No, That Is Not What Kalsarikännit Means

Like most Finns, I was pleased to hear that the Finnish term kalsarikännit got hyped recently in social media, and in some more traditional media like Chicago Tribune, The Independent, and Vogue. They told us (a little bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure) that kalsarikännit is the latest exciting foreign concept that will steal the limelight from the previous year’s Nordic hit word, Danish hygge (which means certain kind of coziness), and the Swedish lagom (meaning, roughly, “neither too much nor too little”).

The meaning of kalsarikännit was described pretty uniformly by the said sources: the title of the piece in The Independent tells us that, “Finland has a word for getting drunk in your underwear at home,” and specifies in the main text that the activity is done “with no intention of going out”; according to Vogue the term means “drinking at home alone in your underwear”; and the Chicago Tribune’s story quoted a characterization offered at the website of (the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’) Finland Promotion Board: “the feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear with no intention of going out.”

In fact, all of the above characterizations draw from the material offered at the website of the Finland Promotion Board of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Department for Communications (phew, that is a mouthful!); and it seems to me that it was the Finland Promotion Board which actually got the whole international brouhaha about the concept started, with a little piece of clever PR work (which, of course, is exactly what this Promotion Board is meant to be doing): by publishing emojis to describe this and fifty-five other peculiarly Finnish concepts, activities, or phenomena.

Here are the emojis the Finland Promotion Board introduced for kalsarikännit:

Pretty cool; my compliments. (Although even better is the picture you see in some memes about kalsarikännit  – you know, the one where Homer Simpson is lying utterly wasted on a couch in his underpants, with an empty beer can in his hand and other empty cans scattered on the floor.) 

Now, this characterization of the term’s meaning, making it the word for this peculiar Finnish concept of getting drunk alone at home in one’s underwear, it is not quite accurate, I am afraid. It makes it funny, of course, and is not entirely incorrect either: kalsarikännit is indeed a humorous, laid-back notion which oftentimes does refer to the said kind of activity. It is a cool concept and absolutely deserves to be hyped by foreigners. But as it stands, the characterization is at least slightly misleading and therefore the notion could use some clarification, to straighten out a couple of misconceptions. For the term does not exactly translate as “getting drunk at home alone in underwear.” Even though the term can be used to refer to that, it is not, strictly speaking, its meaning. Nor is kalsarikännit in any way an untranslatable, mystical Finnish peculiarity. Let Uncle Tero explain ....


To begin with the literal meaning, and the composition of the word: kalsarikännit is a compound word, consisting of kalsari-, which is the unconjugated root of the word kalsarit (underwear; coming to our language from the Swedish word kalsonger), and the plural form kännit of the word känni (drunkenness, intoxication, being wasted), which is probably more often used in the plural but can also be used in the singular, usually without any noticeable difference in meaning (“Eiköhän vedetä kunnon känni!?” and “Eiköhän vedetä kunnon kännit!?” (the first here is in the singular, the second in the plural, in case you missed the plural -t in the latter) both mean, roughly, “Let’s get truly intoxicated/drunk/wasted, yes!?”). As to the first, kalsari- part of the compound, although kalsarit (similarly to housut (trousers)) by itself is always in the plural (for the same reason, I suppose, as “trousers” and “pants” and other such clothing articles that have separate slots for the person’s lower limbs are in the plural also in English), it is used in the singular as a first part of compound words, as in kalsariasu (underwear costume), kalsarisetti (underwear set), kalsarihylly (underwear shelf), kalsarikangas (underwear fabric), etc. (Notice how all these seem best written as two words in English; one thing that some Finns find a little difficult with English is how there are so many concepts that are written as two separate words. For in Finnish, by contrast, most concepts that are compounded from two (or, more!) simpler concepts are most often simply written together as compound words, which I believe makes it easier for the reader to grasp quickly the concepts being communicated.)

So we can start making sense of kalsarikännit by offering this literal translation: “underwear drunkenness” or “underwear intoxication” (although I can see how these might be taken as referring to some pervert’s state of mind when he is sniffing someone else’s used underwear ...).

But of course we want to know the semantic meaning of the term, not the literal meaning. As to the former, there are a couple of corrections to be made to the characterizations mentioned earlier, those which made kalsarikännit the term for (the process of, or perhaps the feeling of) getting drunk at one’s home in one’s underwear. That, as said, is not exactly what kalsarikännit means. In fact, clearly, that couldn’t be its meaning, because the getting part is a verb, of course, and that would require a verb in Finnish, too. The most conventional Finnish verb for getting drunk or wasted, getting into the state of känni – and, thus, into the state of kalsarikännit – is vetää (in the present tense: I vedän, you vedät, he/she vetää, we vedämme, you (plural) vedätte, they vetävät). Its most basic meaning is “to pull” (or, “to drag,” “to tow,”  etc.), but an astonishing variety of uses can be made of it in combination with other words, including vetää kännit (“to get intoxicated/drunk”) and vetää käteen (“to jerk off” (literally: “to pull into hand”), but more often used in the imperative-form exclamation, Vedä käteen! which means pretty much the same as “Fuck you!”).

More importantly, to get now to the more substantial misconceptions about the term repeated by the said foreign newspapers and magazines, kalsarikännit as such entails neither that you are alone, nor that you must be at home. The first time I heard the term used was actually when someone said something along the lines that, I do not feel like going out to bar tonight, so why don’t we just stay here at my place and do kalsarikännit? That is to say, you can very well do kalsarikännit together with some other people. It can be like pajama parties, with alcohol! Also, the concept as such does not refer to one’s own home; you could just as well do kalsarikännit at a friend’s house, or in a hotel room, or in some cabin, or even in a tent.


However, both of these aspects, the part that you need not necessarily be alone and the part that you need not do it at your own home, need a few words of clarification. They should not be taken to suggest that there can be a kalsarikännit event, like an actual party (perhaps I shouldn’t have made the reference to pajama parties, but let me hold on to that idea, with these words of clarification). You need not be alone to do kalsarikännit, but the concept definitely implies that is not a big social event. The big parties that they sometimes had at the Playboy Mansion, for example, or at some nightclub with a very special dress code, where there may have been hundreds of people in their underwear, I would say, were definitely not kalsarikännit. You could add to the definition of kalsarikännit that it is something that you do either by yourself or with a relatively small group of friends or family.

