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[atropab]

It's Lucia today and a tip for any Swedes living abroad or anyone interested in Swedish Christmas traditions is that you can see Swedish televisions Lucia celebration from this morning here: http://svt.se/content/1/c6/72/05/69/luciamorgon.asxRead more... )

Comments

[lucylle]

In (northern) Italy we celebrate St. Lucia as well... only thing that I remember about it though, was going into her church in my home town (there's a very central church dedicated to her where allegedly she's buried too) to place the letters asking for gifts on her grave...and having to get too close to the reliquary where a fully dressed st Lucia is lying holding a plate with her severed eyes inside: it didn't creep me out much, but I remember there were always loads of kids crapping themselves with fear :-D

[atropab]

It's very odd that we celebrate an Italian saint but I think our celebration is some sort of mix between this religious holiday and the celebration of what used to be the longest night of the year. Wikipedia had this to say http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucia_Day

The northern italian version sounds more interesting, I must read up on it...

[lucylle]

I think there are utterly different traditions named to the same saint...
your s.lucia sounds more like a pagan tradition which like many was covered with a patina of cristian religion in order to keep it up, while our one is mainly based on the christian martyrdom of s.lucia -here you can see a bit the reliquiary tomb... sorry the text is in italian but it basically tells about the tradition of leaving letters asking for gifts on the tomb of the saint.

While ours probably is more interesting (only for children in Lombardia though) as it's basically a pre-christmas, you get the best of the two when it comes to decorations and sights.... ^_^

[kyronfive]

Okay, weirdly enough, i was just having a conversation about Swedish Christmas traditions over the weekend. I found out there is apparently a tradition to watch a certain Donald Duck cartoon at 3pm on Christmas... ???? Also, i tried Glogg for the first time (with raisins and almonds). It was delicious. Even better than Gluhwein.