Behind Door #10: Smooth Sailing

It’s quarter to midnight, and I’m sitting here at my desk wondering what to write for today. Nothing really extraordinary happened—just a bunch of the kind of things that go into a perfectly pleasant Sunday.

I made all the various trains and buses I had to catch with time to spare. I played fiddle tunes with friends at the Scandinavian dance in Montague. I listened to my friend Andrea sing Swedish Christmas carols by candlelight. I ate saffron-scented buns and white chocolate-peppermint bark and chatted at the holiday party afterwards and then headed off through the forests of central Massachusetts with my friend Marilyn.

On the way to the station where I’d catch the train back to Boston, we stopped at an amusingly named restaurant where I ordered the sandwich that the host said would be the quickest thing for them to prepare. This would seem to be a recipe for a disastrous meal, but somehow, the sandwich was absolutely delicious.

I still feel stressed about school. I still feel like I need to sleep for about two days straight. But I also feel that in between all my deadlines and assignments I’ll manage to find some moments of pleasure. And, most of the time, that’s really all I need to keep going.

Behind Door #9: Burn, Billy, Burn

One of my favorite Swedish Christmas traditions was picked up by the AP this year. Every year the city of Gävle has put up an enormous straw goat on the town square. (You can find smaller versions decorating Swedish homes.)

The actual display of the goat—billed as the world’s biggest—is not the interesting part, though. What makes it my favorite tradition is that in twenty-two of the forty years they’ve put up a Christmas goat, someone’s managed to destroy it.

Most years someone merely burns the goat, but it’s also been run over by a car or been smashed to bits. Some of the vandals have had a particular flair for the dramatic. For instance, according to the article:

The 2005 vandals — who witnesses said were dressed up as Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man — remain at large. The pair fired flaming arrows at the goat, reducing it to its steel skeleton.

The  city’s Christmas Web site gives a complete, year-by-year accounting of the goat’s fate.

This year city officals claim that the goat has burned for the last time. They’ve impregnated the straw with some sort of space-age flame retardant and put up two twenty-four hour Web cams (1, 2) so the eyes of the world can keep watch.

I can’t help feeling they’ve missed the point. The world’s largest goat rates a giant “meh.” The world’s largest goat that happens to get destroyed in some amusing ways, well, that’s something I’ll even blog about. I mean, aren’t goats meant to be sacrificed?

So, I’ll go on checking the Web cams, but I’ll be waiting to see the goat in flames.