Another way to put it might be that the notion of kalsarikännit involves a certain contrast, which the above cited characterizations did mention: kalsarikännit is something that you do as opposed to going out – as opposed to going to parties or even to a bar. The real-life story I just mentioned, of a friend telling me that, as one does not feel like going out to bar tonight, why don’t we just do kalsarikännit instead, is a very good example of how one might set up kalsarikännit. Of course, you can also make the decision by yourself well before and do proper kalsarikännit alone, that is certainly a possibility. And in fact, this seems like a point worth emphasizing: the contrast between what you are (about to be) doing and the alternative course of action that would take you out to party with strangers, that contrast should be there in your mind, at one point at least, if what you are doing is to count as kalsarikännit ... Yes, you could say that kalsarikännit requires at least some level of conscious decision making. And yet, I think that no more than just some level of it is required: that it does not necessarily need to be a fully conscious decision and definitely not a carefully thought-out plan. Indeed, that is another thing that the above-cited characterizations of kalsarikännit got at least partly wrong: it is not like you mustn’t have any intention of going out; sometimes you could just kind of slip into doing kalsarikännit. Perhaps you were at first thinking about going out, and to do just a little bit of pre-drinking (“prinks,” as some say, or if you want to learn another excellent Finnish word, pohjat (literally: “bottoms”)) to get into the right mood and perhaps in order to save some money insofar as (if) you would be drinking that much less in the bar, but then a few hours later suddenly noticed that it is late at night already, or perhaps just realized that you do not feel like going out after all, so you kind of came to the conclusion that, oh well, these prinks or pohjat have now officially turned into kalsarikännit. However, to repeat: some level of decision-making is required; if the alternative course of action of going out to party does not even enter your mind – if you are, say, an alcoholic who drinks alone at home every night, or what some insensitive people might refer to as a sad lone drunk, then it is not kalsarikännit what you are doing, no matter how you are dressed.

Yes, the dressing part, I should say a word about that, too. For although, as said, kalsarit means underwear and is thus a part of the literal meaning of kalsarikännit, I would not say that they are a part of the proper semantic meaning of the term. It is more a figure of speech. Admittedly, sometimes the term is used quite literally. But it is also something that someone might make a point of, saying, amused: “Hey, you know what guys, we are literally doing kalsarikännit here!” Obviously, that would hardly be worth pointing out if it were a central part of the semantic meaning of kalsarikännit that you are in your underwear. It is not; it is more a figure of speech. So if ever you come to Finland and someone suggests that you do kalsarikännit, it does not mean that you have to take your clothes off. But I would say that kalsarikännit does imply a (very) casual dress. I mean, you might do it in a bathrobe, perhaps, or in sweatpants or shorts and t-shirt. Maybe even in a slightly more formal dress (say, if you were honestly intent on doing only some prinks and then going out, and had already half-way dressed up, but then changed your mind because your friend cancelled or something); but I would say that if you are fully dressed for partying outside, then you would at least need to throw away some pieces of clothing, say the jacket and the tie and the shoes, and open a few buttons of the shirt, to turn it more into kalsarikännit.

By Way of Postscript:

Incidentally, as I have been explaining the proper use of a word like this here, it brings to mind another funny but mistaken English translation of a Finnish term which got some attention in the internet a few years back. The word is pilkunnussija, which is a very dramatic and funny term because it would translate literally as “comma fucker.” Here the literal translation led to an even more serious misunderstanding than those involved with kalsarikännit, however: the people who presented the case to international audience online seem to have thought that pilkunnussija is a sort of dirty equivalent to the English term “Grammar Nazi”; but that, I can assure you, it is not. Actually, pilkunnussija  is only a vulgar variation of a much older term pilkunviilaaja (literally: “comma filer”), and translates quite easily and directly as “nitpicker” or “pettifogger.” The only thing that those translations miss is the vulgarity of the term. But I suppose you could easily reach that side of the term too, if you derived from “pettifogger” some idiotic variant like “pettifucker” and started using that word the same way you would use “pettifogger.” In any case, pilkunnussija is usually used in quite other than grammatical connections. Of course, it could still apply to the present case.

Spede: A Glimpse into the Late-Twentieth Century Finnish Monoculture, and a Word or Two on Language

This post got started with me pausing to think about these two curious, relatively new (probably originating in the 1990s) Finnish terms, the descriptive noun spede and the verb spedeillä. If you are a non-native who hasn’t lived in this country very long and do not have much knowledge of our cultural history, you may find these terms somewhat hard to grasp and, therefore, lose at least some of the nuances of their meanings when translating them. I mean, if you are in a hurry and want to keep it simple, you can probably get away with translating spede with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), and spedeillä with something like “fool around,” but the translation will then not capture everything that someone who has lived in this country in the decades around the turn of the millennium will read into them. In particular, some of the humor of the terms will easily get lost in translation. For in order truly to understand a term you will need to know a little bit about the cultural and historical backdrop, and then learn as many uses of the term as possible, in a variety of sentences or systems of sentences, in different situations or practices (in what Wittgensteinians call language-games). In the case of spede and spedeillä you should know a bit of Finnish (popular) cultural history (of at least the last quarter of the 20^th century) in particular, and preferably also appreciate the fact that it was very much a monoculture back then.

Now, it is a platitude, and yet actually in many cases quite misleading, to say that what for long used to be a (common to all, relatively homogeneous) monoculture in some country has only now quite recently become fragmented because of globalization, secularization, diversifying of interests and genres and subcultures, in the technological context where improving communications, media and most recently the internet, have allowed us (here in the developed countries) to form our identities as sort of combinations or mixtures of many different cultural ingredients. There have been times when and places where this supposed fragmentation of supposed former monoculture has been more an actual fact than in other places and times. And I have lived just about long enough to know that, in my humble opinion at least, it was quite real here in Finland over the last quarter-century.

Consider the fact that, these days, a part of the identity of many people in my country might involve notions like that they are fans of some TV-show or a movie director (“I am a kind of person who likes Tarantino movies”; “I am someone who is a fan of (the HBO series) Game of Thrones” ...); or that they like certain stand-up comedians, or certain YouTube channels, or a particular ethnic cuisine or a special diet; or that they commit much of their time to some hobby – ultra-running, scuba diving, disc golf, parachuting, or some online computer game. Insofar as these cultural elements are indeed constitutive of their identities, and insofar as they have adopted them and possibly to some extent altered their personal manifestations of them because of some sort of interactions with others who share those interests or hobbies, we can say that they are, in a sense, members of a worldwide “community” whose members enjoy the same idols, or the same cuisine, or live by (and preach to others the health benefits of) the same special diet, or form much of the sense of who they are around the same sport, online game, or other recreational activity. As there are now such global communities whose members share this sort of interests – and, thus, contents of mind which constitute bits and pieces of their identity – with potentially millions of other people around the world, those fields of interest can be said to constitute a strand of global culture. And at the same time, the diet or the hobby, the stand-up comedian or the YouTube idol that unites the minds of those hordes of people globally, will often be totally unfamiliar to most people in one’s own neighborhood or country. I mean, choose any YouTube star or starlet who has a seven-figure number of fans around the world, and chances are that most people in your country have never heard of that person.

