World Sweden Västmanlands Vasteras

Ian & Liz's Overseas Adventure

Christmas Day - a church experience worthy of 'What the?' 25 Dec 2006

Christmas Day arrived and it felt a bit strange to have already opened our presents. We had our normal oats brekky and picked up the phone to dial home. It was great to have a chat to everyone - if only brief and thanks again to the fam for the wonderful pressies giving us plenty of edible, wearable and soapy goodies from home. Such decadent treats that we can't get over here are the best presents of all after 4 months living in Sweden. I've started using the frangipani soap T & J and it makes me think of home in Sarina and Grandma & Grandad's place at Palms - very nice indeed! Phone calls behind us, it was time to venture out into the cold sunrise (note it was 8.45am!) and go to Christmas Mass. I have to confess it's the first time I've made it to the Catholic Church (or Katolska Kyrkan) in Västerås. Ian came too and we were looking forward to some carols and festivity - afterall it was Christmas and lots of Italians live in Västerås. At this point, it's probably relevant to explain the history of the Catholic Church in Sweden... The Catholic Church was the established church of Sweden from the Middle Ages. However, in the 16th century, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, King Gustav I broke relations with the Catholics and established the Church of Sweden based on the teachings of Martin Luther - to this day Lutheran is the dominant religion and Catholicism has only made a bit of a comeback in the naughties - from late 1990s to now - thought it would be funny to use such a stupid term in the post! The popular story is he abolished Catholicism because he was getting a bit short of funds (I think they were fighting in some war at that stage which was proving costly) and wanted to raid the Catholic wealth :-) So anyway, back to Christmas morning mass. Perhaps midnight mass the night before had gone off, but this was a sad celebration at 9am! We were a bit worried we wouldn't get a seat, arriving only 5 minutes early, but with less than 20 people in the congregation, it wasn't really a problem... and of that 20, the priest, a deacon and nuns accounted for about 6 of them! Truly shocking. Gone was any hope of anonymity in a situation where you don't know the responses or the etiquette of the given church. I think it took about five minutes before the priest was eyeing us with a level of curiosity/suspicion! On the upside, all but one of the hymns were old familiars and we did our best to sing along in Swedish... once again... no hope of blending in with a crowd when there's only a dozen oldies singing quietly in their pews scattered all over the church! Another lowpoint of this Swedish spiritual experience was to note that despite Swedish normally using about half the words we use in English to express the same thing (it's quite a small vocabulary), for some reason, the mass seemed to triple in length - both Ian and I noted that several parts that are unmistakenly familiar parts of the mass went on and on compared to the English version - bizarre! Noticably shaken from our sad Christmas mass experience, we wandered home in the cold (it was really quite cold compared to the day before - or perhaps just felt that way with such trodden spirits) and enjoyed our own tradition from home - ham, eggs and champagne brekky. Truly decadent (especially since we ate it on the sofa bed, laid out for lazy Christmas television viewing). Most enjoyable. The rest of the day was pretty lazy as just mentioned and we finished off by enjoying the second Lord of the Rings - at least Ian did - Liz fell asleep at about the halfway point :-)

Advertisement