Do you know the real name of Mathieu the midwife? Or who sent the first Christmas card?
It's Christmas time, we sing Christmas songs, eat up the rest of the holiday food and sweep the Christmas tree needles from the floor.
Most of us have our own Christmas traditions, many of which originated overseas. The Christmas tree is from Germany, Santa Claus is from Turkey, and some sweets are from Sweden.
Christmas began to be celebrated by law
Do we have native Norwegian traditions? Roald E. Kristiansen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at NTNU, Norwegian University of Technology, says that Christmas traditions are rarely unique.
“You have to try hard to find purely Norwegian traditions. Most of the Christmas traditions are universal and repeated in different contexts,”he says.
A holiday called Jól has been celebrated in Norway since about the 8th century - and who knows how long before that. Christian Christmas came to the country over a thousand years ago, but nevertheless, many of the old traditions of the celebration itself have survived.
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“Christmas was introduced in Norway by a law passed by Haakon the Good in the middle of the 10th century. The most 'Norwegian' tradition in this tradition may have been brewing, although the Norwegians were hardly alone in serving alcoholic beverages during large religious celebrations,”he says.
Old traditions have not been abandoned
Both in Norway and in the rest of Europe, it was clear to the church that people would continue to celebrate Christmas the way they used to, but now "in a Christian way."
“That is, now everyone drank to the glory of the new heavenly forces. And they had to make toasts no longer for Odin and Thor, but for Jesus and Mary. In other words, the old traditions of celebration were not destroyed, but care had to be taken to ensure that the religious celebration took on new forms,”says Christiansen.
Here are some more facts about Christmas that you may not have known:
1. It is believed that the first Christmas card was sent by the Englishman Henry Cole. He sent it to his grandmother in 1843.
2. Lutefisk (a Norwegian national dish, dried fish soaked in a slightly alkaline solution - ed.) - a typical Norwegian dish, but it came to us from southern Sweden and northern Germany.
3. In the song "Christmas Eve" (the song of Alf Preusen - the famous Norwegian writer, poet and bard - ed.) We learn about the midwife Mathieu. This is a real person, she lived in Ringsaker (Ringsaker). In fact, her name was Helga Johansen, she was the one who gave birth to Preusen's mother. But Preusen chose to call her Matya in the song, rather than Helga. Because that was his grandmother's name.
4. British Bible scholar Ian Paul believes that Jesus was not born in a stable, but in a private room on the second floor. The stable was created thanks to a wrong translation.
5. Archaeologist Aviram Oshri believes that Jesus was born in another Bethlehem, and not in the one that is considered to be the birthplace of Jesus. This city is 10 km from Nazareth, while the city known as the birthplace of Jesus is more than 150 km south. Oshri does not think that Maria on the eve of giving birth could have gone so far. He also found many more signs that Jesus was born in another Bethlehem.
6. When we imagine the birth of Jesus, we see before us sheep and three kings around the manger. In the Christmas Gospel (the Gospel of Luke) we read about shepherds, but not about kings or the Star of Bethlehem. In the Gospel of Matthew we read about “several wise men,” but it does not say how many there were. In addition, nothing is said about the shepherds.
7. It was not known for a long time how many wise men came to Jesus. Only in the 3rd century did they decide that there were three of them, because they had three gifts with them: gold, incense and myrrh.
8. The names of the wise men - Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar - are not from the Bible. The names were discovered in one Italian church in 560.
Sources: Wikipedia, Uit.no, Forskning.no (I), Forskning.no (II), Nrk, Bible.com, Enstadmediakultur.blogspot.no.