Today in Sweden it is Christmas card sending day. We send close friends and family small postcards with pictures of Jultomtar (the Swedish version of Santa) and snow scenes etc.

Tradition dictates that the card should be received as close to Christmas as possible. And Swedish Posten promises that any card posted by today for a Swedish address will arrive on time. Of course, as I'm a foreigner, I did the very un-Swedish thing and sent mine out last week!




The Christmas card selection is pretty sad really, unless you have buckets of money. The cheap, but tasteful packs we get back home in places like David Jones simply don't exist here. The only ones I saw were a cool 200kr ($40) for 10 "okay looking" cards. Or you can buy individual cards from 35kr ($7)!

Once I picked myself up from the floor, I looked at the usual cards Swedes send to each other- they are just postcards with a Christmas theme - and not ONE nativity scene, angel, wise man or shepherd in sight! It makes me wonder what they believe Christmas is all about. Surely not just an excuse to stuff yourself? Typical cards look something like the ones here. You don't put them in an envelope, but merely write your name on the back, address them and send. These packs are much cheaper at 20kr ($4) for a 10 pack.

Anyway, today I wanted to report the sad news that the Gävle goat has been burned down. Again. As usual. Who or what is the Gävle goat? Well, hold on and I'll tell you.

In Australia, we are used to the collection of quirky "big" things that proliferate at the side of the highways. Things like The Big Pineapple, The Big Merino, The Giant Koala, The Giant Rocking Horse... you get the idea. Actually, I'm feeling slightly queasy and more than a little embarrassed by these pieces of kitsch. But in Sweden, they don't go in for trashy stuff so much, except at Christmas time in the town of Gävle (about 100kms north of Stockholm), where every year, since 1966, they have built a 13 metre high, 7 metre long, 3 ton straw goat!

The Christmas goat (julbock) preceded santa as the Christmas figure in Sweden and is still a popular Christmas purchase to stand under the tree. But why they want to build such a structure every year, and see it razed to the ground nearly every single time is a real mystery. In the past, they have been burned with cigarette lighters, levelled by a car and rocketed by fireworks. Sometimes just hours after being erected in the first week of December!

The structure sits in the centre of the town square and you can view it night and day via webcam at the Gävle kommun website. Well, you COULD view it until last Friday, when the citizens awoke to be greeted by this:

Christmas Goat Burns Again
2003-12-12 - 11:20 Once again the giant straw Christmas goat in the Swedish city of Gävle has been burned by vandals, just two weeks after it was set up by local merchants.

Erected each year since 1966 and featured in the Guinness Book of World Records since 1985, the 13-meter-high straw goat has seldom survived an entire Christmas season unscathed. Two years ago an American tourist for fined for torching the goat.
The goat survived Christmas last year for the first time since 1997.

This year, however, the 3 ton straw creation was monitored by several Internet webcams, and the police hope the images will help them track down the culprits. Four or five young people were reported to have run away from the area just after the alarm the goat was on fire.

It must be so disheartening for them all. I do remember there being a huge outcry after the American was caught burning it down a couple of years ago. While people are fairly goodnatured about the locals doing it (it's almost considered a bit of sport) but they were damned if some foreigner was allowed to have a go! He was fined 100,000kr ($20,000) and jailed for a month. And no, it wasn't a young kid, either, but a 52 year old from Cleveland, Ohio!

The good news is that the people of Gävle are rebuilding the goat on Friday, December 19th and you c an watch it live on webcamera if you tune in to the Gävle website, click on the link to Gävlebocken and look at the webcams. Also under the same link you can see a pictorial essay about how the goat is constructed at the link to Så byggs Bocken.

I leave you with my useless Christmas fact:

Assuming Rudolph is in front, the number of possible way to arrange Santa's other eight reindeer is 40,320.