An American Christmas in Lapland

One of the things I enjoyed most at Christmas this year was a simply wonderful fruitcake, made by Trappist monks in Virginia. It had a world of fruit in it (nothing like the all-too-scant fruit in most commercial cakes), so that greed got the better of me, and I kept stealing back to the cake to sink my teeth into that absolutely heavenly mixture of glacé fruit and nuts, with everything soused in brandy (and very good brandy too). It reminded me of bringing a fruitcake to Lapland in North Norway one Christmastime, and being amused at the way the natives took to this new delicacy (supposedly native to the American South), which they did with a vim and vigor that would put many a Southerner to shame.

I was in Karajosk, a totally Lapp city, visiting a friend, who had, perhaps overconfidently, invited her relatives for a typical American turkey dinner. The bird, imported from the U.S.A, (not by me), was thawing on her kitchen table, so cold, so white, so bare, as the old song has it (“St. James Infirmary Blues”). But we still had to go shopping for the fixings, not an easy thing to do in Karajosk. Dressed in warm skins from top to bottom (only my feet were cold, since I was still wearing three pairs of wool socks and American boots instead of Lapp boots), we ventured out among the Lapps who were doing the last of their Christmas shopping, and were stuffing themselves with sticky sweets between errands.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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One of the things I enjoyed most at Christmas this year was a simply wonderful fruitcake, made by Trappist monks in Virginia. It had a world of fruit in it (nothing like the all-too-scant fruit in most commercial cakes), so that greed got the better of me, and I kept stealing back to the cake to sink my teeth into that absolutely heavenly mixture of glacé fruit and nuts, with everything soused in brandy (and very good brandy too). It reminded me of bringing a fruitcake to Lapland in North Norway one Christmastime, and being amused at the way the natives took to this new delicacy (supposedly native to the American South), which they did with a vim and vigor that would put many a Southerner to shame.

I was in Karajosk, a totally Lapp city, visiting a friend, who had, perhaps overconfidently, invited her relatives for a typical American turkey dinner. The bird, imported from the U.S.A, (not by me), was thawing on her kitchen table, so cold, so white, so bare, as the old song has it (“St. James Infirmary Blues”). But we still had to go shopping for the fixings, not an easy thing to do in Karajosk. Dressed in warm skins from top to bottom (only my feet were cold, since I was still wearing three pairs of wool socks and American boots instead of Lapp boots), we ventured out among the Lapps who were doing the last of their Christmas shopping, and were stuffing themselves with sticky sweets between errands.