Chapter 4 – The Yule Tree
The fire still burned brightly, having been kept alive and tended to ever since the Yule Log was lit on the first day of Yule. Now, on the fourth day of Yule, the Yule tree too has been brought in and awaits decorating. Luckily, Max managed to pick out some modern decorations when they were in town – less luck is the fact that Denmark is one of the places in the world fondest of homemade Christmas decorations and ornaments. So while Ian was popping popcorn to string, as per American tradition, Max and Sigyn were looking somewhat helplessly at the packs of paper strips which were somehow supposed to become cute little stars. There was a step by step guide on the back of the packages, but somehow those seem even more confusing than Ikea guides.
“Okay, what about some of the other stuff,” Max suggested, digging through the bag of stuff he bought. He pulled out a sheet of paper full of little boys dressed in red pants and blue or grey shirts, red, pointy hats, and wooden shoes. Each little nisse had a line to cut with a pair of scissors, and small strips meant to be bent – like clothing for a paper doll. Once cut and bent properly, the idea was that the strips would be placed on a plain surface, like the top of a cupboard or something, and the nisse would then hang there. Each nisse was depicted doing something somewhat naughty, like blowing a trumpet, slamming pot lids together, or just falling off of something – one was even riding a pig.
“These should be simple enough,” Max said unsurely. Loki snatched the whole pack right out of his hand.
“Modern me’s!” he exclaimed loudly and hugged the package possessively to him. Sigyn smiled and shook her head softly.
“What about these?” Sigyn asked, picking up some colorful glossy paper.
“Supposedly, if you cut it in the right pattern, you can sorta braid it and make little hollow hearts to put candy and cookies in. I actually,” he said, digging through the bag once again. “Bought some of the classic Danish Christmas cookies too.” He pulled out three bags of what was supposedly cookies. One bag contained brown circles which seemed to have almonds in them. Reading on the package Sigyn informed him they were called “brown cakes”. Another bag held what looked most of all like small pebbles, which Sigyn claimed were called “pepper nuts”. The third bag held rings that were sorta jagged – as if one had taken a two dimensional star and made it 3D by simply extending the entire pattern in the third dimension, and then proceeded to loop the two ends together. These were called Vanilla Wreaths apparently.
“This isn’t so strange actually,” Sigyn said, almost relieved that something sorta made sense to her. “The Vikings used to hang colorful fabrics on the tree, and small statues of the gods they worshipped, and a few edibles as well. It seems most of that survived in some shape or form – except for the statues, it seems only Loki survived to some extent.”
“Freya too,” Loki announced. “Beautiful blonde women with wings on their backs. They call them angels now.” Max laughed softly.
“I don’t really think you can equate the angels to Freya.” This, of course, requires a more thorough explanation – but, being a lawyer, Max found a quick way around it and shifted the attention back to the paper strips in front of them. Soon Ian and Vali were busy making a string of popcorn – or, more accurately, Ian did most of the work on the string itself, and Vali kept Max’s long fingers away from the bowl, and in return were given generous amounts of popcorn thrown around the room (though, please do not do this to none magical wolves or dogs! the fats and the salt is too much for them). Loki was busy cutting out the “kravle nisser”, as they are called (meaning crawling nisser). Nari had found one of the packages of paper strips which had a guide to “mice staircases” on the back, and was happily making long, long, long staircases by folding one strip of paper over the other repeatedly. The end result becomes something that could almost be called a staircase, if not because you would have to be able to pass through the steps in order to walk on it. Sigyn had figured out the heart paper – one simply cuts a long square, rounds the short ends into half circles, and cuts long gashes following the straight sides. It sounds a lot more complicated than it actually turned out to be, and she soon had a few hearts – with noticeable improvement between the first and the third heart she made. By the time she actually managed to make one she was truly happy with, Sleipnir decided to put a dirty hoofprint on it, just to signal that he was in on the family crafting session too.
Max on the other hand had thrown himself into the star making. He had started mumbling to himself, but was bluntly refusing to give up – no piece of blank paper was going to defeat his intelligence. Soon all the nisser were cut out, the popcorn was either eaten, on the floor, or on the string, the mice staircase was almost two meters long and no longer interesting enough to hold Nari’s attention, and Sigyn had not only made ten perfect hearts – all complete with the hoof stamp of approval – she had also filled them with the Christmas cookies and hung them on the tree. As one could imagine, everyone else having achieved their desired tasks, they all turned to Max’s Christmas stars to see if they could crack the code before him.