Things were different back in the day before the internet. For one thing, the teenage kids who now gain millions of viewers on YouTube with their jokes and tricks or by sharing their views on fashion, might once have been successful only as what we used to call the class clown, or perhaps become the most popular girl in school. The most famous or notorious of them might have been known throughout the school or perhaps even throughout a small town or neighborhood, by hundreds of people. But even the most successful class clown and admired prom queen could not have been reasonably described as a global or national level “cultural icon.” Instead, back in the 1980s we had in this country, and in many other countries, dozens of national cultural icons that almost everyone would know and have opinions about; we had, for example, Spede.

Pertti “Spede”Pasanen (1930–2001), a film- and TV-producer, screenwriter, director, and actor, as well as – less famously – an inventor, was a public personality if there ever was one in this country. He produced, scripted, sometimes directed, and almost always also starred himself in, dozens of movies and several TV-shows, mostly comedies, in an era when there were only two television channels in this country – aptly titled TV1 and TV2. (Both were owned and ran by Yleisradio, our national broadcasting company, although it did allot a few hours of daily screen time to the one commercial broadcasting company that we had – Mainostelevisio (literally translated: “Commercial Television”) – for which Spede would also produce his shows. That commercial company would later adopt the name MTV3 after purchasing and in 1993 merging itself with the third Finnish channel, which had started airing in December 1986 (then only to about half of the country – the other half would still only have two channels until well into the -90s).)

The fact that there were indeed only two television channels back in the 80s is worth stressing, I think, because television may have been an important factor in the production of – for a brief, proud(?) moment in the late-20^th century – a peak in the Finnish monoculture. You see, there probably wasn’t at the outset too much by way of common culture here before the very idea of (there being such a thing as) one Finnish people emerged, first in the 19^th century after these lands had been taken from the Swedish crown in the 1808–09 war by Russia and turned into the Grand Dutchy of Finland. (There probably weren’t too much of common culture in any average-size or bigger country, not before the emergence of national identities and and then real nation states with parliamentary democracy, the developments which took place over the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, hand in hand with the emergence of nation-wide media, the first key factor behind that having been the invention of the printing press.) Before nation-wide media, so I have gathered, cultures (language, customs, and traditions) differed so much between the many regions of this country that people from Western Finland would have had difficulties understanding people from Eastern Finland, and vice versa, and everybody would have had humongous difficulties understanding the Sami people (from Lapland). Finnish culture was probably more like a cluster of local, though of course variously overlapping, cultures, one in each major part of our present-day country. For although there would have been some common elements – based on similar agricultural practices, religion, and some laws set by the king in Stockholm (before 1809), or the czar (1809–1917) – I would imagine that a majority of the specifics of the “cultural software” running on the brains and practices of the people would have been noticeably different in many different parts of Finland. Only with national media there came to be more commonalities across this disparity. It began with newspapers, which, together with attendance-requiring national schooling systems (the first one of those was instituted only in the 1760s, in Frederick the Great’s Prussia) that were producing growing numbers of literacy throughout populace, started unifying culture, perhaps most distinctly language, throughout the country. Radio broadcasts offered more common experiences and national cultural icons by allowing the whole nation to share, in real time, in events like the speech of the president or one of our athletes winning Olympic gold. But television was in some ways the height of that development, allowing people to see visual images, including living expressions on the faces (which evolution has designed us – the kind of social, small-group animals that we are – to pay close attention to and care about) of would-be cultural icons. That allowed people to share in admiring (or hating), even becoming fans of, specific TV personalities that would be known to everybody.

That is why I think that, in some ways at least it was only with television that the unification of Finnish culture came to a head: with the introduction of television set to most households, allowing people to share in many contents with so many others across the country (and aware of the fact that it was a shared experience). Thus there emerged dozens and hundreds of new, shared contents for a peculiarly Finnish consciousness to marvel at: events and stories, concepts and phenomena, people and fates, all seasoned with so much visual imagery. In that sense, indeed, television unified much of the national culture; and this effect would last (only) as long as there were but two or three TV channels, because then basically everybody had to watch the same few programs every night. A face often seen on TV would be known by all throughout the country. That was the scene which Spede entered, in the 1960s.

It was early days of television entertainment in this country, and Spede was able to make a prominent position for himself in that niche, most likely because he was a very talented and energetic young man who could both come up with lots of ideas and scripts fast and to execute them rapidly too, and who also turned out capable of finding the right people to collaborate with.

Obviously no one could achieve much anything by oneself alone, and Spede too only achieved what he did by collaborating with a number of other people, for instance with such other grand old men of Finnish movie- and television-entertainment as Jukka Virtanen, Ere Kokkonen, Simo Salminen, and Vesa-Matti Loiri. Many of those men became something of cultural icons by their own right: everybody in this country would know who Jukka Virtanen, Simo Salminen, or Vesa-Matti Loiri was; everybody. (I should mention that they became known also from connections other than their collaborations with Spede – Jukka Virtanen, for instance, as a prolific scriptwriter, director, and for many years the host of the long-airing TV-show Levyraati (based on an older format used in American and British television, a show called Jukebox Jury), where a five-member panel graded songs with points from 1 to 10; and Vesa-Matti Loiri as an actor in many other productions besides Spede’s and also as a highly successful singer (here is a clip of him representing Finland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, where he performed the song Huilumies (“A Flute Man”)). To give but one vivid example of just how widely known many of those guys became in this country: there was this one Jukka Virtanen that I knew (both Jukka and Virtanen are very common names in Finland), and as I understand it he had at some point found it rather irritating to share his full name with the famous Jukka Virtanen, not least because the other kids at school had come up with the nickname Jukka “Jukka Virtanen” Virtanen for him – a joke that obviously wouldn’t have made much sense unless just about everybody had known that there was that one particular other Jukka Virtanen.

Spede and the people he collaborated with were tremendously productive. Basically year in, year out, starting from the mid-sixties and all through the seventies, eighties, and much of the nineties, Spede and a group of other usual suspects would crank up a new TV-series season, plus a movie or two – with a shoelace budget – that would be shown in movie theaters first and come on small screen a couple years later.

A word about the movies: first of all, most of those “Spede flicks” (as the movies produced and otherwise orchestrated by Pasanen became commonly referred to) would get pretty awesomely crushing critiques from most movie critics worth their salt, but would usually do very well at the box office. The general public loved them, or at least found them funny and watchable enough to buy the ticket. Many a year one of those Spede flicks would be the most watched Finnish movie; and there were years when they were the most watched movie in this country, full stop. The most successful of them, some instalments in the incredibly popular Uuno Turhapuro franchise, would be seen in movie theaters by about 600,000 viewers or more (from a population of ca. 5 million).

