I can’t think of an English equivalent for romjul, or “Space Christmas”. It means the interval between Christmas day and New Year’s day — actually, a week — the time when some of us flop around on the sofa like stranded manatees, eating and drinking more and more until we go-off pop.
The illustration is of St. Francis driving the demons from the lake by our house. In the foreground is the diving board.
A Bad Guide 
We (along with the whole population of the three(3) northern provinces of the Netherlands and some nearby Chermans) just made our annual pilgrimage to the IKEA in Groningen, in a spirit of great penitence by the time we got out if not earlier.
(Boris van ‘t Blad will shortly be moving to a Big Bed to free up the cot for Unborn Egberdina.)
I shed a nostalgic tear for the bouncing children’s areas of IKEA. We used to practically live at IKEA; one of its two (2) Oslo branches is only five (5) minutes drive from our house. Coincidentally, Languagehat currently has a thread about whether the noun IKEA is declined in various European languages. There is no article attached in Skandinavian (IKEAen), as far as I know.
Also romhelg “Room Holiday” and, in my wife’s Trondheim dialect, mellomjul “Between-Christmas”. Originally romjul denoted the nearly two weeks between Christmas day and Epiphany (called trettendedagen “the Thirtheenth Day” or helligtrekongersdag “Holy Three Kings’ Day”). As Epiphany was forgotten and New Year’s eve rose to prominence the scope was narrowed.
It’s not really “Space Christmas”, either. Etymologically it’s sort of a backformation. Originally it was a compound adjective rúmheilagr “loosely holy” (or some such) used to describe the days between the feasts. This was reinterpreted as (or extended to) a compound noun based on helgr “holiday”, modern helg. Finally, since the actual holiday was jól, romjól was formed as a less generic name.
In folk religion Romjula was a period of, er, limbo, when the border between the worlds could be crossed. Hunting bands from the underworld would roam at night (Åsgårdsreia). In the folk song Draumkvedet (originally probably a medieval religious allegory) a man falls asleep at Christmas night and sleeps until Epiphany, travelling through the heavens and the underworld.
The Wikipedia article on Romjul points to an English article named Boxing Week. I don’t know the provenance of that term.
Thanks, that’s very interesting, Trond. My dictionary doesn’t give the derivation though it agrees that historically romjul /-helg was, as you say, until twelfth night.
Boxing Day is, of course, the 26th of December. “Boxing Week” may be only Canadian. In Britain, as far as I know, that event is known as “the January sales”, even though it now takes place in December.
Well, this is THRILLINGLY useful, as among the self-employed (and any schoolteachers) Christmas Eve through the 7th of January is just no-man’s land here. Nothing is happening. I’ve never heard “Boxing Week”. We’ve crawled into our hole (“Mole End” is the name of our house) and pulled the hole in after us [my husband was working away from 11-23 Dec]. And except for dogwalking (no goats, I’m sorry to say) and maybe a need to buy lettuce, we’re not emerging until the 7th. All the greenery will come down on Twelfth Night.
And a continuing Happy Romjul to all. Thanks for giving us a name for it. Hibernation.
Mole End must be an anagram for something … I’m not sure what.
Twelfth night. Argh! I knew that. Shakespeare’s plot is even an obvious mytological parallel.
I may have overstretched the etymology a bit. The endpoints are known, but the sequence of intermediary stages is mine.
And I forgot to acknowledge the mytological content of your photo, too. I don’t think those creatures can be captured by a camera any other time of year.
An English calque slash phonological adaptation would be Roomyule.
I have a book somewhere that shows a primstav (Norwegian calendar stick) with only 300 or so days. I tracked down the missing days to somewhere after December 21, the day of Thomas the Brewer. I found some unusual stuff about the December primstav calendar here
Click to access ncsnlf2003.pdf
including the information that Jan. 6, when the visit of the magi is celebrated, was Christmas Day in the old Julian calendar before the change to the Gregorian calendar in the 1700s.
Oh, what the hay, I’ll just paste the January part, since it has so much Norwegian and so much drinking in it. For the drawings though, and for properly italicized Norwegian words and nicer formatting, you will have to follow the link.
I don’t know why St. Francis would be at Kron’s lake though; according to this website, St. Olaf is supposed to drive out jul. Repeatedly.
Unfortunately Giotto made no frescos of St Olaf, otherwise I would have been happy to cut and paste them.
“I can’t think of an English equivalent for romjul, or “Space Christmas”. It means the interval between Christmas day and New Year’s day..”: ho yes we do. I invented it last year – the Santapause.
Coincidentally, Languagehat currently has a thread about whether the noun IKEA is declined in various European languages.
Well, the thread was supposed to be about Russian morphology, but as usual it mutated into some sort of horrible slime-dripping alien monster.
some sort of horrible slime-dripping alien monster
Yeah, that’s IKEA for you. Not that there’s anything to stop us discussing Russian declensions here. I know if anyone had asked me in 1960s Russia if I declined nouns of the type пальто, депо, I might have been reluctant to admit it.
