Annelie and I were eating lunch in the library cafe the other day when my gaze fastened on an unbelievable sight outside. I stammered, “Det kommer en julbock!”, which means “Here comes a Christmas goat!” Even in Swedish, this is not a very likely sentence. Annelie turned towards the window and saw that, sure enough, there was an enormous straw goat making its way up the street, held by a forklift. It was an ominous and somewhat menacing sight, awakening in me troubled memories about which I will tell you presently.
A julbock
So the time has come to tell you about straw goats. You see, the Swedes have a tradition of making little goats out of straw and using them to decorate the house at Christmastime. Why, you may well ask? Apparently, in Scandinavia, the goat predates the Christmas tree and the Christmas gnome (they still don’t have Santa Claus) by several hundred years. Some believe that it comes originally from Norse mythology, in which Thor’s chariot was drawn by two goats (Which is kind of funny in itself: “Nice wheels, buddy—how many goatpower is the engine?”). Nowadays, in Swedish households, it is customary for one of the adults to dress up as a Christmas gnome (tomte) and deal out the presents, but apparently, before this became the custom, someone would dress up as a goat to do so. There are other stories told about Christmas goats; one says that there was a game played, whereby people would make a large straw goat and attempt to hide it in their neighbors’ house, who, upon discovering it, were obligated to hide it in another house without being discovered, and so on.
So you see that there is an element of playfulness associated with the Christmas goat, which perhaps explains the bizarre doings of the inhabitants of Gävle.
Two julbockar
Annelie comes originally from Gävle, and her parents live there still. I used to think of Gävle as a small town in the north, but now that we live in a little town three hours further north, I think of it as a large city in the south. It is, truth be told, a remarkably unremarkable town, which no doubt paved the way for it to become famous, not only in Sweden but internationally, for a strange thing: having the world’s largest Christmas goat. The Gävlebock, as it’s called, is a straw goat made on an industrial scale—13 meters tall and weighing 3 tons—and placed in the center of town every year in early December.
This year’s Gävlebock
In fact, most years they have to make a new one. You see, soon after the city of Gävle created its first giant goat, back in the 1960s, a tradition developed, among the youth and the anarchists of the town, of attempting to burn down the goat. If you think about it, it’s no wonder: Three tons of dry straw is a pyromaniac’s dream. Although it is completely illegal and punishable by a jail term, attempting to burn down the Christmas goat has become such a popular tradition that it is precisely this that has made the Gävlebock so famous. In fact, if you, like Annelie, meet someone and say you are originally from Gävle, you will sometimes get the reaction, “Ah, the town where they burn the big goat!” This is almost without question the only thing Gävle is famous for outside of Sweden.
A look at the Swedish Wikipedia article on the Gävlebock shows that more often than not, since the 1960s, the goat has not made it through the Christmas season, succumbing usually to arson, but occasionally to being rammed with a car or otherwise demolished. This has, of course, caused the merchants of the city, who pay for the goat, to question the reasonableness of continuing the project year after year. But, as I have said, if it were not for the arson, the goat—and therefore the city—would not be nearly so popular. In fact, there are betting pools on whether the goat will make it to Christmas or not.
The julbock guards the library
My first encounter with the Gävlebock was a fateful and highly memorable one. It was in 2001, the first time I came to Sweden for Christmas. Annelie and I spent several days with her various friends in Göteborg before setting off to see the family in Gävle. We arrived late one night—much later than intended, because a snowstorm had thrown the trains into such chaos that we missed our connection in Stockholm and had to take a bus instead—and as we pulled into town, we noticed a strange, smoky smell in the air. I asked what it was, and Annelie said “Oh no, it must be the goat!” She explained about the Gävlebock and what happens to it almost every year. When we got to her parents’ house, one of the first things they said was “The goat is burning.” (How’s that for a Bergman-style entry?) The next morning, the news raced through the town—they had caught the goat-burner! And it was an American! It seems there was some poor dolt from the US visiting relatives in Sweden, who had heard about the goat-burning “tradition” but missed that it was “illegal”. So he got plastered that evening and went and set the goat on fire, but failed to leave the scene of the crime. By the evening of the next day, he was sitting in the Gävle jail and the national papers were plastered with headlines like “AMERICAN GOAT-BURNER CAUGHT IN GÄVLE”. Annelie and I were horrified—everyone knew she had just taken me to Gävle! What would they think? It occurred to me that they might never let me live in Sweden if my name became connected with rumors of being a goat-arsonist. A victim of cruel fate and American stupidity. So nothing new, really.
Safe from fire, we hope
Well, here I am, six years later, living in Sweden. Known neither for goat-burning (except as a joke among my friends) nor for putting out forest fires. It’s strange how often fire seems to play some role here. Meanwhile, the Gävlebock is up again, and has evolved—last year for the first time, they saturated the goat in a new fireproofing compound so effective that it shrugged off two attempts on its life. This year they’re able to reuse the same goat (which was kept in a secret location all year). In fact, they’ve set up a webcam so you can watch the goat (do nothing), and also have a website dedicated to the goat (with an English version), and yes, even a goat blog. That’s right, the goat himself is blogging this year for his fans—only in Swedish, but come on, give the poor goat a break. How many bilingual goats do you know?
And here in Härnösand, we have a large, albeit not gigantic, Christmas goat guarding the entrance to the library like a Tibetan temple dog. Let’s hope no drunkards get it into their heads to try to burn that one, or it could lead to the destruction of the accumulated knowledge of western civilization, or at least that part of it which resides here in our little town.