The Turhapuro franchise is probably the first thing that comes to mind when one is asked to say something about Spede flicks. I personally do not think that Turhapuros were the funniest of Spede’s movies, I enjoyed some of the older adventure-comedies better, but they were the most popular and do constitute a good illustration of Spede humor. Turhapuros were a series of films starring Vesa-Matti Loiri as Uuno Turhapuro, a habitual bum and loafer with uncombed hair, stubbled face, and half the front teeth missing, mostly dressed in saggy old grandpa pants, suspenders, a holey string vest, and occasionally a trench coat, who had managed to charm and marry a rich businessman’s daughter. The movies were more collections of sketches than constituting any truly unified storyline, although they did have some vague sort of a background plot, around perhaps someone scheming something and someone else having some other plans and those schemes and plans conflicting in some surprising ways. It was more like there was this unifying theme holding each movie and the franchise together: the theme that much of the humor would come from the rich father-in-law’s loathing of and despairing over his no-good son-in-law and oftentimes coming to suffer from Uuno’s actions, and then perhaps plotting to get rid of him, but Uuno always ending up victorious, either because of some curious stroke of luck or because of coming up with some clever countermeasures or other schemes with his two friends (whom he had promised a share of the inheritance when the father-in-law dies), all the while keeping busy loitering, lying on the couch, finding ways to avoid work, and perhaps drink beer or hit on some beautiful woman that had entered his field of vision (the latter activity could mean him transforming his appearance into this very specific “Charmer Uuno” -look real quick, basically just by combing his hair back with gel and putting on sunglasses).

As to Spede himself, in the Turhapuro movies he would play the part of Uuno’s friend, Härski Hartikainen, an eccentric and (given his social status, surprisingly) arrogant, as well as in certain ways plain dirty –  in a sense to be defined shortly – car mechanic. Actually, here is a good opportunity for you to learn a delightfully multi-sided Finnish word. For whereas Hartikainen is a relatively common surname, Härski was a nickname, from the adjective härski, a term with which one could describe a food product gone bad, “rancid” or (in the case of a milk product) “sour,” but which is more interestingly applicable also as a characterization of personality – and of jokes, stories, pictures, or other acts of communication – in certain senses of “dirty,” the senses of “indecent” or “obscene,” but also carrying the meanings (more pertinent to the specific case of Härski Hartikainen) of “unscrupulous” and “shameless,” and often also transalatable as  “rude” or “disrespectful.”




Should you be a foreigner who has never seen any Spede humor, there might be no better quick clip to watch than this one (from a 70s black-and-white Turhapuro movie) where Härski inspects a car and makes an offer for it. In the sketch, an older man (played by Simo Salminen) comes to the Härski’s garage and offers to sell his car. Härski inspects the car and claims to find all sorts of faults with it. The customer asks, how much would Härski say the vehicle is worth? And Härski then takes his sweet time contemplating the matter, as if carefully considering every aspect. He lights a cigarette and all, thinking about the value of the car. Finally he answers: “Seven marks.” But at that moment his friend and associate, engineer Sörsselsön (also played by Simo Salminen) comes in and greets the older man: “Hi, dad!” Härski is stunned – clearly he did not know that the customer was his friend’s father. The father says: “This man is a härski one, offered me seven marks for this car!” But Härski saves the situation with some quick thinking: “Seven ... seven marks, indeed; seven marks per kilogram. And as this sort of car weighs about 2,000 kg, it makes ... 14,000 marks; so would that be okay with you?”

That is one of the best Spede jokes ever, I think; it makes me laugh, at least. More generally, in the Turhapuro movies and elsewhere, I think it is fair to say that what became known as Spede humor was rather lowbrow or childish; it was direct rather than subtle; and it was certainly manly, if not downright chauvinistic sort of humor. A striking example of the latter: one reoccurring sketch in the TV’s Spede Show in the late-80s was called “Naisen logiikka” (“A Woman’s Logic”), in which Spede played the part of a husband whose wife (very credibly played by Hannele Lauri) would make some silly claims or perhaps ask her husband to explain something, like a car’s differential gear system; Spede would then try and explain/mansplain how it is, but the woman just would not get it and would keep on contradicting the husband with some outrageously stupid remarks, until the man, Spede would end up speechless and in despair. And that would be the joke: there was no surprise twist to it.

The times were different then, of course. In many ways the eighties were still some of the good old days for the patriarchate in this country, so it was nothing too extraordinary to slip in a few chauvinistic jokes. And a good part of Spede humor was still otherwise quite funny. The editing of the movies and much of the other cinematography-technical stuff are rather poor, amateurish, by present-day standards, to be sure (just watch that above clip of Härski offering seven marks for a car if you question my judgment), but much of the jokes and the rest of the humor were pretty OK per se. Many of the actors were good, too, with a great sense of timing, which, as we know, is the key to good humor; and Vesa-Matti Loiri in particular was very good in physical comedy too. So I don’t think that there is much shame in admitting that, especially in the 70s and 80s, Spede did make us laugh. I remember laughing so hard watching, for example, the parody western Hirttämättömät (“The Unhanged”) which Pasanen, Loiri, Salminen and a handful of other guys had shot at some gravel pit near the town of Hyvinkää.

Of course, as I was a young child at the time, I suppose I was perfect audience even for childish jokes. (Though I should mention, in this connection, that there are people who would argue that Hirttämättömät is actually an objectively rather good movie and the humor apt for adults too; if you want, listen to this feature-length commentary by one Hannu Mäkinen, for example, and you can hear in his voice genuine enthusiasm about, as well as remarkably deep expertise on the topic (in Mr. Mäkinen’s enviably fluent English).) But now childhood, as we know, ends at some point. Also my relationship with the cultural icon called Spede Pasanen would inevitably change. Contributing to the change was the fact that, while I was growing up, becoming a teenager, in the late-80s and early-90s, Spede in turn, as the laws of nature would dictate, was getting older and more set in his ways. He now had some very recognizable mannerisms, which just about every imitator in this country would be having a field day on for years and years, even decades after Spede’s death; the humorist was becoming a topic of humor, the joker an object of jokes. (The most memorable of Spede’s mannerisms are how he would make this very grandiose, trademark face-palm, and say “Voe rähmä!” (“Ohh, lema!”); or how he would start explaining something, with a very distinctive tone of voice, by saying “Eh, nimittäin ...!” (“Ah; you see ...!”)) But even besides these I would say that Spede was becoming quite objectively speaking much less funny than before around the early 90s. In retrospect, too, I would say he was getting tired with sketches and jokes, was less into humor. He wouldn’t be making movies as often as before; he more or less stopped writing sketches for and appearing in TV comedy series; and most importantly, he would instead start appearing in this one particular gameshow that he had invented, the name of which changed over the years but finally became Speden Spelit (the first part being Spede in genitive and the latter a playful modification of the plural term pelit, “games,” a modification quite straightforwardly just making the two words alliterate, both now starting with Spe-).

