A Catholic Citizen in America

Get-togethers, family and community, are part of the holiday season.

Take Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example. Thousands of folks, maybe a million or more, turned out Thursday morning,¹ standing in a cold New York City rain, cheering this celebration of consumerism.

I could kvetch about folks buying stuff they don’t actually need, the rampant waste of helium, or Snoopy being neither at the parade’s head nor at Santa’s side. But I won’t.

Fact is, I enjoyed an online broadcast — or is that stream? — of the parade. Watching the parade has become part of my holiday season routine.

Instead, I’ll talk about another holiday tradition I’ve enjoyed: family Christmas gatherings at the home of Aunt Jule and Uncle George. They lived, along with some of the rest of the family, in Grand Forks, North Dakota: about a two hour drive north from Moorhead, Minnesota, where I grew up.

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Feelings, Memories, Moods, and Me

Sharing those good times and warm feelings with you isn’t as easy as I’d prefer.

Partly because I’m a stickler for accuracy.

But mostly because I’m not among those blessed — or cursed — with HSAM.

I’ve got a pretty good memory, particularly for words and images. But when it comes to remembering specific events, or the sort of questions you’ll see on multiple-choice tests: well, I’ve learned to verify stuff I’m sure I remember. I’m usually right, but it’s the exceptions that keep me checking.

My father was the same way. He had a wonderful memory, with a gift for sharing what he’d learned: and for showing how it relates to everything else. He also had a gift for improving on his source materials.

It never, to my knowledge, resulted in distortions of fact with anything that really mattered. But some of his anecdotes and quotes were more colorful than the originals.

I’m forgetting something.

Good times.

Happy feelings.

Remembering stuff. Right.

HSAM stands for highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. As of 2021, fewer than 100 folks had been diagnosed with this freakishly enhanced knack for remembering not-quite-everything they’ve experienced.

Considering how many experts aren’t hyperthymesiac, I’m mildly surprised that it’s recognized as something that a few folks really live with.² And that’s another topic.

So, much as I’d like to do a Dickens-style description of Christmas get-togethers at Aunt Jule and Uncle George’s, what you’ll see — if you keep reading — are bits and pieces I’ve pulled from that folder in my mind’s archive.

Oddly enough, although the details weren’t like Fezziwig’s Christmas party, the general mood wasn’t all that different.³

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Julekake and Lefse, Krumkake and Sandbakelse, But No Lutefisk

At any rate, while rummaging through those six-plus-decades-old memories, I found that I can’t come even close to calling up the sort of detail you’ll read in “A Christmas Carol”.

“…There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’…”
(“A Christmas Carol” / “A Ghost Story of Christmas”; Stave Two / The First of the Three Spirits, Charles Dickens (1843))

That’s hardly surprising, since Dickens was making Fezziwig and the party up; along with Scrooge, the three ghosts, and the fiddler. I’m trying to put together a coherent account of a real annual event, mostly experienced as a child.

What I mainly remember is a very great many folks having a good time in an older house. Most of them, my memory tells me, were in the three rooms along one side. There’s a story about that place that I’m saving for another time.

Conversations overlapped each other, merging into a cheerfully mild roar. Just being there, enjoying all those folks enjoying themselves, was fun.

Then there was the food. Lots and lots of food.

Aunt Jule — that’s Jule with the “J” sounding like the “j” in “jam” — I’ll get back to the name in a bit — retained her Scandinavian appreciation of Christmas food: along with an enthusiasm for producing it in prodigious quantities when family came visiting.

Meet the Treats

Julekaka is just what the name says it is: Christmas cake. It’s pronounced “yulehkahkah”, and emphatically not for someone who shuns butter, sugar, and candied fruits.

Unlike the Christmas fruitcake that’s inspired holiday-themed jokes, Aunt Jule’s julekaka never had a chance to get passed along from family to family. It’d be lucky to last until New Year’s.

Krumkaka — it’s rather thin and stiff, so it could crumble; but that’s not what the name means. It’s a sort of Scandinavian waffle cookie. Again, like julekaka, not for the diet-obsessed; except krumkaka has no candied fruits.

You could put candied fruit in those ice-cream-cone-shaped manifestations of sweetness, but I liked them just as they were. Again, while they lasted.