Nij, your last comment is 2′-4″ long. Please note that anything longer than 3′-0″ will result in the surfeit being returned to Wikipedia*.
* or whomever.
Over here we seem to fundamentally believe that Christmas is December 25. Christmas Eve is the night before Christmas. December 26 is the beginning of that (formerly) nameless stretch between Christmas and New Year’s (as in “Happy New Year’s”).
The Christmas season is something else. Our fundamental belief is that it ends on the 25th. It has no definite beginning, but it is a commonplace that it starts ridiculously early these days. I mean, suddenly there are colored lights in the shops (that’s “stores” in my dialect but I like the word “shops” better) and on the lampposts and the trees, and cheesy holiday music in the shopping malls, and Starbucks getting out the special red paper coffee cups … It wasn’t always like that, let me tell you. And snow: When I was a kid we got real snowstorms, nothing like what you get today. I swear, sometimes you couldn’t get out the door. I remember a time — lots of times — when …. Sorry, what was I talking about?
Oh, yeah, Christmas season ends on the 25th. But we also, in a higher, more pretentious or trivia-oriented register of our brains, hold the fact that there is something called the 12 days of Christmas. Everybody knows the song.* Many of us also know that January 6 is “the last day of Christmas”, a.k.a. the 12th day of Christmas. If you do the math, that means that December 26 is the first day of Christmas. What the … Oh, and there are a few people around — we used to live next to one — who rigidly adhere to the view that you mustn’t set up a Christmas tree until December 24, and that you have to take it down on January 6. That wouldn’t work at all for us. We have a tree from earlyish December to, well, it depends on a lot of things, but let me just say that at least once it went into February, I think.
* I know some of you have seen this before, maybe at Language Hat, but here it is again. A friend of mine in grad school once sang me a parody of that song that he and his friends had written as part of a project in high school. I memorized the best bits:
Oh, the state of Yugoslavia is a country, with
6 republics
5 Slavic nationalities,
4 languages,
3 religions,
2 alphabets,
and a single political party.
your last comment is 2′-4″ long
I was too lazy to format it properly, but on my 24″ screen it’s only 18 inches long.
…but just look at all the good stuff it’s got–guest departure day, the thirteen-clawed critters and troll-women, the day not to take horses out for fear of breakage, and not one but TWO days for brewing. And even more at the link–like special words for drunkenness on the various days: on Jan. 11 the name for the drunkenness was snipprusen (rus = intoxication or a high); drunkenness on Dec. 21 was called skokedrykke or skakkubollen.
But enough about language. Extracting the salient information, I would say the important traditional drinking days still left are Jan. 5, the 7th, and the 11th.
I see the IKEA here is offering free breakfast for their winter sale if you get there before a certain time, but if they’re not serving aebleskivers I’m not sure it’s worth it. We only have one IKEA, and from wikipedia I note that English nouns are only declined by singular/plural, so I’m not sure if we decline IKEA or not.
As for St. Olaf, iconic images of him are pretty hard to come by; I suspect some find him excessively badass. Here are two:
http://logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com/2009/08/heavenly-law-which-long-will-standst.html
The only different I can see between St. Olav and other saints is the ax.
Oh! Mr Crown: I never thought of looking for anagrams. I like “Le Monde”; and also in AAVE “de lemon”. Thank you for the inspiration.
Well, out of all this I have at least learned one thing: January 6 is not the 12th but the 13th day of Christmas, making December 25 the 1st and not the 0th. Not the most exciting epiphany in the world, but I’ll take it.
I really like the bit about the 13 claws. I’m assuming that that is per paw, not 6 on one side and 7 on the other? (Insert Santa claws/paws joke here if desired.)
Seriously (I know that this is a bit obvious, but I’ll say it anyway), when you try to imagine what it must have been like to live in northerly places in the coldest and darkest times of the year, in the days before people had central heating, electric light, grocery stores, and all the rest of it — well, the mind reels, doesn’t it? Recoils, I should say — I don’t want to think about it. I see myself as a hardy sort, the sort who for example will occasionally take the garbage cans to the curb in the snow barefoot rather than take the trouble to put his shoes on. But the people who created these rituals and these monsters, they were something else: Let us raise a glass, or a hat, to them.
take the garbage cans to the curb in the snow barefoot
I’m shocked. Good heavens, whatever next!
Yes, that left me speechless (and rubbing my toes to restore a feeling of warmth).
I don’t do it often these days. And never unless the snow is soft enough to make nice prints.
Don’t some Scandinavians like to plunge naked into the snow, straight from the sauna?
Straight from the sauna is not straight from the kitchen. Besides, they’re Finns; you wouldn’t catch my feet anywhere near snow.