In each episode of Speden Spelit (here is one episode in case you are interested) there would be four famous or, more often, semi-famous people competing in a set of events like jumping rope, bowling with (by kicking) a football attached to their ankle, guessing the color of a playing card, shooting with a light beam pistol, and rotating a hula hoop around the neck. At first there were a sketch or two per episode, too, and the show always started with the same, sort of comic title sequence (which you can watch by clicking the previous link), but over the years the actual show became more and more about the competition only. Spede himself would be hosting it, and I suppose he was trying to keep it light, mostly by just relying on his funny man habitus, but as he was getting older that habitus was arguably fading fast. Perhaps the funniest thing in Speden Spelit was when Spede, who would often challenge the winner of some event, promising to beat their result and offering to double or perhaps triple the prize money if he couldn’t do it, would actually get quite mad at himself and have a brief, genuine outburst of sorts if he failed the challenge. (That tells you something about Spede: he was a very competetive person, to put it mildly; and I should mention that he was very good at the events, even at the more physically demanding ones ... I mean, the man was in his sixties at the time but could jump rope like a f’ing Rocky Balboa, challenge people half or third his age and usually beat them.) But over the years even those fits after failed challenges lost much of their charm; they were getting pretty old, in my eyes, along with the rest of the show, and its host. 

By the late-90s by the latest, I would say, neither Speden Spelit nor Spede enjoyed much popularity amongst the teenagers or the twenty-somethings of this country. To us, Spede was now boring, predictable, dumb, very much an “old fart.” He and his show were all about the same ol’, same ol’ stunts and quips and mannerisms, over and over, dozens of times every year, year after year. He was now like the least funny guy ever, and yet one who you could expect to pop up on TV every week. (I am not  even exaggerating here: I just checked this from the (Finnish) Wikipedia page of the program, and it said there that, although at first there were some sort of summer breaks in the show, from November 1992 until Spede’s death in 2001 Speden Spelit was aired year round. That is, the damned thing would actually run non-stop, every single week. I had forgotten that that was so; but now it comes to me that one very special Christmas tradition in our country in those days was how Spede would be wearing a red-and-white Santa Claus hat in the episode of Speden Spelit aired nearest to Christmas.)

The very appearance of Spede would then piss many people off. I myself may have been so fed up with Spede in those days that I could actually grunt with frustration when I turned on the TV and the first thing I saw was Spede making a face-palm or swinging hula hoop around his neck. Yes, perhaps that sounds like over-reaction now, in this era of dozens of TV channels and unlimited quantities of entertainment available online, but remember that at the time we still had but three TV channels in this country (well, the fourth channel started airing in 1997, and there had long been a couple free cable channels in bigger cities, but still), so there weren’t too much to choose from when you came home and fell onto the coach and started surfing the channels, all three of them. There was a good chance that you would have to watch Spede failing in fun; that freaking Neanderthal grandfather of Finnish comedy, who due to the deplorable state of our country’s television entertainment was still having all the screen time he wanted, week after week, every godsdamnest week. 

An interesting youth-cultural development then took place. You know how when someone tries to be funny but isn’t, and then repeats the same sort of not funny acts time and time again, it might at some point become unintentionally funny? For many of us teenagers of the early-90s, that was pretty much what happened with Spede: we would start finding him so stupid that he was ridiculous, which is to say that he was, after all, kind of funny again. But of course that meant that we had started laughing at this man whom we as children had laughed with.



And then we come to that fantastic little piece of linguistic evolution that so nicely testifies to this: the introduction of the terms I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the desriptive noun spede, which I think most often translates best with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), except of course for the Finnish term’s connotation of that particular person that we knew as Spede; and (a little bit later, I believe) the absolutely wonderful verb derived from the noun, the verb spedeillä, which cannot be as conveniently translated with any single term (though “fool around” does come close) because it means, basically, “to behave like a spede.”


If I had to guess, I would say that the original linguistic innovators behind these terms had been some teenagers. The first time I personally came across the term spede was on the pages of a newspaper, probably Helsingin Sanomat, 1993 or 1994 if my memory serves me, in an article that revealed that many of the commercials targeting young consumers those days failed miserably in their attempts to address that target group with any credibility. To be more precise, the term was mentioned in the specific connection of an ice cream TV-commercial where, I believe, a young rock group was first shown performing or practicing, and then the lead singer (or was it a singer-guitarist?) took a bite of the ice cream bar that was being advertised (Kingis was the name of the product, I believe). The article said that the young people they had been interviewing for the piece had found the commercial lame; and one of the interviewees was quoted as having said (something like) “Toi jätkä on ihan spede” (That guy is all spede).




And so it begun. Since then, I have heard the term used roughly in the said senses several dozens if not hundreds of times. That does not make them the most used terms in Finnish, but widely used enough for them being parts of proper language, not just of some local language-game or sub-culture. They probably started out that way, but the term-uses then spread from the teenagers’ language-games and stuck with us when we got older. In any case, over the past twenty years I have heard countless many thirty- or forty-year-olds use the terms spede or spedeillä. They might use spede like:


“That guy over there, he is an utter spede.”
“Stop being such a spede, man!”
“Oh, f- me, what a f’n spede I’ve been!”


The verb spedeillä (which is conjugated in the present tense like this: I spedeilen, you spedeilet, he/she spedeilee, we spedeilemme, you (plural) spedeilette, they spedeilevät), on the other hand, might be used in sentences like:


“What the hell you guys spedeilette here? Get to work already!”
“We need to quit this f’n spedeily and start doing this right!”
“I thought she would make a decent CEO, but she just spedeilee something at every turn!”


Spedeily in particular is one of my favorite words. It proves how healthy our language is. A lot has been said about how much English is affecting Finnish terminology; how several (American) English terms are adopted to our language every year, usually in some slightly modified form; and of course Finnish has always soaked in influences from other languages, mostly from Swedish, some from Russian, and a bit from German. But we should be pleased to see that there is also linguistic evolution through such endogenous terminological innovations like spedeily. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these terms stick and are adopted by the generations who have never seen Spede Pasanen. But that is the thing with linguistic evolution, of course, or any Darwinian evolution. I for one would be very happy should I hear some teenagers in the year 2050 using the term spedeily, most likely blissfully unaware of its origins.

“The Sunbeam and the Goblin”

This time around I will keep it short and simple: will only briefly introduce to all the non-Finns out there this one, particularly classic song, one that has been effectively instilled into the Finnish cultural inheritance, into the minds of all of us who were born sometime over the latter half of the twentieth century in Finland. The song is “Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen,” or, as it seems best translated: “The Sunbeam and the Goblin.”

The lyrics were written sometime in the 1940s (the exact date is not known to me) by the famous and highly productive popular song- and screenwriter Reino “Repe” Helismaa (1913–1965), best known in his time for his comic, even slapstick movie scripts and couplet songs, but who was also the genius behind a couple such timeless masterpieces as Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen.