“So, you need four strips of paper,” Ian deciphered from instructions on the back. “And you fold them all in half, and then cross them over each other, linking them together so they cannot move.” That sounded simple enough, in theory. Nari didn’t notice that the strips given to him have come pre-folded in the middle, so he folded them effectively in fourths. Loki overlaid the strips of paper as shown on the image, but when he pulled on one strip the whole thing came apart. Sigyn managed to get them to stick in her second try, but isn’t quite sure what she did. She then proceeded to the next step, which was taking one of the ends of each strip and folding it down on the square she somehow made. That was all well and good, until she did it to the last strip, and suddenly it all looked wrong. It took her a minute to realize that the last strip was supposed to be folded over the strip before it and then slipped under the first strip. It took her another two minutes to manage the task of getting a thin piece of paper to go unhindered under the other thin strip of paper in a space that is exactly as wide as the traveling paper is. When she finally managed it and looked back at the recipe she realized to her great horror that the act of driving the paper through like that is a feat needed to be completed no less than 19 times in all. With a grave sigh she settled in for a long task.
Loki’s paper star bent on the middle as he was trying to push the paper through, resulting in a loud cry of “what the Gjoll?” from the trickster god, and a humorous smile from Ian. Nari tore his trying to get it through the impossibly tight tunnel. Ian managed to crumple his star while trying to get the paper through it. Max had a stack of unfinished, discarded stars lying next to him.
“This requires magic!” Loki grunted.
“This shall not defeat me,” Max mumbled in annoyance.
“I can figure this out,” Sigyn tried to persuade herself.
Sleipnir neighed loudly and muffled Sigyn gently as if trying to tell her something.
Vali got a hold of one of Max’s unfinished stars and chewed it to a lump of wet paper before spitting it out.
Eventually Ian gave up under the pretense of needing a snack. He dug out something called “æbleskiver” (meaning “apple slices”) from the freezer where Max had put them, and with the help of Loki managed to decipher the Danish instructions and get them in the oven. There wasn’t much “slices” over them though, they were actually quite ball shaped, and they turned out to taste pretty much like pancakes with a slight aftertaste of apple. They didn’t taste bad though, especially when dipped in jam and powdered sugar like the picture on the package suggested doing. Along with it they heated up something called “glök” – a drink that is basically warm red wine with almonds and raisins added. It sounded weird, but so do so many other things in little Denmark (whose capital can literally be translated to “buy a harbor”). By the time Ian and Loki served the little afternoon snack, everyone but Sigyn and Max were ready to give up on the Christmas stars. By the time every last apple slice had been eaten and most of the glök (apart from Ian’s glass, it wasn’t really to his liking) had been drunk, Sigyn and Max had decided competition was stupid, and collaboration was more productive. By the time Loki started preparing dinner – with the help of Ian who loved cooking, Vali who loved tasting, and Nari who just wanted an excuse to get away from the two lunatics – Sigyn and Max were pulling out the last strip on their first complete star. It was squashed and a bit wonky looking, and all in all it wasn’t really a good looking star, but they completed it, and by Sif’s golden hair they were going to remain proud of it!
Before they went to bed that night the tree was decorated with every single ornament they made – complete or not, pretty or not, everything went on the tree. The Sleipnir approved Christmas hearts hung spread out over the entire tree, the still wet star Vali chewed on had gotten an honorable placement near the top, the mice stairs Nari made got to adorn an entire circle at the top of the tree. The stars were placed in progression from least complete (including the one Loki bent and then abandoned) to the one fully completed star which got to adorn the very top. The crawling nisser aren’t really designed to go on a Christmas tree, but they ended up there nonetheless, crawling all over the poor tree and blowing their trumpets at the poor unfinished stars. The whole thing was a delightful mess, and Sigyn couldn’t help think that it summed up their little family pretty well. A serpent, two wolves, a half skeleton step daughter, one human child, the Jotun adopted by Asgard and the goddess refused by Asgard for loving him, and the two Americans who have somehow become the newest members of the family, quite by chance it seemed. Sigyn smiled to herself. If this was what life on Midgard was like, she would never leave here again.
And so everything was ready for the fifth day of Yule, the day modern people would know as Christmas morning. One can only presume that Ian and Max had great plans for that particular day, but whether they get their way or not shall remain to be seen.