I quite enjoy December, even if it is dark and (occasionally) cold. Decorations and lights brightens up my day and I simply cannot resist the kitschiness of Christmas. It is also a season for annual public lectures, and I have two versions that I keep returning to since a couple of years. One is connected to the Imitatio Mariae-project and concerns images of the Nativity and the Three Magi. It focusses on the development of the visual representations of the Christmas story and its various contents and characters. But this year that particular lecture is hibernating.

My other public lecture in the December collection concerns visual representations of Swedish Christmas celebrations. At first it was a lecture I held with a colleague from literary studies under the title The Man in Red, where we used gender perspectives in the analysis of Christmas and Santa Claus in art, film and literature. Now I have dropped the title for two reasons: 1) there are not that many Santas (or tomtar as this figures is called in Swedish) in artworks, and 2) our witty intention caused some confusion as the audience did not seem to know about The Man in Black: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXRmJyIyJbM&noredirect=1.

The visual representations of Christmas celebrations are a vital part of celebration itself and particularly illustrations from the turn of the century 1900 is crucial in creating our understanding of "a real Swedish Christmas". It is a commercial, modern, aesthetic, nationalistic and urban understanding of a rural past, where the patriarchal father figure is compared with the farmer as the superior provider of all material goods for his family. Basically it is dad's money that makes Christmas possible, and mom's hard labour with food preparations, cleaning and decorating the house is kept in the dark.

The above image is an illustration from the book Spadarvet (1905), that was also the name of a small farm owned by the artist Carl Larsson. In the book one can follow the life on the farm during a year, and it ends with the feast of Christmas Eve. You can see a decorated Christmas tree in the background, but it is the laid table with food and particularly all the silver ware that are in focus. A veritable triumph of the farm and farmer (born an urban man). He really does not need a Santa Claus to satisfy his family!

Hopefully I can tell you the story of the Swedish tomte and its creator, Jenny Nyström, in a blog post before Christmas...