The song has been adapted literally dozens of times by different artists, but we all know it best from the versions sang by Tapio Rautavaara (1915–1979). According to the “Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen” page in the Finnish Wikipedia, Rautavaara had first heard it performed (live, I suppose) on radio, by the actress Tuire Orri, and he then asked Helismaa’s permission to record it himself. The first rendition by Rautavaara was published as a gramophone record in 1949. The Wikipedia page also told me that Rautavaara made a re-recording of the song in 1965 (in memoriam of Helismaa, perhaps, for the latter died in January that same year), and that it was that later version, where the singer is accompanied by electric guitars and an electric bass, that has become the more renowned or classic one.

The surface story of Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen tells about this fleeting, transient encounter between, you guessed it, a goblin and a sunbeam – the last ray of daylight before the darkness falls. It is rather fairytale-like and could be seen simply as a children’s song. And almost all Finns of my generation have probably first heard it as children and been captivated by the story as it stands. (I am pretty sure the song was also in the elementary-school song book that we used in the school music class in the 1980s.) But the underlying metaphor is not too subtle: this is also a story of unrequited or impossible love. (The story, as you will soon see, leaves it unclear whether the sunbeam would have felt the same way as the goblin did, had it not been absolutely impossible for her to stay.)

At the end of this post you will find an English translation of the lyrics I prepared for you. But perhaps you would like to hear the song first; here is a link to a recording on YouTube that I found. No actual video there, just a picture of the singer, Mr. Rautavaara – a handsome devil. In the picture he is wearing a Suomi sweater often worn by athletes (Suomi means Finland, in case you didn’t know). And it is not just for show: Rautavaara was also a highly successful athlete, who among other things won Olympic gold in the javelin throw in the 1948 London Olympics! Indeed, he was a bit of a multitalent, did several movie roles too, but the most lasting impression to the Finnish culture that he did he surely did as a singer. (Or as a singer-songwriter ... I should mention that he also wrote a few songs himself.) And what a singing voice he had, wow! I read it online somewhere that the experts call that bass-baritone. (In an autobiographical work he tells us that, as a young man he was actually a tenor, but that the voice got deeper with age (Numminen, Juha [1978] 1986, Tapio Rautavaara: Päivääkään en vaihtaisi pois (Helsinki: Tammi), p. 275).)

Did you listen to the video already? Do listen to it, please, especially if you are a non-Finn and have never heard the song! It only takes a couple minutes of your life.

Okay, done? Now a quick note on the English translation I made for you. By no means is this an exact word-by-word translation, and I did not get all the rhymes into it either. The first priority was to get all the concepts and sentences translated as well as possible, and roughly in same order as they appear in the Finnish song. However, the concepts and the sentences may have been switched from one line to another, when that seemed best for some reason. Most prominently, right at the begining, in the Finnish lyrics the sunbeam (päivänsäde) is not mentioned until in the third line, whereas it is told already in the second line that she was left behind of her sisters; but I just found that these lines worked better in the reversed order in English. The reason for that is related to the second goal that I had: I tried to make the English translation singable, too. By this I mean simply that I tried to get the same number of syllables into each line of English as there are in the Finnish text. That was a bit of challenge; consider, for example, the fact that the often repeated Finnish word for “goblin,” which is two syllables, is “menninkäinen” – a four syllable word (men-nin-käi-nen).

In any case, here goes, hope you like this:

“The Sunbeam and the Goblin” (Päivänsäde ja menninkäinen)

Finnish lyrics by Reino Helismaa, 1949 ; copyright (C) Reino Helismaa
(English translation by T. Piiroinen, 2017)

It happened as the Sun set down

That a sunbeam, for a moment
Of its sisters left behind.
The dusk it crept in already
And the beam, with her golden wings
Was about to fly from underfoot
When she detected this littlest goblin approaching
That had only just emerged from its den.
For goblins cannot roam the earth until after sunset
They do not live in daylight, no.


Peeping there at one another
The goblin, in chest felt rather
Strange kind of flame and ardor
Said he: “Burn my eyes, this you do
But never in my life have I
Seen anything as wonderful!
It matters not that your shine will blind my eyes forever –
In darkness I trudge with ease wherever.
Stay with me, please, and I’ll show you the way to the home den –
Keep you as my precious own then!”


The beam answered: “Gremlin, darling,
Darkness would be my undoing
And I have no wish for death.
Away I must now forthwith fly
If I’m not back in daylight soon
Then I will live not a moment more.”
Thus left the sunbeam that beautiful
But to this day still
As the goblin plods alone in the dark
He wonders why one of us here a child of light should be
And the other, he loves the night.

Ye Good Ol’ Christmas Traditions

Dear Chang,^*


You are probably just dying to learn more about the curious traditions we Finns had back at the turn of the 21^st century. Like virpominen (a bit like trick-or-treating but done near Easter, and only by little girls dressed as witches, tapping people with willow-branch withes and chanting that this will make the target persons “new and healthy”); or the custom that many diners served pea soup and pancakes every Thursday; or that thing we called sauvakävely (Nordic walking) – what the hell was that all about!? Now, it was Christmas just recently, so I thought that this time around I might indulge you with some adept contemporary observations concerning our Christmas traditions.


Traditions, much like times according to Bob Dylan, they are achangin. Consider, for instance, how the Finnish version of Santa Claus, already before it got soaked with American Coca-Cola advertisement in the mid-20^th century, was a curious mixture of the actual fourth century person, bishop Nicholas (a Christian saint) and the pagan medieval character of nuuttipukki – that used to be played by young hooligans wearing a billygoat hide and horns (symbolizing fertility, I am told) and going from house to house to beg for beer and raise hell around the time of the end of Christmas (in January). Drawing from the latter tradition, Santa Claus – joulupukki in Finnish, still literally meaning Christmas-billy – used to be a rather scary character, something to frighten your children with. (By the way, that side of Father Christmas was brilliantly developed by Jalmari Helander in his movie Rare Exports [2010] (which you should definitely see, if you haven’t already).) Only an inkling of that scary side was maintained by the 20^th century Santa, in Finland no more than in other countries; it reduced to little more than parents sort of blackmailing their children to be nice lest Santa might not bring them any gifts. (You hear some of that in the songs telling us that Santa knows whether you have been naughty or nice – the intimidating aspect of which was insightfully and funnily captured by this joke in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, performed by the great Liam Neeson, by the way.) These days, for the most part, the Finnish joulupukki is much the same as the American Santa Claus. So yes, indeed, traditions keep changing all the time; some old ones disappear, some tangle together with other traditions or novel influences, and new traditions are created too. But let me nevertheless try and offer a snapshot of the Finnish Christmas traditions as I have personally experienced them over these 40+ years of my life.


