Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Sorry, I am very very late in posting this! It's going to be long, but hopefully it gives enough information about Christmas here, as well as a bit of what I've been doing. December 6th was Independence day in Finland. It is celebrated kind of like our remembrance day. There aren't really parties, but often people go with their families to ceremonies and we have the day off school. The day before my school celebrated it. We all were dressed up a bit more and we met a the flagpole before school started and there was a speech and we sang the national anthem. Later on in the day there was a ceremony for the whole school in the gym. My music class was preforming, we sang three songs. Well, as a class we preformed three songs but not everyone did every song, and they were all in Finnish (a really hard language to sing in), so I only did one. There were also a few speeches from teachers and students. A week before Christmas my first host family took me to go see Lord of the Rings. We went into Turku and had dinner, then walked across the river to the theatre. There is a bridge that had a bunch of Christmas trees on it, and they were covered in lights. We also had snow by that point and it was beautiful. The show was about 4 hours long with 2 intermissions. It was absolutely amazing. I couldn't understand everything because it was in Finnish and I still have a very long ways to go with the language, but I could follow what was happening and even got a few of the jokes. I loved the lights, costumes, sets, and everything. There were some really cool special effects where they used fog or fire or dropped people from the ceiling. It was an amazing show, and I am so happy we got to go see it. There were also a few Christmas celebrations at school. We had Christmas food one day for lunch (well a mixture of Christmas and other food) and then Friday evening we had the "night church". Many schools have Christmas parties or celebrations on the Saturday before Christmas, but my school had one in the middle of the night - literally. Our celebration started at 23.00. I and a bunch of other first year's had to be there at 21.00 for a rehearsal, so it was a very long night. We had some people sing songs or play the piano or flute, and a few speeches from the principal and another student, and Greta and I gave speeches as well. Our speeches were about Christmas in our home countries. And, the speeches were in Finnish. I gave a five minute speech in Finnish! I wrote the speech in English beforehand and then we hadn't decided whether we were going to do it in English or Finnish, but a day before we decided to try Finnish, and so got a friend to translate it. So I think I had read it though only once before our first rehearsal right after school, and then I read it through a million more times to myself and my family before going back in the evening. It went really well and everybody said they could understand us and they were good speeches. It was a really fun evening in general, and I liked getting to see some of my friends preform as well Christmas time here was definitely different than what I am used to. Christmas is celebrated on the 24th instead of the 25th. In the morning we opened our presents from my host parents. My sisters were very excited and the older two were up at 5 to open presents. They woke me up (with permission) a few hours later and we all opened presents together. At noon we went down to the old town square to listen to the Christmas Peace speech. There were soooo many people there, I have never seen so many in Naantali before. Luckily the square is right below the road where my house is, so we didn't have to be a part of the huge crowd we could just stay on the edge and leave really easily. Christmas peace is a declaration of a period of peacefulness and calm that lasts for many days after Christmas. It is very old, in Turku (the oldest town in Finland) it has been almost every year since the 1300s. It is traditionally held in the old part of the town, and is to remind people about the peace and warn about punishments that will come if you do not observe it, as well as wishing people a merry Christmas. Later on in the afternoon we all went to Mummo's (my grandmother's). Most of the family was there, my dad has multiple siblings so there were about 20 people altogether. It was a lot, but it was fun. We had a traditional Finnish Christmas dinner which is pretty different from a Canadian one. To start with we had two different smoked salmons as well as another fish, and a salad. Then the main course we had a huge ham that had been in the oven forever, as well as three different "Laatikko". The literal English translation is "box" (closest English translation to what it actually is is a casserole but its not the same) and it's kind of like a mash of vegetables. We had a carrot, rutabaga, and potato one. They have spices and some other stuff in them so it's not just a mash. For dessert we had luumukiisseli (a prune pudding/sauce sort of thing - we had a challenge translating it) with whipped cream. We also had very traditional Joulutorttu which are really good and if you have a premade puff pastry really easy to make. The idea is that it is a bit lighter than the rest of the meal, which was kind of heavy. After dinner Joulupukki (Finnish Santa, literally translates to Christmas goat) came. There were already many presents below the tree, but he came a bit before 18.00 and had another large bag of gifts. It is tradition in families where there are younger kids to hire a Joulupukki to come and distribute the gifts. The younger kids sang a song before he could start (also a tradition). Then he distributed the presents to everyone there. I think it is nice for the younger kids who believe in Santa to have him come, but I think I like the Canadian tradition of gift giving where you personally exchange gifts better. I like being able to thank people and know who gifts are from, and I think when kids are a bit younger it is good for them to learn to thank the gift givers as well instead of just getting a pile all from "Joulupukki". But it was really fun seeing just how excited they all got. There were 5 kids under the age of 9, and then another 6 of us under 19 (ages are approximate I'm not sure how old some of my cousins are). That took a while, and then later in the evening we went home. The next day (25th) we had a lazy morning but my host mom's dad came over and made traditional rice porridge for us. It takes about an hour of constantly stirring to make it properly without it burning. It is then eaten either with a prune sauce or with cinnamon and sugar. There is one almond in the pot, and whoever gets it has to sing a song or make a wish or something. We went to my host dad's grandfather's cottage around lunch time (now owned by Jaakko's father and siblings). It was a long ways into the woods, but it was nice. I liked driving through all the trees with the snow. There were also a lot of people there, but not quite as many as the previous night. We had coffee and snacks there, and then went back to Mummo's for dinner. We had leftovers from our Christmas dinner, and there weren't as many people there. We went to some friend's of my host parents in Raisio (the town between Naantali and Turku) for New Year's. We had a potluck dinner with lots of salads and sausages and just spent the evening there. At one point we went outside and melted tin horseshoes in a ladle over a candle. Once it had melted we poured it into a bucket of cold water and it instantly hardened and took a shape Then you look at the shape and can see different things that will happen in the next year based on texture and its form. Mine didn't work super well because I was old enough to do it myself but I had never done it before, so I have a few smaller pieces instead of one larger one but that's ok! A bit before midnight, maybe around 11, we went into the yard and had a bunch of sparklers. Then one guy set off some fireworks. They were pretty small but they were still pretty cool, and I have never set off fireworks like that before. I didn't set them off but I've never had small ones like that before. It was kind of wet snowing so a bit cold, so people went back inside after that, but a group of us stayed outside and had a snowball fight. We started off with most of the kids (those closer to Essi's age, 7) but because it was kind of wet and cold it eventually because just me and three younger boys, maybe they were around 8 or 10. I don't know their names and don't think I talked to them much if at all before then that evening, but thanks guys because that was a great snowball fight! Just before midnight we went out onto the deck, and could hear fireworks everywhere. It was cloudy and the clouds were pretty low so we couldn't see a whole lot but we could hear many and could see some close by. Almost every direction we looked we could occasionally see one which was really cool. We stayed a bit longer, somehow the kids were still awake, and then went home. Here are a lot of pictures. The newest pictures are first and dating backwards throughout a good chunk of December and a bit of January (Naantali is so pretty in the snow and we have so much right now). |
AuthorHi! My name is Katerina, and I am on exchange in Finland for a year! Archives
April 2019
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