Sandbakkelse — I called them “sand-buckles”. They were thickish sugar cookies, very light and very sweet.

Rosettes — that’s what Aunt Jule called them, I don’t know why she used our language’s generic name for that sort of fritter — again: very light, very sweet, very tasty. They seemed to dissolve before I got a chance to chew them.

Lefse isn’t a “Christmas” food, although it was part of Aunt Jule’s Christmas feast. It’s the Scandinavian version of potato flatbread. I don’t think I’ll ever taste lefse again.

On the other hand, my wife makes something very much like it: with wheat instead of potato, which is fine by me. But I do miss lefse.

The stuff on grocery shelves that’s labeled “lefse” — I don’t know how or why, but it doesn’t taste right: Not bad, just not right. Maybe it’s the plastic wrapping.

Lutefisk wasn’t part of Aunt Jule’s Christmas extravaganza. It’s dried cod, soaked in lye.⁴ I’ve never tasted it, and understand the canned stuff called “lutefisk” — isn’t.

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A Name, Languages, Spelling, and Birthdays

Aunt Jule’s name, again, was spelled with a “J”. She’s as American as I am, so we pronounced her name as if it was “jewel”, with “J” sounding like the “j” in “jam”.

Now, she was a “jewel” in several senses of the word, but she’d been named “Jule” because that’s when she’d been born: on Yule.

I’ve never been told why her name was pronounced “jewel” and spelled “Jule”, even though she was named for our culture’s winter solstice festival.

Folks who use English as their native language give Jule its anglicized spelling: “Yule”. But, even though that side of the family was and is determinedly English-speaking, we still pronounced words like julekaka properly. Except for Aunt Jule’s name: which we spelled properly, with a “J”. Why, again, I don’t know.

I do know that her name wasn’t “Jules” without an “s”. That’s a name French-speaking folks picked up from Latin, and that’s yet another topic. Several, actually.

About our celebrations of Yule, we knew about Yule logs — oddly enough, I don’t have a specific memory of one burning at those get-togethers — Yule singing is another blank spot in my memory, and I didn’t even know about Yule goats until recently.

And as far as I knew, at first, “Yule” was just another word for Christmas. Which, in a sense, it is: since both are part of my native culture’s winter solstice observance, and connected with our celebration of a very special birthday. Speaking of which, tomorrow is the first Sunday in Advent.

Finally, the usual more-or-less related posts:

• “A Change of Pace: Family Stories”
  (November 23, 2024)
• “Sledding With My Dad: Good Memories”
  (June 22, 2024)
• “Merry Christmas!”
  (December 25, 2023)
• “Happy Lille Julaften and Fourth Sunday in Advent”
  (December 24, 2023)
• “Boston Charlie, Partridges in Pear Trees and Me”
  (November 28, 2020)

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¹ Part of New York City’s Thanksgiving Day since 1924:

• Wikipedia
  • Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
• “NYPD prepared to keep Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade audience safe”
  Alecia Reid, CBS News (Updated November 27, 2024)

² Memory, mostly:

• Wikipedia
  • Eidetic memory (Some experts who don’t have this say that nobody does.)
  • Episodic memory (Remembering specific everyday events.)
  • Explicit memory (Remembering facts, experiences, and ideas.)
  • Hyperthymesia (Episodic memory on steroids, sort of.)
  • Implicit_memory (Remembering how to do stuff, and what things are: like how to walk, and what a cat is.)
  • Memory (It’s complicated.)
  • Semantic memory (General knowledge, experience, culture; all mixed together: it’s complicated.)

³ A Christmas classic:

• Wikipedia
  • A Christmas Carol
• “A Christmas Carol” / “A Ghost Story of Christmas”, Charles Dickens (1843) via Gutenberg.org
  • Stave Two / The First of the Three Spirits

⁴ Food, mostly:

• Wikipedia
  • Fritter
  • Julekake
  • Krumkake
  • Lefse
  • Lutefisk
  • Rosette (cookie)
  • Sandbakelse
  • Yule
• “Negus“
  British Food: A History / Tag Archives: nineteenth century (December 24, 2023)

⁵ A name, a season, celebrating, a goat and a log:

• Wikipedia
  • Jules
  • Wassailing (AKA “Yule singing”. 😉 )
  • Winter solstice
  • Yule
  • Yule goat
  • Yule log