Christmas caroling, for one, is much less a tradition in Finland than in some other Western countries. You do not see groups of people touring from house to house doing Christmas caroling, you don’t. (Except perhaps some hammered students who might have come up with this idea in the middle of the night, but even that is very rare.) Yet Christmas carols, the songs that you only hear around Christmas time, do play a part in our Finnish lives and minds. This is mostly because, most of us were forced to sing these songs in school when we were small children – both some cheerful ones like “Jingle Bells” in Finnish translation, songs telling us that everything is oh so jolly, Santa packing his sledge with toys, etc., and also quite a few of the not so jolly ones, the pompously solemn, melancholic or even sad, religious hymns. I guess most of the Christmas carols written by Finns are of the latter kind.


Ours is a rather secular society, to be sure, and tends to become more so every year (I should hope), but at least in the 1980s small children were still quite ruthlessly indoctrinated with religious propaganda in countless many elementary school classes across the country, the teachers themselves usually being at least conventional Christians if not members to some revivalist movement. My first six years in school took place at Vanhankylän primary school (still a semi-rural neighborhood with lots of fields and cows and sheet), and as I recall it my first and second grade teacher, this stern elderly lady, had actually been doing some missionary work in Africa. So, yes, it was pretty “Old School” stuff I can assure you: she would play harmonium and make us sing songs like the “Hoosianna” (Hosanna) hymn (“Hosanna / The son of David / Praised be him! / The praised son of David / Who comes in the name of the Lord …”). I kid you not, Chang; I kid you not!



Many of the songs that we hear and sing in childhood, both religious and secular ones, leave deep, emotional memory traces, as well as associations with people and places perhaps. They will forever be attached to our feelings, even if we grow up to loathe their explicit message. One of my favorite philosophers, the famous atheist Daniel Dennett, starts out his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995) with a personal anecdote about the song “Tell Me Why” that he used to sing as a child, a song where they sing “Tell me why the stars do shine / Tell me why the ivy twines / Tell me why the sky’s so blue / Then I will tell you just why I love you. // Because God made the stars to shine / Because God made the ivy twine / Because God made the sky so blue / Because God made you, that’s why I love you.” That pathetic, childish song “still brings a lump to my throat,” Dennett confesses. (p. 17.) Indeed, I guess most of us who turned atheists at an older age have this sort of experiences with respect to one religious song or another.

One of the better songs, one that I am not too bitter to feel a bit nostalgic about, is “Varpunen jouluaamuna.” I just did a bit of research (googled the song’s Wikipedia page, hah!) and found out that the lyrics were originally a poem by the great pre-independence time national writer and academic, Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), written in 1859, and that they reflected the fact that Topelius had lost his one-year-old son the Spring before. Topelius wrote the poem in Swedish, but it was translated into Finnish by K. A. Hougberg, and it is in the Finnish form that most Finns know and love it. The most famous composition to music was done by one Otto Kotilainen in 1913 (again: in Wikipedia I trust; I certainly would not know this sort of things by heart). The melody as well as the lyrics are very melancholic. (To hear the melody, you can probably find the song online – just search with the Finnish title “Varpunen jouluaamuna”; and here is a link to one version, performed by Mr. Jarkko Ahola, better known as a heavy metal singer.)

I suppose that, having started about this thing, I should actually try and offer a rough (and probably rather poor, I am afraid) translation, by yours truly, of the (Finnish) lyrics.



A Sparrow at Christmas Morning

The flowers in the vale covered by snow
The wave in the lake frozen in the chilly winter blow.
A tiniest sparrow, having eaten its summer supply
The wave in the lake frozen in the chilly winter blow.

At the steps of a little cabin stood a girl dearest:
– Come now, birdie, rejoice, take these grains I giveth!
It is Christmas, after all, you poor thing, homeless
Come here, rejoice, take these grains I giveth!

To the girl flew the sparrow, tiny darling:
– Greatful, I do take these grains from thee
And God surely will once reward you for this.
Greatful, I do take these grains from thee!

– I am not, my child, a bird from this world.
I am your little brother, I came from Heaven above.
The crumbs that you gave to this poor thing
Fed your little brother from the land of angels. 

Melancholy aplenty, that’s what I am saying. Yet you will need to understand that, for most Finns, Christmas carols, including if not especially the more melancholic carols, are attached to mainly positive feelings. They also help construct the right kind of framework of mind, if only because they are usually never played outside December: they guide us into the proper mood or ambiance. (And, unsurprisingly, people in the marketing business will eagerly exploit this, play these songs at the malls and in the shops that you visit, starting from around late-November already I think. That way, you would really need to be braindead in order not to know it is getting near to Christmas time.)

What else should I tell you about Christmas in Finland these days? Well, traditionally, people buy presents, send Christmas cards, decorate their homes with colorful lights and stuff, turn off the electric lights indoors perhaps and light a few candles instead, and they expect Dad to carry home a Christmas tree. At least, that is how it used to be; it would seem to have changed to an extent. People do still give presents, especially in families with children, but as I understand it the sum the average family spends on gifts is not what it used to be before the recession/stagnation (which has lasted for, what, a decade now?). Christmas cards are being sent less and less each year, too; though that has nothing to do with the recession but is simply due to the fact that younger people, and even my very middle-aged generation, have just opted out from that tradition (I myself have not sent any actual Christmas cards for twenty years, although we do slip one inside the gift package that we mail to my parents and sister). Even the Christmas decorations are pretty bare these days, especially in childless households, and most loners and childless couples find the Christmas tree just way too much trouble; they might settle for a Christmas wreath or a branch or a mere treetop of a spruce. It is different with families with kids – as it should be, I think: even for an old diehard atheist like me, it is somehow a heartwarming notion that children get to experience the joy of Christmas – the smell of a fresh spruce tree carried inside, the decorations, the candles in the otherwise dark rooms; yes, the whole shebang. Traditions, or customs, are among some of the most peculiarly human things: there is a sense in which they make us human; and they certainly creep into our minds when we are children and come to constitute a part of who we are. They change in time, of course – indeed, we change them ourselves, simply by changing our ways, little by little; but we should not try and change everything at once (even if that was possible, which I do not think it is).


Now the day before Christmas, the jouluaatto is very special in Finland; it is a holiday in its own right. (Perhaps I should point out that while joulu is Christmas, aatto is the postfix that can be added to signal that it is the day before – we also have juhannusaatto, for example, the day before juhannus, the midsummer’s day, the latter again being the official holiday (though people actually get hammered in the aatto evening and suffer from hangover the day of juhannus); and Finnish being the most flexible language in the world (thus thinks I), one can conceivably and quite understandably use the term aatto also in just about any creative combinations, like to say that it is syntymäpäiväni aatto – the day before my birthday; or, perhaps, kesälomani aatto – the day before my summer vacation.)


Annyhoow, there are a couple of special traditions that Finns enjoy during the jouluaatto. Most significantly, at noon that day there is an official event known as the Declaration of Christmas Peace. It takes place in Turku (where I live), the old capital city (though when Turku was the capital, Finland was not independent) at the South-West coast of Finland. And this one is a real Tradition with a capital-T, mind you: it goes way, way back to the 14^th century! (There have only been a few short intervening periods, like the years 1712–1721 of a particularly terrible Russian invasion and occupation of Finland; possibly the years 1809–1815; and, in the 20^th century, only in the turmoil of 1917 when Finland had just declared her independence, and in 1939 – which was the Christmas of the Winter War and they feared Soviet air raids.) The declaration is read out loud by a city official, and since 1886 this has been done from the balcony of the Brinkkala building near the Cathedral of Turku. The words of the declaration, read from a parchment, have changed slightly over the centuries, I have been told, though the message has remained essentially the same – it is to declare the Christmas time to have begun and to remind everyone to celebrate it peacefully (threatening offenders with harder-than-usual punishment), and to wish everyone a merry Christmas. The current form of the text dates back over a hundred years. Here is how it goes:


“Tomorrow, God willing, is the graceful celebration of the birth of our Lord and Saviour; and thus is declared a peaceful Christmas time to all, by advising devotion and to behave otherwise quietly and peacefully, because he who breaks this peace and violates the peace of Christmas by any illegal or improper behaviour shall under aggravating circumstances be guilty and punished according to what the law and statutes prescribe for each and every offence separately. Finally, a joyous Christmas feast is wished to all inhabitants of the city!”


The declaration has been broadcast on the radio since 1935, and has been televised since 1982. But there are always thousands of people gathered under the balcony and nearby too. So, yes, it is a mass event (as well as, of course, a rather Christian one), and yet the security measures around the event have been relatively scant; this Christmas, however, there was much more police presence and they had also cut off the motor traffic from all sides of the venue, obviously reacting to the terrorist attacks in France earlier last year and in Germany just a couple days before Christmas (where a terrorist drove a truck to the crowd). These are some of the signs of our times, I am afraid.


There are also some special programs on TV all jouluaatto day, like The Snowman animation with its classic theme song Walking in the Air (sang by a boy soprano, I just recently learned from newspaper). I hear that the movie and the song are something of a Christmas classic in some other countries too.


Then there is the very Finnish tradition of Christmas sauna. We Finns, of course, like our sauna any day of the year and many families traditionally bath in sauna every Friday, say, or every Saturday perhaps; but the Christmas sauna, bathing in sauna the Christmas Eve, is nevertheless a special, traditional, nostalgic occasion for many if not most Finns. It is a moment of calming down, taking time for yourself – indeed, many people, myself included, like to enjoy their Christmas sauna alone – relaxing in that warm, steamy and dimly lit room, far away from everyday troubles.


After the sauna, we eat. The most traditional item in the Finnish Christmas table is the ham – a roasted thigh or butt of a pig, usually crusted with breadcrumbs and served with some mustard on the side. Now, as I say the most traditional item, I am not thinking farther than less than a hundred years back, though: some sort of roasted meat has been traditional much longer, but until the early decades of the 20^th century it usually wasn’t pork that they ate; mutton was much more common back then, I’ve been told. And over the past decade or so, turkey has been making its way to the Finnish Christmas table; in some households it has taken the ham’s place. There are also more and more vegetarian households, and there are some vegetarian alternatives to the ham (some of them made to look much like the ham). Anyways, the ham is still by far the most common centerpiece of a Finnish Christmas table. It is usually baked in relatively low temperatures, for hours and hours (usually for more than one hour per kilogram; and the bigger hams weigh more than 10 kilograms easy). Believe me, that bad boy comes out tender and juicy – sweet Jesus how tender and juicy at its best (insert the drooling sound by Homer Simpson here)! Even if you don’t usually eat pork (as is the case with yours truly), this is the one time of the year that you might consider making an exception!


Other very traditional Christmas foods include a variety of fish dishes like gravlax, or perhaps salmon in some other form, and herring served in various different sauces – garlic, tomato, or mustard sauce, for example. You might also see some roe served in the Christmas table. In addition, there is usually rye-meal bread, perhaps such that is deserving of the particular label joululimppu (a Christmas loaf). Rosolli salad – made of potato, carrot and beetroot – there will usually be also. And at least in my childhood home we always had some dried plums (prunes, right, although my dictionary says the term is obsolete now in this meaning?) in the table. Come to think of it, I do not know whether dried plums are very common a dish in the Christmas table, but they are traditional to me. And they are good for your plumbing (plum -> plumbing?). Otherwise that good kilo block of ham that you ate Christmas eve might take a week (I am only slightly exaggerating) to go through your system; and come the day of reckoning you would be crying to sweet Mary Mother of God to help you deliver the end product. But with some good plum fiber in your gut even the heavy stuff will travel through your intestines as smoothly as a freight train. In many families they also drink kvass at the Christmas dinner. (I personally hate that sewage myself.) And perhaps most essentially, there must always, always be these couple of very particular types of casserole foods served at a Christmas dinner: it will invariably include at least some rutabaga casserole and some carrot casserole. More often than not there will also be some (smashed) potato casserole. Liver casserole might also be served, but that is nowhere nearly as closely associated with Christmas as rutabaga and carrot casseroles in particular, for liver casserole (sold by many big convenience food manufacturers in Finland, most often in 400 g boxes that feed about one person each) is a pretty normal everyday food item in this country (most often eaten with some lingonberry jam), whereas you won’t see any carrot or rutabaga casserole being served outside December. You just won’t – that is something that we simply do not do here, ever. Meanwhile, it is equally unimaginable that there might be a Christmas lunch or dinner without those dishes.


After dinner, and all through the Christmas holidays, we Finns eat loads of chocolate. Several boxes of chocolate; yep, a good couple of kilograms of that stuff might well be consumed by a given person (say, me, for example) over three or four days. And it is not just chocolate that we eat, no. There is this one other traditional delicacy that belongs to Christmas for many of us: these quite specific, pear-tasting, ball-shaped, green marmalade jellies called Vihreät kuulat (Gröna kulor in Swedish); I tried to look for the preferred English translation from the manufacturer’s (Fazer – a company established in the 19^th century by one Mr. Karl Fazer and still owned by the family) web page but couldn’t find the product from their English page. The retailers seem to market the product under various names, as Green Marbles (would be my preference), Green Jellies, or Green Balls. The last one is probably not the most enticing translation, although it could give rise to some pretty legendary – though tragic, absolutely woeful, and my sincerest apologies and condolences to anyone who has actually lost someone like that – events, because the said delicacies are pretty big in size, and it is also imaginable that some poor kid might take a couple of them into one’s mouth at the same time (I remember doing that myself as a child, actually, the idiot that I was; but do not try that at home, you fools!) and accidentally choke to death if they got stuck to his throat, thus becoming known as the fellow who choked on a pair of huge balls that he was sucking at Christmas night.


^*) Chang is my imaginary 25^th century cultural anthropologist, reading my ancient blog texts in order to better understand the turn of the millennium Finnish culture – see the last couple of paragraphs of my second post in November 2016.